Serious XM Podcasts.

Hey everyone, Dan here with another sporkful reheat for you.

And hang on, before I start recording this, let me just have a quick drink of water.

Wait a second.

Do I even need water? Why am I drinking so much water? Why do my kids have 400 water bottles? Why can't they go 15 minutes without water? Well, it turns out that hydration, this whole obsession with hydration, it's kind of a new thing. And that's what we're talking about in this week's reheat from our friends at the Slate podcast Decoder Ring. They look into how bottled water went from a small European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America. Turns out, spoiler alert, hydration may not be the wellness cure all we've been told it is. Of course, if there's an episode of the Sporkville, you want us to reheat, drop me a line. I want to hear from you.

We take requests.

You can find me at hello atsporkful.com.

So don't bother filling up any more water.

You don't need any more water to listen to this episode.

Just keep listening.

Thanks and enjoy.

I actually remember this very vividly because it actually turned into a fight, one of probably like the top ten times we were annoyed with each other that year.

This is Christina Cotarucci. She's a senior writer at Slate.

One of us started like needling the other about their water consumption.

Christina and her wife were in the middle of a long car ride, somewhere in New Jersey.

I forget whether my wife, Deb, was making fun of me for being so concerned with whether we would have enough water for the rest of our car ride or whether I was saying to her like,

huh, it's weird that on this four-hour car ride you haven't drunk any of our car ride or whether I was saying to her like, huh, it's weird that on

this four hour car ride you haven't drunk any of our water bottle. And I've like drained the whole

thing. Christina is rarely found without a glass of water by her side. As a teenager in the 2000,

she learned about water's importance in health class. She read about it in magazines. She

heard the advice to drink eight cups of water a day. Probably couldn't even count the number of

times that I've heard the eight glasses of water a day. You know, it always seemed to me that it

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