Why do westerners often drink cold water directly?

In fact, this problem has a long history, both for historical reasons and closely related to eating habits and living habits.

Four major factors

The body needs to "put out the fire"

The western diet is mainly beef and mutton, plus bacon, cheese and butter. Drinking milk every day produces a lot of calories. Therefore, westerners consume more meat, protein and calories every day than people in China.

From the perspective of Chinese medicine, such a way of eating will lead to "getting angry". When the fire is booming, the sun is booming; Excessive yang needs yin water to balance, and ice water is water with strong yin, which can quickly restore the balance of the body. Simply put, foreigners like to drink cold water because they usually eat greasy food and need to "put out the fire". Similarly, this is why many people eat a lot of spicy and exciting things, as long as a glass of cold water will feel very cool.

Pay attention to water quality and develop direct drinking water

Parents often teach us that drinking raw water is easy to have diarrhea, but westerners always drink raw water. Why are they okay? This involves water quality. The most basic premise for them to drink ice water is the appearance of direct drinking water, but China has not yet developed a perfect urban direct drinking water system.

In this respect, they didn't pay attention to it from the beginning. Historically, the pollution of water sources and the prevalence of epidemics made them pay the price of blood. In medieval Europe, the so-called moat was actually an annular cesspit. When it fell into the moat, it was probably not drowned but smoked to death. Subsequently, the industrial revolution intensified the gathering of urban population, and at the same time, the prosperity of maritime trade also introduced diseases caused by water sources such as cholera from the Indian River into Europe, which led to many large-scale cholera epidemics in European history, with many deaths and very profound lessons.

Therefore, the west attaches great importance to the water source problem. Until today, the water quality standards in the west are the most stringent in the world. On the other hand, our Chinese civilization has the habit of boiling water from a very early time. We were healthier earlier, but the water quality of the current water supply system really lags behind that of the west.

Our ancestors didn't invent the device for boiling water.

Perhaps some people will continue to ask why westerners at that time did not boil water, but drank unclean raw water. Actually, I don't want to, but I can't. Chen Mingyuan, a scholar who has been engaged in the comparative study of Chinese and Western cultures for more than 30 years, once told this story. Since the Neolithic Age entered the agricultural society, pottery has been widely used in China and the West, but there are still differences. The ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek pottery exhibited in the world's major museums were all used to hold articles, and no water boilers similar to those in ancient China were found. In other words, the boiler is a unique invention of China ancestors in the pottery period.

Therefore, the west has never had the habit of boiling water, which also contributed to their habit of drinking cold water since childhood. However, people in China have always had the habit of boiling water, and it has been said since ancient times that they don't drink raw water. The differences in history and culture have created the differences in drinking habits between the East and the West today.