"East Coast elitist" is not a label that even Sarah Palin could pin on me. But I am no "Joe Six-Pack American" either. In fact, after drinking my fill of German beer for the three years I lived in Bavaria as a soldier and student, I have despised American beer.

No way could a "mountain boy" like me be elitist. I grew up in the mountains, and once when I went back to visit my boyhood home, a guy there pinned that label on me. It fits me perfectly.

One of my so-called girlfriends once said that she liked me only when I was hiking in the mountains or stoned. I broke my addiction to pot more than 20 years ago, but my addiction to hiking in the mountains is just getting stronger as I get even more into photography.

Since I don't drink beer, what else could I possibly drink? Just three beverages.

Water
When I'm hiking in the mountains, water is my only drink. Except when I run out, it's always water that I have filtered at home with my Brita. If I do run out of filtered water, I purify it with my SteriPEN Journey, a 4-ounce device that uses ultraviolet light to destroy waterborne microbes, like Giardia and Cryptosporidium.

A big advantage of water over just about anything else that we drink is that it has a glycemic index of zero. It won't raise our blood glucose at all.

But, as I wrote in my first book, The New Glucose Revolution: What Makes My Blood Glucose Go Up...and Down?, it's not true that you have to drown yourself in the stuff. There's an old urban myth that you should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. While you will see this advice repeated time and again, it lacks any scientific proof.

It looks like the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council started the whole thing in 1945. That's when the board recommended that we consume about "1 milliliter of water for each calorie of food." That works out to roughly two to two-and-a-half quarts per day. But most people seem to have missed its next sentence, that "most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods."

Where does that leave us? When we are thirsty, water remains our best choice. Even when we are hungry, having a drink of water is a great idea. It can help us feel fuller and therefore less likely to overeat. This goes a long way toward keeping our blood glucose under control.

Coffee
Unlike water, coffee is hardly a necessity of life. It's a pleasure.

Most Americans make their coffee far too weak, closer to dishwater than to real coffee. I use one-half cup of beans per 10 ounces of water, which may be too much for most people, but consider it a goal.

And many of us pollute it with cream and/or sugar, which only makes sense when people serve you otherwise undrinkable coffee. Doing that also adds calories that few of us need.

At least, when we prepare coffee properly it's a pleasure. Making a good cup of coffee happens to be one of the most difficult things that we do in the kitchen.

I think that I finally got it. The water we use for making our coffee is the most important ingredient. That's because coffee is mostly water. I never use water straight from the tap and certainly not distilled water. The key is to filter it, which is even better than buying plastic bottles of mineral water, which contribute to environmental pollution.