DOPAMINE AND HYDRATION: A STUDY

I ran across a very interesting study undertaken by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, also in San Francisco.

“The experiments involved restricting water in test mice and using technology that allowed them to focus on the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the brain. In one experiment, thirsty mice were given unlimited access to water for five minutes while the researchers monitored brain waves emanating from the VTA—a means of measuring how much, if any, dopamine was being produced.”

So, dopamine – what is it and is it good or bad? Dopamine is known mostly as the pleasure hormone. It is produced by eating something we like, such as sugary or fatty foods; it is produced during sex and now apparently it is produced by simply hydrating. Findings like this continue to convince me (I didn’t really need convincing) that there is a God, that God created us to naturally lean toward a healthy condition. Making dopamine by drinking water – wow. We would like to assume that the mouse experiments equate to the human condition, which it very often does.

Continuing, “As expected, dopamine production levels rose as soon as the mice began drinking. But the researchers were then surprised to find that 10 minutes later, the dopamine levels rose again—coinciding with the amount of time it took for the water they had been drinking to reach their brain.”

There’s more to the study but this is the prime finding and it is published in the journal Nature.

Now, just think of that water the mice are drinking – what if it were saturated with oxygen, the O2 that we breathe? Hmmmmm. Maybe someone should invent a machine to push oxygen into drinking water…