Re: Endurance athletes heavy water consumers

"Paul Crowley" <slkwuoiutiuytciuyik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

AATers vastly overstate human need for water.

Do you sweat? How many other mammals
do so regularly?

Equids for one. Horses are open country animals.
Allow me to point out the obvious. Zebras are
quintessential savannah dwellers.

Sweating is a reserve emergency resouce,
used mainly for short-term sprints to escape
predators. However, zebras are not territorial
and will travel to sites where they can top up
on salt.

And don't forget the gorilla. George Schallers' observation at Kabara
is illustrative: "I have observed animals lie in the direct sun for
more than two hours, with beads of sweat forming on the upper lip and
rivulets of it running down the chest". ("The Mountain Gorilla:
Ecology and Behavior": 295).

Male gorillas are huge animals, and will
generate much heat from vigorous
activity.

Like "lie in the direct sun for more than two hours"?

But they also are well-known to go on 'salt-treks'.

They will occassionally consume soil, apparently for its mineral
content. Schaller observed them do it twice during his entire study,
but "Although gorillas ate soil occassionally, they apparently did not
seek out such salt-rich sites habitually. At least three times group
VIII passed within 100 feet of the locality from which sample 2 was
collected without deviating from its course." (op. cit. p.166).

In fact, many primates are capable of eccrine sweating although most
of the time it's not obvious because they do not sweat profusely
(neither do we all the time), but "of the non-human primates studied
only the rhesus monkey (M. mulatta) has been found to have an eccrine
sweating response comparable to humans (Harrison et al. 1988. Human
Biology: An Introduction to Human Evolution, Variation, Growth, and
Adaptability, Oxford University Press. p.455).
And humans sweat profusely only under certain circumstances, under the
threat of hyperthermia, e.g. during excercise or exposure to high
environmental temperatures when not acclimatized.

Go to some outdoor activity -- the beach
or the zoo, and take a look around you.
It is bad science to try to deny ordinary
everyday facts.

When do people prefer go to the beach? And then what are they doing
there?
At the zoo I've seen them mostly at leisure, usually not visibly
sweating.

Gerrit
.

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