I hydrate with tea. Bad idea?

I gauge my hydration on the color of my pee! I drink a few cups of tea and coffee every day (and some water) and don’t have any issues with my hydration. Just listen to your body.

Thank you so much! I will give that a try and report back. :)

I don’t think hydration should be a major issue. If you are particularly thirsty, sweating or working out heavily, it might be better to switch to a non-caffeinated beverage temporarily. One potential issue is iron absorption — the tannins in tea can prevent you from absorbing iron if you drink tea with meals. I know that drinking black tea in the evening causes me to have trouble sleeping due to the caffeine. My spouse drinks black iced tea all day, but switches to decaf in the evening. Maybe you could try rooibos or chamomile sometimes?

I asked my dietitian the same question before and she told me the body can get hydrated from a variety of dietary source—- tea, juice, soup, or just about anything. Of course they also say that your body needs more water when your caffeine intake increases. Not willing to give up my teas, I’ve been drinking different kinds that contain less caffeine like Kukicha (contains stalks, the less caffeinated part of a tea plant), Genmaicha (has the popped rice in it), or other herbal blends.

Unless you’ve extenuating medical circumstances, drinking tea alone should be okay when it comes to hydration. As most have said, listen to your body because we’re each unique.

I have personally been cautioned about drinking only tea at work and was advised a 1:1 ratio of tea to water, but you have to take into account that I have a very physically demanding job in a dehydrating environment (-15F) coupled with persistent nausea (did you know you can be allergic to cold?). At that point, tea becomes wasted ounces when every ounce counts. :)

from what i understand, diuretics make you pee more than normal so you lose water from your body. so if you want to maintain your current water level or increase it (hydrate) then you have to drink more water.

the color of your pee shows how clean your system is (the more you pee, the less color). your system will be cleaner if you drink more/pee more. if you drink more water, your body will be hydrated but if you pee more without a change in liquid intake you will be dehydrated. either way, you get clean pee.

i suggest getting a portable water purifier that also adds minerals to your water.

Thanks everyone! I probably have to drink more water anyway but I refuse to drink less tea! Ha!

My understanding was already expressed in these comments; it depends on the person, but usually people need to drink some water in addition to tea because of the diuretic effect. For me I don’t need to drink one glass of water to each glass of tea, just mixing in a few glasses of water throughout the day will do it.

Any herbal tea that isn’t a diuretic could offset that essentially the same way (chrysanthemom, chamomile, mulberry leaf, floral or fruit; whatever it is), and those work well for me in the evening when I’m concerned about sleep issues. To be on the safe side it’s probably as well to drink some water though.

that’s a great question, and it leads to other even broader questions, about the effects of other types of teas. are the other health claims real, or are there any possible concerns, or how good or bad is the information on them? I think it’s best to just not drink excessive quantities of any one of them, and to try and keep an eye on internal cues for effects, especially related to hydration. I did some research on two for blog posts (on sage tea and mulberry leaf tea), and some decent reference material is out there, not that hard to find through Google, including some warnings for special cases (I think one was that sage isn’t recommended for women that are nursing).

it would be natural for people to try to use herb teas for health benefits but the claims are all over the place; everything does way too much, without much basis in anything but hearsay. based on that very limited research some of the claims probably are justified, just not in a way we can document; for example, mulberry leaf is very high in Vitamin A, so it’s doing a lot of what carrot juice does. I drink much more conventional tea than herbs, so that’s probably more a concern for me, if insecticide toxins are more a factor than related health benefits, but I don’t lose any sleep over that.

I usually just listen to what my body is telling me and I have never had a problem with most of my fluid intake being in tea form.
I think it also depends on what tea, if you rinse your tea first or not (rinsing can remove a lot of caffeine depending how tight the leaves are) and how many infusions you stretch out for.
I can happily drink 10g of loose green/oolong/black/puerh tea leaves gongfu style for many rounds until there is hardly any flavor left, with very long infusions towards the end, sometimes with the same leaves for a full day, but if I’m tasting many different teas side by side for example and start to ‘get the jitters’ or feeling a headache or something coming on, then I drink water for a while until I feel good again, but thats rare for me as usually I’m drinking about 2 different teas a day and I push them to their limits and never have problems when I do that.