Water tracking that counts the water in your food

Dietary surveys put the food share of total water intake at roughly 20–30% for most adults, and higher for anyone whose diet leans toward fruit, vegetables, soup or yogurt. The European Food Safety Authority uses that band in its reference values; American intake data lands in the same place.

On a 3,000 ml day that is 600–900 ml — three glasses you already drank and never counted.

By weight: cucumber and lettuce about 96%. Watermelon and strawberries about 91%. Broth-based soup above 90%. Yogurt about 88%. Apples and oranges about 85%. Eggs about 75%. Cooked rice and pasta about 65–70%. Cooked chicken breast about 65%.

A lunch of soup, an apple and a yogurt is most of a liter before you touch your drink.

It is a database problem, not carelessness. A conventional tracker resolves your meal to a row in a food database, and the number it needs from that row is calories. Water content is an optional field, populated inconsistently, and it changes with preparation in ways the entry rarely captures — boiled rice and fried rice are the same “rice” to most databases and very different amounts of water.

So the field goes unused and hydration gets its own counter with its own button. The result is an app that knows you ate a 400 g bowl of vegetable soup and still says you have had no water today.

Water is a row in the same nutrient registry as protein and iron, estimated from the same analysis of the same meal. The estimate covers the water in the food itself: the broth in the soup, the moisture in the chicken, the water the rice absorbed while cooking.

You can put a daily goal on it like any other nutrient, chart it over a week, and pin it to your meal cards. Logging a drink still works — say “large glass of water” — and it goes into the same number. There is no second system.