A significant number of advertisers and news media reports are trying to convince you otherwise. The number of people who carry around water each day seems to be larger every year. Bottled water sales continue to increase.

This summer’s rash of stories was inspired by a recent study in the American Journal of Public Health. Researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2009 to 2012 to examine 4,134 children ages 6 to 19. Specifically, they calculated their mean urine osmolality, which is a measure of urine concentration. The higher the value, the more concentrated the urine.

They found that more than half of children had a urine osmolality of 800 mOsm/kg or higher. They also found that children who drank eight ounces or more of water a day had, on average, a urine osmolality about 8 mOsm less than those who didn’t.

So if you define “dehydration” as a urine osmolality of 800 mOsm/kg or higher, the findings of this study are really concerning. This article did. The problem is that most clinicians don’t.

I’m a pediatrician, and I can tell you that I have rarely, if ever, used urine osmolality as the means by which I decide if a child is dehydrated. When I asked colleagues, none thought 800 mOsm/kg was the value at which they’d be concerned. And in a web search, most sources I found thought values up to 1,200 mOsm/kg were still in the physiologically normal range and that children varied more than adults. None declared that 800 mOsm/kg was where we’d consider children to be dehydrated.

In other words, there’s very little reason to believe that children who have a spot urine measurement of 800 mOsm/kg should be worried. In fact, back in 2002, a study was published in the Journal of Pediatrics, one that was more exploratory in nature than a look for dehydration, and it found that boys in Germany had an average urine osmolality of 844 mOsm/kg. The third-to-last paragraph in the paper recounted a huge number of studies from all over the world finding average urine mOsm/kg in children ranging from 392 mOsm/kg in Kenya to 964 in Sweden.