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A missive touting a regimen that calls for the ingestion of four glasses of water first thing in the morning, followed by the restriction of drinking after meals, began circulating on the internet in August 2004. While it now arrives primarily labeled, Heart Attacks and Water, its earliest appearances were titled, Drinking Water as Treatment and Drink Water on Empty Stomach: Our earliest sighting of this item came from a message board post, where it was presented without any comment identifying its author. Its central claims to authority, that scientific tests have proven its value and water treatment had been found successful by a Japanese medical society as a hundred percent cure for [various diseases] are unsupported; We were unable to locate any record of scientific tests proving this hypothesis, nor of statements issued in support of it by a Japanese medical society. Diabetes, cancer, and tuberculosis are serious illnesses that are not subject to being easily cured by even the latest medical technologies, let alone by tap water. Belief in such easy fixes is understandable because such diseases are big, mean, scary things, and those so afflicted often feel powerless in the face of them. Of the illnesses included on the proffered list, the only malady that might be improved by increasing one's daily water intake is constipation; however, even that claim may be nothing more than chimera. The National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse says, of the practice of increasing fluid intake in an effort to treat constipation, that: Claims that certain healthful benefits can be gained by eating or drinking particular items at specified times of the day are not new; for example, the eat fruit only on an empty stomach rumor has circulated for years. Likewise, the belief that increasing one's water intake would be a good and healthful thing to do is also well traveled; many people continue to believe (erroneously, it turns out) that 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated and that, to stay healthy, folks must drink eight glasses of water a day. In July 2007, the following admonition against drinking cold water was tacked on to the basic e-mail about timing one's water intake: As we detail in a seperate article about an email supposedly outlining the dangers of drinking cold water, that rumor itself dates to February 2006. By July 2006, it was circulating as the lead-in to a cough CPR mailing (which dangerously advocates that medically-unsupervised heart attack victims attempt to cough rhythmically to get themselves through cardiac events), and, by October 2006, had come to have the following bit about heart attacks in women added to it: We discuss these claims in depth in our article about heart attack symptoms, but, in a nutshell, while it is true that a number of the signs are subtle and can easily be mistaken for indigestion, it's not true that women have one sort of heart attack and men another. In January 2010, we happened upon another benefits of drinking water e-mail, which, by November 2011, had been expanded into this longer form: The suggestion that a glass of water helps digestion is nebulous (how would that be measured?), the claim that it helps lower blood pressure is erroneous, and the statement that water activates internal organs in the morning is misleading (our organs function quite well all on their own while we sleep, and they continue functioning after we wake up). The one potentially true bit of information related to this item is that some studies have suggested a higher daily intake of water may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. Later versions of this piece also tacked on an older item about taking aspirin at the first sign of a heart attack.
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