The conventional wisdom about drinking water must be: drinking hot water nourishes the stomach. Drinking cold water hurts your stomach. Eating is also, it's not good to eat cold things, it's healthy to eat while it's hot. If you have a child with a cold, you can't drink cold water, and eating popsicles is even more of a death wish.

But Europe and the United States, Japan and Korea are only drinking ice water, hot water is only used to make tea and coffee. Because, in ancient times, poor sanitation, drinking water are directly from the wells of the river. Eat, drink and shit in the river, in fact, such water is very unhygienic.

The Journey to the West, the eight rings see drinking water immediately rushed up to drink a big full, and then loaded back to the master with water belt to drink. Many modern anti-Japanese drama also has a lot of such scenes, farmers picked a load of water, go home to fill the tank, thirsty, take the dipper directly scoop to drink. In those days, conditions were limited, and only large families or when making tea could have hot water to drink. Boiling water, as high-temperature sterilized water, hygienic conditions greatly improved. Later, although there are conditions to drink hot water, but the general public for the "disinfection" "bacteria" these concepts are not, think boiled water and cold water is almost the same.

After the liberation, the state realized this problem and came up with a simple and brutal but very effective solution. It is to promote patriotic hygiene campaign, one of the very important one is "do not drink raw water and boiled water". "Drinking hot water" this propaganda although rough, but the effect is very good, greatly improved the health of the Chinese people, eliminating the spread of many digestive diseases, so that China's per capita life expectancy has increased dramatically.

Chinese people have been drinking cold water for thousands of years, and have only been drinking hot water for a few decades. Drinking hot water this is not a thousand-year-old tradition, but a health concept that has been vigorously promoted since the founding of the country. Therefore, the stomach does not nourish the stomach, pure nonsense.

And as for water hygiene, Europeans slowly began to realize the problem. Polluted water sources allowed infectious diseases to run rampant in medieval Europe. People knew that river water was unsanitary, and they had no other choice. They chose to drink wine because they thought it was cleaner. This choice did make sense, and wine fermented from grain was indeed more sanitary than river water. The nobles brought water with them in wine almost daily, creating a group of alcoholics.

But Europeans and Americans never had a patriotic hygiene campaign like ours, nor did they popularize the drinking of hot water, and so to this day maintain the habit of drinking cool or ice water. A glass of warm, lukewarm water is one of the most difficult foods to swallow by Europeans and Americans.