A few days ago I had a business lunch and me, the raw paleolithic dieter forced to eat some cooked animal foods. I was observing the others exclaiming, jokingly, chokingly the need for a glass of water with the meal they were eating. Even telling a story of how when he was on the airplane and he asked the stewardess to give him a glass of water with his meal, the stewardess told him to wait until she had served everyone else; he was upset and told the stewardess if she could wait while he choked to death on his food!
Oh, I remember those times. I used to eat lots of cooked food myself. In each meal I just had to have water at my side. No way was would I dare begin eating without a glass of water to help me push the food in case I choked and to drink up when the cooked food made me thirsty.
Now as a raw foodist, a raw paleolithic dieter, and going through raw vegan and raw fruitarian diets, I now know that drinking water with meals is necessary with a cooked diet paradigm because cooked food is dehydrating. You make up for the dehydration with the instinct to drink water.
When you are on raw food all the time, you are hydrated at every meal. Each meal is hydrating, thus, there is absolutely no need to drink any supplemental water.
So those gurus telling people it is bad to drink water with meals are correct, but people cannot help it. They are so routinely dehydrated and the cooked food has the true potential to choke people unless water is handily ready.
As natural hygiene has suggested, humans are not drinking animals. Yes this is true, if humans eat as humans were designed to eat raw. When humans decide to eat a cooked diet, then they have no choice but to supplement with water. Of course soda is bad for you. Of course packaged juices are bad for you too. Only real fruit juice should be considered. Coconut juice is best. Plain water is just inferior, you only absorb 10% of that water, the rest is waste.