This stuff goes into the category of “everybody knows”. These things don’t come from authoritative sources to begin with, it’s just believed that they did. I have never understood why people are reluctant to question those things that “everybody knows”.
Let’em have a drinking contest and see who goes under the table first.
Dan
Waiting to swim persists in large part because there is no compelling reason that it should not. No one has ever been injured by this rule, plus it is mostly applied to children, which are subject to a host of non-rational protections at all times.
Example: a friend of mine whose ten year old daughter sometimes spends her summer afternoons grooming my pony and petting my chickens. She cannot be dropped off at the bottom of my road to walk up, she must be driven. It’s a one mile dead end gravel road with about five cars a day driving it – which are mostly people we know and delivery vans. But her mother “doesn’t feel comfortable” – a result of the rather recent societal convention that does not allow children to be unwatched for any amount of time no matter how benign the circumstances. There is no rational reason for it, but if you flout this law you will be subject to the opprobrium of all parents who come to know about it.
Our efforts to battle the scourge of the etymological fallacy have met with limited success.
The issue with the acidity is the effect is has on your teeth, not your digestion. Your teeth are not usually marinating in stomach acid. GERD (chronic acid reflux) and chronic bulimia are associated with dental problems.
But what you say is true - ordinary soft drinks are not strongly acidic. It’s difficult to do rigorous studies on the effects of consuming ordinary soft drinks on teeth, for the same reason it’s difficult to do rigorous nutritional studies on humans.
To say nothing about breakfast for dinner…
“If you drank with a cracked lip, from a cracked cup, you would at once catch a disease as unmentionable as it was unpronounceable”.