Ditto here. I grew up in a household where my Mom routinely used a lot of salt when cooking, as did both my Grandmothers, so I guess I’m used to eating food that didn’t need extra salt.
But I have never seen anybody else sprinkle salt on buttered bread.
It’s tangential to the op, but:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cancer-tea-idUSTRE52Q01620090327
There are plenty of similar articles out there, including what appear to be decent quality studies, eg:
Oddly, they all seem to be about tea drinking - but the message seems to be that it’s the heat that’s the problem. Do the places selling super-hot drinks post health warnings?
j
I will second the answer - at the beginning, take very tiny sips.
I usually just sort of inhale to pull a small amount into my mouth, rather than tipping the cup. It has the advantage of also passing air over the tiny slurp as i get it, and as others mention, it mixes with saliva to spread the heat.
Just to clarify - the reason McDonalds and Starbucks and many others make coffee at 180°-plus is because that’s how you make good coffee. It has the added bonus of staying drinkable for a longer time. yes it is very hot, and yes exposure in quantity will cause burns on assorted body parts. it’s a feature of the beverage. Similarly, real actual (good) tea is made with boiling water.
I do once in a while over-slurp a little bit with a cup of coffee and so will have a raw area on the top of my palate or on my tongue, but oddly enough, that teaches me to be careful. I sometimes get the same problem with fresh pizza. (I don’t recall anyone suing a pizza restaurant for burning themselves on the hot sauce and cheese, but knowing America I’m sure it’s happened.)
My dad was like that with soup - he would get the full rolling boiling pot of soup, ladle some in a bowl and immediately dig in. Yikes.
I drink my coffee by first putting about 1/3 of the mug of half and half, adding my splenda then adding my coffee so it is moderately cool by the time I get around to it. I do one cup a day, the rest of the day I drink herb tea [ginger lemon, I got hooked on it during chemo. Worked for nausea but it is really tasty]
Put me down as another person without an asbestos lined mouth!
Butter traditionally was salted as a preservation method - when one wanted to use it, one dropped a lump into water and rinsed the salt out by working it underwater briefly, then working it out of water using the paired paddles to squeeze out the excess water. Unsalted butter will go rancid faster than salted butter, for what it is worth. Salted butter has been found in bogs that is still edible [for certain values of edible, it wasn’t meant to go that long, it was meant to last over a couple winters] after a couple thousand years.
I’ve noticed that while I can have a hot beverage in my mouth, sometimes if I swallow it I can get a burn pain in my throat. Perhaps there is something about the mouth that can stand higher temperatures. Also hands tend to stand higher and lower temperatures better than the rest of the body.
I worked at a corporate coffee shop (but not that one) and there were some patterns that were noticeable over time. One was that some people of apparent South Asian background liked their beverages extrememly hot.
They would order coffee and do it up with cream & sugar, then ask if we can heat it up. We’d use the steam wand on the espresso machine to heat, ‘Hotter,’ ‘No, hotter,’ right up to boiling. The cup would be shaking on the wand, the surface rolling. The cup was hot to the touch even through its foam insulation and they’d sip it right there at the counter.
My hands and feet seem to have special skin formed from repeated damage. A decade of Copenhagen chewing tobacco left me with a lower lip that didn’t feel any pain or burning from nicotine and abrasives. Are you aware of a reason that repeated heat damage wouldn’t cause this to happen in the mouth?
You think the mucous membrane of the inside of the mouth routinely gets scarred or calloused like hands or feet from exposure to hot drinks? I’m skeptical - but if you think this is the explanation, the burden is for you to provide some evidence of this phenomenon, not for me to specify a reason that it couldn’t happen.
I realize, of course, that nerve endings can become desensitized. But lack of sensation is not protection from damage.
I provided examples of multiple locations that we all have on our bodies. Those locations will callus.
Calluses are formed from repeated mild injury to the tissue. Braces will cause calluses in the mouth. Chewing tobacco will cause calluses in the mouth. Heat and friction will cause calluses on hands and feet. Our bodies remaining consistent is not making a claim that needs a site.
You made the claim that our brain will become tolerant to a chemical (Caffeine) but our body will not alter itself in response damage (burning). We know the body will alter itself in response to repeated mild injury. You made this claim while quoting Bootb.
My sister can tolerate much hotter water on her hands, when it feels scalding to me. But she can’t tolerate very hot liquids. She drinks her coffee tepid, which makes me want to hurl.
Decades ago, I was working as an adult advisor to a youth group, and we were going on an outing. We were meeting early in the morning in the parking lot at work (who sponsored the youth group). To save time, I didn’t make coffee at home, but there was a McDonalds directly facing the offramp when I got off the freeway to go to work. It was very easy to drive straight ahead into the McD’s drive-through lane, circle the building, and come out with an easy right turn onto the road.
I’m not in the habit of going to McD’s (hate their food), so I was unaware of how hot their coffee was. I didn’t even try to drink it, though, until I got to work, because it was just two blocks away. Once there, I took the lid off the cup, and let it sit for about 30 seconds. I then tried to take a sip, and it burned my mouth. I couldn’t even sip it for about 15 mins it was that hot.