• Question: What is more fundamental to the human body, food, or water?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Firstly, don’t try this at home!

      If you drink but do not eat, you will progressively lose weight (as you use up spare and later more essential resources) and die, but depending on your health and weight when you start it’ll take several weeks for this process to work.

      If you eat but do not drink (and let’s assume for the sake of argument that the foods you eat are fairly dry) then the problem here is dehydration. Again they’ll be some differences in survival time depending on how healthy and hydrated you are at the start, but this time you’ll die in a matter of a few days.

      So water is more important.

    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Good question!

      Water is definitely more important. Humans are made up of about 70% water which means it is super important to us! If you were on a desert island then you could survive days without food, possibly even weeks, but without water you might not even survive more than a day or two.

      There are some animals which can survive agessss without water. Such as camels which can live months without drinking water.This is due to adaptations such as the camels hump which can store water and energy to use when water and food are scarce. Also camels have different shaped blood cells than humans which are better are helping blood flow when body fluid is low. They can also survive when they’ve lost 40% of their weight in fluids where as humans can only afford to lose 15%.

      Maybe if humans evolve further, one day humans will be able to survive better without water!

Comments