(Precipitated by a big tiff with the BF this evening…)
Tonight we were at the bar and the discussion turned to health and my BF and another girl were talking about the Chinese theory that you should not drink cold water with your meals and that drinking hot beverages aids in digestion.
My stance was that water is water is water after a certain point. He kept saying, “Well, put bacon grease in cold water and then put it in warm water,” and I kept saying he was leaving out all the helpful stomach acids and enzymes. (And the fact that anything you put in turns body temp pretty quickly.)
What say you, Dopers? I need some links that pertain to this, but not “The Chinese have done it for years” because I know they have; I’m just not sure temperature makes a difference either way. I’m totally willing to be proved wrong, but please provide outside sources, preferably to do with the inner workings of the human digestive tract. (Outside sources because I really don’t want to just link him to this thread.)
(FWIW, I think the big snit I had was more a reaction to the unthinking acceptance of something because it was non-Western, rather than any science behind it. I don’t know if there’s a scientific basis. Please educate me.)
Well, if we’re going to go for old wives’ wisdom, Spanish old wives say you shouldn’t drink cold water (freezer-cold) if you’re sweating. It’s fine otherwise.
Admittedly there’s less Spanish old wives than Chinese ones.
If we leave old wives aside, I go with your own interpretation.
IANA thermowaterologist but it is my personal experience that drinking cold drinks shortly AFTER a meal, does mess me up a bit. And drinking room temperature water when very thirsty (working outside at 30oC+) simply doesn’t help at all and just makes me go to the bathroom.
Dunnow, Sapo, to me the first one sounds like a case of, uhm, how do you say corte de digestión in English… same as jumping into cold water or getting into a cold room from a very hot outside once your digestion has already started. Your body was busy doing Digestion over other stuff (which is why you get sleepy after a meal, too), and then the sudden cold makes Thermostat a priority, which kicks your tummy out of whack.
In case you are wondering, according to the Snopes article, drinking cold water doesn’t cause cancer either. Yeah, I know, you were really worried about that.
Temperature would have a major effect on digestion. The question is how much and how cold. Drinking a lot of ice water would definately reduce your ability to digest food but only until that water harmed again. A person being such a large mass compared to the ice water would probably be able to heat that water fairly quickly. I’ll leave the math to the experts.