Drinking & Diving

[waynne fowler]

Beer is generally 95% water, one could drink beer as a water source for a long time without getting dehydrated.

Oh hell ya! Same with coffee, parsley tea... And what the heck your washing that diuretic down with a glass a water how could that dehydratate anyone )

 

[boulderjohn]

Oh hell ya! Same with coffee, parsley tea... And what the heck your washing that diuretic down with a glass a water how could that dehydratate anyone )

The concept of caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea and their relation to hydration has been brought up many times. If you Google it, you will find a ton of of articles on it. To summarize, the consensus is exactly what was said--the amount of water in coffee and tea more than offsets the mild diuretic effect of caffeine, so the net result is hydration.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

My fiancee is terrified of attorneys after dealing with her divorce. When we bought a boat last year she said there will be no drinking allowed on the boat, and anyone with a known drinking problem or anyone who may have one will not dive with us until they seek treatment. Our gas mileage has been great with the light load.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

I'm still amazed that we don't have definitive data on dehydration and hydration ... and let's not forget negative pressure breathing diuresis.

OK, now I'm amazed as well!

I just did a few minutes of web research and even the presumably expert advise from doctors and such typically said something to the effect of "like caffeinated beverages, alcoholic beverages cause dehydration."

 

[Thalassamania]

In an earlier dehydration thread Rick Inman suggested this link, and I said:

This is nothing new. The French have pushed it for a long time. I picked up using a "French Cocktail" before every dive from Phillipe Cousteau back in the 1960s. That's a liter of orange juice and one aspirin.

BTW: Given the bizarre price of OJ in Hawaii (approaching $8.00 for two quarts) I have switched to other fruit juices, right now I'm using fresh squeezed Jabong (Chinese Grapefruit) juice.

 

[beester]

I know of divers who drink beer and dive. They all come from Belgium, which doesn't seem to suffer from the same social norms in this area as the rest of the world. They also have abnormally high accident rates as compared to, for example, the Dutch, who are prudish and much more risk averse. What the chicken and the egg are here isn't clear, maybe, but when I see divers drinking on their surface interval then I don't generally think of them as being "safe" divers.
R..

I pressume you are Dutch. Do you have any actual evidence suggesting this? If I look at the DOSA website (keeping diving accident statistics in the Netherlands) they don't differentiate between nationalities as far as I know. I'm not contesting that there have been many accidents involving Belgians in the Zeeland area. I only want to find out if these are drug or alcohol related. I've always assumed that these are more related to the kind of dives done and the kind of courses done (some deep tests) in what is basically tidal water with bad visibility.

In my comment I didn't suggest that I know people who drink alcoholic beverages before dives or during diving intervals. Only that I know alot of people who will drink alcoholic beverages after they finished diving for the day. Even guys from very risk aware technical agencies (and these are not only Belgians mind you). To be honest in my quite broad group of divers from different nationalities and agencies I have yet to encounter people drinking before a dive or during intervals.

 

[Diver0001]

I pressume you are Dutch. Do you have any actual evidence suggesting this? If I look at the DOSA website (keeping diving accident statistics in the Netherlands) they don't differentiate between nationalities as far as I know. I'm not contesting that there have been many accidents involving Belgians in the Zeeland area. I only want to find out if these are drug or alcohol related. I've always assumed that these are more related to the kind of dives done and the kind of courses done (some deep tests) in what is basically tidal water with bad visibility.

I don't know if they are drug or alcohol related. As I said, the dive culture in Belgium is quite different than it is in the Netherlands and that may account for it. As I said, it's hard to know what is the chicken and what is the egg.

In my comment I didn't suggest that I know people who drink alcoholic beverages before dives or during diving intervals. Only that I know alot of people who will drink alcoholic beverages after they finished diving for the day. Even guys from very risk aware technical agencies (and these are not only Belgians mind you). To be honest in my quite broad group of divers from different nationalities and agencies I have yet to encounter people drinking before a dive or during intervals.

Well, I trust what I see when I'm in places like Scharendijke in the restaurant during the surface interval and at some of the sites frequented by large clubs that bring motorhomes and the whole family. On the surface of it it looks very cozy and like a lot of fun but it's not uncommon to see divers drinking at about noon. I don't think if they drove all the way from Belgium to dive that they would make one dive in the morning and then start drinking at lunch without diving again in the afternoon. I may be wrong, though. I'll admit that this is based on an assumption that they're diving again in the afternoon.

