Monday, October 22, 2012

A strange thirst




I have long been a rather thirsty soul.  I drink fizzy drinks by the gallon.  And despite all the dental alarmists, my teeth are fine.  I haven't had a filling since childhood.

The amount I drink has however alarmed me at times as a big thirst is a symptom of diabetes.  So a couple of years ago I had a glucose tolerance test which came back dead-centre: No sign of diabetes.  So I continued enjoying my soft-drinks.  I put my fluid consumption down to the fact that I have a lot of salt with my food.  Salt makes you thirsty.

In recent months however my thirst seemed to be greater and I started to do something I hadn't done since childhood:  drink  orange softdrink.  I had previously been a confirmed drinker of lemon squash.  So I once again had a diabetes test and came back within  the normal range.  So I continued to enjoy my orange softdrink.

Today, however, things got out of hand.  I needed to get up and drink my orange softdrink almost every five minutes.

Now I have always believed that your body tells you what you need.  If you note the strange things that pregnant women eat, you will understand.  They will eat ANYTHING to get what their unborn baby needs.

So I thought that my body must be telling me that what I needed was not orange softdrink but real oranges.  So I got out a mandarine (mandarin orange) from the fridge that I had bought some time before (I normally never buy fruit) and ate it -- swallowing only the juice.  And my thirst vanished!

I normally have some salady things with both my breakfast and dinner so I thought it most improbable that I would have a vitamin C deficiency but it seems that I did.  Despite my extensive reading in the medical literature on diet I have never heard of thirst as a symptom of vitamin C deficiency so it seems that my body was wiser than the medical journals are!

I would be pleased to see any references I might have missed, however.

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