Hydration

There are at least three things necessary for proper hydration. Anyone can guess the first: water. With minor effort most people should be able to guess the second: electrolytes. But when one demands people to guess the third item you’d be lucky to find someone that guesses correctly. It’s almost as if people are only worried about putting stuff in and not keeping stuff in. It is likely assumed that you already have everything else needed to achieve hydration, so no one ever bothers to do further research. This, however, leads to false assumptions about hydration.

Protein catabolism

During times of dehydration the body is more than willing to eat away at your muscles or other sources of protein. This is because the body stores water in proteins, therefore the best place to get water from is protein. Water isn’t the only thing you can bind to protein. In fact, protein can be a good source of minerals—and that includes electrolytes—and other kinds of nutrients. Even cholesterol is bound to protein, and is used to carry nutrients throughout the body.