dry up, coffee haters Just got another mini-lecture from a co-worker about how 'coffee dehydrates'. Err, right. If that were true, I'd be dead, and this fellow apparently agrees (that I should be dead, that is):

http://ezinearticles.com/?Coffee-vs.-Water----Which-One-Actually-Gives-You-More-Energy?&id=297541

(this site is funny in a pathetic way. 'living water', indeed!)

The struggle between water and coffee is intensified further when you take into consideration that for each cup of coffee (100 mg caffeine) your body needs 3 cups of water to compensate for the water loss that occurs due to coffee's diuretic effect.

Struggle? Please. In any 'struggle between water and coffee', water would roll over and play dead. Which, really, it does. But anyway, from this, I should in theory, be dead and well dessicated, which of course I am neither.

For another (less hysterical) view:

http://www.ific.org/foodinsight/2002/ja/caffdehydnbfi402.cfm

In a recent review article, "Caffeine, Body Fluid-Electrolyte Balance, and Exercise Performance," published in the June 2002 issue of the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism , researcher Lawrence E. Armstrong, a professor of exercise and environmental physiology at the University of Connecticut, found that caffeine is not the dehydrating demon some people believe. In fact, he concluded that caffeine is no more a diuretic than water.
  ¶ 3:15 PM