We're always being told to drink more water, that its health benefits are myriad and self-evident. But there's a surprising dearth of hard scientific evidence to support that.
One recent meta-study tried to summarize and quantify the health benefits of drinking more water. The results are inconclusive at best.
It seems like drinking more water before meals (i.e. filling up stomach before food) can help with weight loss, which makes sense, although not very much. Also, increased water intake helps reduce the incidence of kidney stones, which also make sense.
However, other purported benefits, like reducing blood sugar and headaches and UTIs do not seem to have any evidence behind them. For example, those blood sugar studies that do show improvements may just reflect blood hemodilution (literally, a watering down of the blood), or come as a result of lower food intake, and some studies actually show an increase in blood sugar. Any improvement in headaches and urinary tract infections as a result of higher water intake turn out to be not statistically significant. Overactive bladders, obviously enough, worsened after increased water consumption.
All in all, it seems like the health benefits of increasing your daily water intake have been somewhat overstated. It's not going to do you any harm, generally speaking, but don't expect any life-changing improvements.
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