And as usual, it's probably a very small segment of the population so it's not fair to draw broad conclusions about that.

R..

 

[Spazzy]

A beer at lunch won't hurt your afternoon dive.

 

[kanonfodr]

A beer at lunch won't hurt your afternoon dive.

WTF??

A beer at lunch, MAY not hurt your dive. Or it MAY hurt your dive. So can staying up too late the night before, drinking milk that morning, not having enough sex, driving a foreign car, or singing Mary Had A Little Lamb into your regulator at 98.765498 feet. The point is that a) so little is known about alcohol and it's effects upon divers, b) everyone handles their alcohol differently, and c) your dive buddies may or may not think you're gonna die for whichever choice you make re: drinking before diving that each individual case on a day-by-day basis will be different.

It's theoretically possible that some random individual could make a trimix decompression dive to 150m after downing half a bottle of Jack Daniels and be perfectly fine. The next week he does the same thing and gets turned into a pretzel. That's all it is: theory with some historical facts and a whole lot of "What makes me feel good about doing this dive?" thrown in there.

Peace,
Greg

 

[DocVikingo]

I just did a few minutes of web research and even the presumably expert advise from doctors and such typically said something to the effect of "like caffeinated beverages, alcoholic beverages cause dehydration."

A little bit of web searching can be a misleading activity.

Yes, caffeine is a diuretic--an extremely mild one. One needs to consume substantial amounts before this effect even approaches the meaningful (e.g., See 1 below).

Since it is so widely used (clearly it’s the world’s most popular psychoactive drug), let's take coffee as an example of a caffeinated beverage. Routine caffeinated coffee contains ~0.71mg of caffeine per ml (BTW, nearly all other caffeinated drinks, such as caffeinated soft drinks, contain less than this amount). Thus, every ml of coffee one drinks will result in the excretion of an extra ~0.71ml of urine. Given an average 8oz serving of coffee, the 240ml of caffeine one imbibes will cause an extra ~17ml of urine to be voided. Doing the math, that's a net gain of ~65ml of fluid.

And it depends when the diver drinks his or her coffee. Caffeine is absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream and reaches maximum concentration within ~1-hr. It has an estimated half-life of 3 to 7 hours.

All of this of course is not say that drinking an equivalent amount of plain water is not a superior method of hydrating oneself, because it surely is. However, it puts this issue in perspective. BTW, it also is not to say that coffee in general, and caffeine in particular, cannot have adverse (or salubrious) effects on the body.

In summary, taken in moderation the evidence does not support that caffeinated beverages pose a dehydration threat in the healthy diver (e.g., See 2 below).

Regards,

DocVikingo

This is educational only and does not constitute or imply a doctor-patient relationship. It is not medical advice to you or any other individual and should not be construed as such.

1. Caffeine: Is it dehydrating or not? - MayoClinic.com

2. The Effect of Caffeinated, Non-Caffeinated, Caloric and Non-Caloric Beverages on Hydration -- Grandjean et al. 19 (5): 591 -- Journal of the American College of Nutrition

The Effect of Caffeinated, Non-Caffeinated, Caloric and Non-Caloric Beverages on Hydration

Ann C. Grandjean, EdD, FACN, CNS, Kristin J. Reimers, RD, MS, Karen E. Bannick, MA and Mary C. Haven, MS

The Center for Human Nutrition, (A.C.G., K.J.R.), Omaha, Nebraska
School of Allied Health Professions, University of Nebraska Medical Center (M.C.H.), Omaha, Nebraska Bannick Consulting, Isle, Minnesota (K.E.B.)

Address reprint requests to: Ann C. Grandjean, Ed.D., The Center for Human Nutrition, 502 South 44th Street, Room 3007, Omaha, NE 68105. E-mail: agrandjean@unmc.edu

Conclusions: This preliminary study found no significant differences in the effect of various combinations of beverages on hydration status of healthy adult males. Advising people to disregard caffeinated beverages as part of the daily fluid intake is not substantiated by the results of this study. The across-treatment weight loss observed, when combined with data on fluid-disease relationships, suggests that optimal fluid intake may be higher than common recommendations. Further research is needed to confirm these results and to explore optimal fluid intake for healthy individuals."