Water Facts
- Roughly 70 percent of an adult’s body is made up of water.
- At birth, water accounts for approximately 80 percent of an infant’s body weight.
- A healthy person can drink about three gallons of water per day.
- Soft drinks, coffee, and tea, while made up almost entirely of water, also contain caffeine. Caffeine can act as a mild diuretic, preventing water from traveling to necessary locations in the body.
- Much more fresh water is stored under the ground in aquifers than on the earth’s surface.
- Of all the water on the earth, humans can use only about three tenths of a percent of this water. Such usable water is found in groundwater aquifers, rivers, and freshwater lakes.
- The average person in the United States uses anywhere from 80-100 gallons of water per day. Flushing the toilet actually takes up the largest amount of this water.
- By the time a person feels thirsty, his or her body has lost over 1 percent of its total water amount.
- The weight a person loses directly after intense physical activity is weight from water, not fat.