mr_rubino said:
Watching it again, I can now speak to something that slipped by me:
I'm no athlete, but even I have always been told that drinking soda when dehydrated is only slightly better than drinking table salt. Yes it's water at its base, but there's a whole lot of stuff in it that makes it just about the worst thing you can drink if you need water, and can even make the effects worse. So a negative makes sense.
Roninraver said:
It doesn't work that way.
Nnnnnope. It works exactly that way.
EDIT: Are the Under-10-Posters (double meanings ftw) done making the same complaints seen weekly here at The Escapist yet?
No, it does NOT work that way. A basic high school chemistry course would tell you this. Actually you don't even need the chem course, you just need a little common sense.
The reason that soda, tea and coffee are worse for hydrating than water, is because the substances in the beverage require water (among other things, like calcium from your bones in the case of soda) to be processed and broken down by the body. That and a slightly elevated rate of urination. But there is a net gain in the amount of water present in the body after consuming the beverage. You do not magically end up with less water in you than before, simply because what you are drinking has things other than water in it.
If you drink a 20oz bottle of soda, it does not cost your body 21oz of water to process the additives. It costs less, leading to a net gain in water present in your body, therefore you are better hydrated than you were before. This is common sense, and I do not know how or why people seem to have trouble understanding.
Let's try this. Say you're stranded in the desert, you've been walking through the heat of the day for 10 hours, during which time you've had nothing to drink. You come across a bottle of soda lying along a dune. Do you drink the soda? Or do you think to yourself "No, that would be silly. It would dehydrate me more than I am already!"
If you chose the second answer, you have failed the Darwin test and deserve your fate.
Drinking water is better than drinking soda. But drinking NOTHING is so much worse. The fact that Fallout: NV actually has soda cause a DECREASE in your hydration level is ridiculous, and Yahtzee was right to point it out.
