Does snow dehydrate you?

Not directly, but eating snow in a survival situation isn’t the best strategy. As it’s so cold, it will decrease your core temperature, forcing your body to increase its metabolic rate to keep you warm. In these cases, you trade high levels of energy for relatively little gain. Melting the ice to water is a far better option. If you can’t do that, sucking on ice is still better as it has more water for the same volume compared to snow. The other problem is that, like drinking from a stream, you don’t know exactly what pollutants may be in the snow.

Answered by Aneel Bhangu, HIW contributor.