recently, my friend and i were riding motorbikes in thailand. i had an accident, which i blame on the fact that it was my first time on a motorbike and that the road was not paved. aside from bruises, i also received a skinned forearm, which was bleeding and in need of some attention. we were a ways from the nearest city and running water. in our bags, we had bottled water and a can of coke. my question is: which would have been better to clean my wound, the water or the coke? i chose water, but i was curious if the acid content in the coke would have done a better job of killing germs.
-alan from canada
Given the choice between bottled water and coke, I would definitely choose the water. The coke contains a lot of sugar, which might encourage bacterial growth, and it would leave the area sticky, which would lead to it getting dirty again quicker.
On the other hand, if the choice was between a soft drink and water you found in a puddle beside the road, I would in that case choose the pop. You don’t know what sort of nastiness might be in a puddle, but the pop you know at least starts off as sterile.
And finally, if you had some sort of strong alcoholic beverage with you (of course you probably shouldn’t, while biking, but…), I would choose that even over the bottled water. It not only starts off clean like the other bottled beverages, the alcohol will also help to kill other germs. I don’t know how strong a drink would have to be before the benefit of the alcohol outweighed the drawback of the sugar, but I suspect that it would have to be strong wine at least (the fermentation process stops at about that level because the yeasts kill themselves off with the alcohol). I would imagine that anything distilled would be good.