All That Water Advice Just Doesn’t Wash

Re: “Hard to Swallow” (Nov. 20): Swallowing eight glasses of water a day might not be as hard as swallowing all the contradictory advice that we get from health experts.

--ROBERT H. WILLIAMS

Monterey Park

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Although not trained in medicine or nutrition, I intuitively knew that the advice to drink eight glasses of water per day was nonsense. The advice fully meets three important criteria for being an American health urban legend: excess, public virtue and the search for a cheap “magic bullet.”

--JONATHAN BALL

Pasadena