Why drinking more water might make you lose more iodine
Higher Urine Volume Results in Additional Renal Iodine Loss
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
When you drink more water, your kidneys flush out more iodine in your pee — even if you eat the same amount of iodine-rich foods.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
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Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
When you drink more water, your kidneys flush out more iodine in your pee — even if you eat the same amount of iodine-rich foods.
No biological mechanisms were identified in this study. This may be an epidemiological, observational, or survey-based study that reports associations rather than proposing causal biological pathways.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 552 / 44
Evidence Score
A snapshot of a population at a single point in time. Can identify correlations and prevalence, but cannot determine the direction of cause and effect.
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Claims (5)
When healthy adolescents and adult women drink more fluids and produce more urine, their bodies excrete more iodine through urine, even when their diet stays the same.
People who drink more fluids tend to excrete more iodine in their urine, even when their dietary iodine intake from foods like salt, milk, and fish is accounted for. This suggests that how much fluid a person consumes affects how their kidneys remove iodine from the body.
In adolescent girls, each extra liter of urine produced is linked to a greater amount of iodine being removed from the body compared to adolescent boys, suggesting that kidneys process iodine differently between the sexes.
Drinking large amounts of non-milk beverages like almond or oat milk may reduce iodine levels in the body because these drinks contain very little iodine, and increased urine output removes more iodine than these beverages replace.
When measuring iodine levels in urine to assess iodine status, the total amount of urine produced in 24 hours can affect the results, because more urine means more iodine is excreted, even if iodine intake hasn't changed.