Proper hydration can help you feel and perform your best. If there’s one consistent rule to follow, it’s everyone has unique and different hydration needs and goals. Both dehydration and over hydration can be dangerous, so it’s important to know what your body needs. Before continuing on, it’s important to know that BevWatch® is not a medical app or device, and none of the information BevWatch presents or displays is intended to be medical advice.
The baseline daily hydration goal BevWatch uses is based primarily on a report by the The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,3 with additional information supported by the Mayo Clinic4 and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.5
If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, your hydration needs increase by a fair amount. BevWatch used information from the European Food Safety Authority6 to help adjust our hydration goal for these conditions. These reports and studies provide a way to calculate an approximate hydration goal based on gender.
BevWatch also takes into account your activity level along with the altitude and weather at your current location. An article from University of Missouri cites a report by The American College of Sports Medicine that gives guidance to additional hydration recommendations based on the length of workouts.7 These recommendations were extrapolated to fit BevWatch’s varying activity levels in the user’s profile.
The environment you’re in is also a major contributor to dehydration. Your current location’s heat index is used in conjunction with recommendations from the European Hydration Institute to help adjust your daily hydration goal to the current weather.8 As for altitude, a recommendation from the Institute for Altitude Medicine was used to calculate additional hydration needs when at higher elevations.9 F
The hydration goal that BevWatch calculates is based on recommendations found in the reports, studies, and articles mentioned above. It is also based on the information entered by the user. Please remember this is only a rough suggestion and it is not intended to be medical advice. If you have any medical condition or concern over your hydration, please consult with a trained medical professional.