Skip to main content
trans-canada highway

Drinking two cups of water before meals helps to suppress appetite.Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press

Headed out on a long road trip or just your congested and time-killing daily drive to and from work?

Don't forget to pack some bottled water. Otherwise, you could be driving impaired.

A recent study, conducted at England's Loughborough University and published in the journal Physiology and Behaviour, indicates that dehydration can induce as many driving errors as being drunk behind the wheel.

"We all deplore drink driving, but we don't usually think about the effects of other things that affect our driving skills," Ron Maughan, emeritus professor of sport and exercise nutrition at Loughborough, told Britain's Daily Telegraph. "And one of those is not drinking and dehydration."

The study revealed that drivers who consumed only 25 millilitres of water an hour made more than twice as many mistakes – the same total as those who have been drinking and driving – than those who were hydrated.

"Our findings highlight an unrecognized danger and suggest that drivers should be encouraged to make sure they are properly hydrated," Maughan told The Telegraph. "The levels of driver errors we found are of a similar magnitude to those found in people with a blood alcohol content of 0.08 per cent."

The study's testing procedure involved volunteers who were given 200 millilitres of water every hour on one day, and another day when they were given just 25 millilitres – the equivalent of five sips. The volunteers were then put behind the controls of a driving simulator for a two-hour drive.

Participants averaged 47 driving errors while normally hydrated – but that number rose to 101 when they were dehydrated.

Like us on Facebook

Follow us on Instagram

Add us to your circles

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe