Water is more necessary than food; from one point of view it is food. Water is the great temperature regulator, the basic fluid medium for all the body’s processes, and the supply is guarded zealously. The brain contains water in practically the same proportion as milk. You need to have water to think, to move, to exist - Water is Life!

But there can be too much of a good thing. Waterlogged tissues may not be fat tissues, but that’s the way they strike the public eye. You cannot control your water content by exercise or intake, to any satisfactory extent. Unless there is sufficient moisture in the tissues you can’t break down and burn up fat. There is no valid health rule that can set down your water needs arbitrarily at six or eight or ten glasses a day. A great deal depends on what you eat, too. The safest rule is to drink enough water so that the color of the urine is a light straw yellow.

So in what ways can you do to try and prevent edema or water retention in your body?

One way to prevent water retention is to be sure that you get enough protein in your diet. When protein is severely restricted, water tends to accumulate in the tissues and make them puffy.

The second way to control water retention is by restricting the use of common salt in your foods. Salt has a natural affinity for water; look at the Pacific Ocean. Internally, your fluid economy is something of an ocean itself, in that it contains mineral salts in approximately the same proportions as are found in the seven seas.

Salt holds about seventy times its weight of water in the tissues. If you get a mental picture of one surplus teaspoonful of salt holding seventy teaspoons of water in captivity in your person, you may be encouraged to reduce your salinity. Unless there is water retention, however, or some heart or kidney condition, it is not necessary to restrict salt too severely in the diet.

Instead of salt, which is sodium chloride, you can substitute potassium chloride as an alternative. As the salt surplus dwindles, excess water that it has held in subjection gradually disappears.

An increase in potassium discourages water retention too. Vegetables are, in general, rich in potassium and low in calories. With liberal use of vegetables of low calorie value, and there is an added virtue in the tendency of their potassium to drive out surplus water. Of course if you yield to the natural urge to sprinkle vegetables with common salt, this benefit will be foregone.

In a desire to be fair, water keeps your weight down as well as up. One-fourth of the calories you consumed in yesterday’s meals have already escaped from your person in the form of water vapor—as insensible or invisible perspiration, and in the moist air exhaled from your lungs.

If you don’t believe it, breathe a few calories onto a mirror