Since summer is two weeks away, I thought it important to remind everyone of the importance of water.

As children we learned in school that most of the earth’s water, 97 percent, is in the form of salty ocean water. The sun draws much of this water up and circulates it throughout the biosphere each year.

This water evaporates into the air, condenses in clouds to liquid, and rains, snows or sleets back down to earth.

This precipitation evaporates back into the atmosphere, penetrates the soil nurturing plant life or runs off the earth’s crust into nearby surface waters, ultimately reaching the oceans again or seeping into the water table, filling underground aquifers, where it then slowly travels along subterranean floors to feed lakes, rivers, swamps or the sea.

Like mother earth, the body’s principal constituent is water.

The body of a newborn baby is 77 percent water. Children are 59 percent water. Adults vary between 45 to 65 percent water.

Our respiration, digestion, assimilation, metabolism, elimination, waste removal and temperature regulation can only be accomplished with water. The circulation between blood (which is 83 percent water) and bodily organs is perpetual, but a certain amount of water is eliminated daily through evaporation or excretion and must be replaced.

Most of this water is removed by hardworking kidneys, through which the entire blood supply passes and is filtered 15 times each hour!

When the body becomes overheated after exercise or in the summer months, sweat glands excrete perspiration, which is 99 percent water. Even just during breathing a consistent loss of moisture is exhaled.

Replacing this water with tea or coffee doesn’t work, as those drinks are diuretic. Alcoholic drinks also do not replace water. It takes three quarts of liquid daily—via fruit, juice, soup, pure water, etc. to do the trick. More is needed during strenuous activity, a high temperature or altitude, or a diet high in salt.

Water is precious.

Only oxygen is more essential than water in sustaining human life and the life of all living organisms.

We can survive about five weeks without protein, carbohydrates, and fat; but we can survive a maximum of only five days without water!

So especially this summer, drink up!

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photos: eefiz/Flickr, Suvodeb Banerjee/Flickr, Adri Botma/Pixoto