Is cold water bad for you? The facts behind 5 water myths
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We know the importance of staying hydrated, especially in hot weather. But even for something as simple as a drink of water, conflicting advice and urban myths abound.
Is cold water really bad for your health? What about hot water from the tap? And what is “raw water”? Let’s dive in and find out.
Myth 1: Cold water is bad for you
Some recent TikToks have suggested cold water causes health problems by somehow “contracting blood vessels” and “restricting digestion”. There is little evidence for this.
While a 2001 study found 51 out of 669 women tested (7.6%) got a headache after drinking cold water, most of them already suffered from migraines and the work hasn’t been repeated since.
Cold drinks were shown to cause discomfort in people with achalasia (a rare swallowing disorder) in 2012 but the study only had 12 participants.
For most people, the temperature you drink your water is down to personal preference and circumstances. Cold water after exercise in summer or hot water to relax in winter won’t make any difference to your overall health.
Myth 2: You shouldn’t drink hot tap water
This belief has a grain of scientific truth behind it. Hot water is generally a better solvent than cold water, so may dissolve metals and minerals from pipes better. Hot water is also often stored in tanks and may be heated and cooled many times. Bacteria and other disease-causing microorganisms tend to grow better in warm water and can build up over time.
It’s better to fill your cup from the cold tap and get hot water for drinks from the kettle.
Myth 3: Bottled water is better
While bottled water might be safer in certain parts of the world due to pollution of source water, there is no real advantage to drinking bottled water in Australia and similar countries.
According to University of Queensland researchers, bottled water is not safer than tap water. It may even be tap water. Most people can’t tell the difference either. Bottled water usually costs (substantially) more than turning on the tap and is worse for the environment.
What about lead in tap water? This problem hit the headlines after a public health emergency in Flint, Michigan, in the United States. But Flint used lead pipes with a corrosion inhibitor (in this case orthophosphate) to keep lead from dissolving. Then the city switched water sources to one without a corrosion inhibitor. Lead levels rose and a public emergency was declared.
Fortunately, lead pipes haven’t been used in Australia since the 1930s. While lead might be present in some old plumbing products, it is unlikely to cause problems.
Myth 4: Raw water is naturally healthier
Some people bypass bottled and tap water, going straight to the source.
The “raw water” trend emerged a few years ago, encouraging people to drink from rivers, streams and lakes. There is even a website to help you find a local source.
Supporters say our ancestors drank spring water, so we should, too. However, our ancestors also often died from dysentery and cholera and their life expectancy was low.
While it is true even highly treated drinking water can contain low levels of things like microplastics, unless you live somewhere very remote, the risks of drinking untreated water are far higher as it is more likely to contain pollutants from the surrounding area.
Myth 5: It’s OK to drink directly from hoses
Tempting as it may be, it’s probably best not to drink from the hose when watering the plants. Water might have sat in there, in the warm sun for weeks or more potentially leading to bacterial buildup.
Similarly, while drinking water fountains are generally perfectly safe to use, they can contain a variety of bacteria. It’s useful (though not essential) to run them for a few seconds before you start to drink so as to get fresh water through the system rather than what might have been sat there for a while.
We are fortunate to be able to take safe drinking water for granted. Billions of people around the world are not so lucky.
So whether you like it hot or cold, or somewhere in between, feel free to enjoy a glass of water this summer.
Just don’t drink it from the hose.
Oliver A.H. Jones, Professor of chemistry, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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What Flexible Dieting Really Means
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When Flexibility Is The Dish Of The Day
This is Alan Aragon. Notwithstanding not being a “Dr. Alan Aragon”, he’s a research scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed nutrition science papers to his name, as well as being a personal trainer and fitness educator. Most importantly, he’s an ardent champion of making people’s pursuit of health and fitness more evidence-based.
We’ll be sharing some insights from a book of his that we haven’t reviewed yet, but we will link it at the bottom of today’s article in any case.
What does he want us to know?
First, get out of the 80s and into the 90s
In the world of popular dieting, the 80s were all about calorie-counting and low-fat diets. They did not particularly help.
In the 90s, it was discovered that not only was low-fat not the way to go, but also, regardless of the diet in question, rigid dieting leads to “disinhibition”, that is to say, there comes a point (usually not far into a diet) whereby one breaks the diet, at which point, the floodgates open and the dieter binges unhealthily.
Aragon would like to bring our attention to a number of studies that found this in various ways over the course of the 90s measuring various different metrics including rigid vs flexible dieting’s impacts on BMI, weight gain, weight loss, lean muscle mass changes, binge-eating, anxiety, depression, and so forth), but we only have so much room here, so here’s a 1999 study that’s pretty much the culmination of those:
Flexible vs. Rigid Dieting Strategies: Relationship with Adverse Behavioral Outcomes
So in short: trying to be very puritan about any aspect of dieting will not only not work, it will backfire.
Next, get out of the 90s into the 00s
…which is not only fun if you read “00s” out loud as “naughties”, but also actually appropriate in this case, because it is indeed important to be comfortable being a little bit naughty:
In 2000, Dr. Marika Tiggemann found that dichotomous perceptions of food (e.g. good/bad, clean/dirty, etc) were implicated as a dysfunctional cognitive style, and predicted not only eating disorders and mood disorders, but also adverse physical health outcomes:
Dieting and Cognitive Style: The Role of Current and Past Dieting Behaviour and Cognitions
This was rendered clearer, in terms of physical health outcomes, by Dr. Susan Byrne & Dr. Emma Dove, in 2009:
❝Weight loss was negatively associated with pre-treatment depression and frequency of treatment attendance, but not with dichotomous thinking. Females who regard their weight as unacceptably high and who think dichotomously may experience high levels of depression irrespective of their actual weight, while depression may be proportionate to the degree of obesity among those who do not think dichotomously❞
Aragon’s advice based on all this: while yes, some foods are better than others, it’s more useful to see foods as being part of a spectrum, rather than being absolutist or “black and white” about it.
Next: hit those perfect 10s… Imperfectly
The next decade expanded on this research, as science is wont to do, and for this one, Aragon shines a spotlight on Dr. Alice Berg’s 2018 study with obese women averaging 69 years of age, in which…
In other words (and in fact, to borrow Dr. Berg’s words from that paper),
❝encouraging a flexible approach to eating behavior and discouraging rigid adherence to a diet may lead to better intentional weight loss for overweight and obese older women❞
You may be wondering: what did this add to the studies from the 90s?
And the key here is: rather than being observational, this was interventional. In other words, rather than simply observing what happened to people who thought one way or another, this study took people who had a rigid, dichotomous approach to food, and gave them a 6-month behavioral intervention (in other words, support encouraging them to be more flexible and open in their approach to food), and found that this indeed improved matters for them.
Which means, it’s not a matter of fate or predisposition, as it could have been back in the 90s, per “some people are just like that; who’s to say which factor causes which”. Instead, now we know that this is an approach that can be adopted, and it can be expected to work.
Beyond weight loss
Now, so far we’ve talked mostly about weight loss, and only touched on other health outcomes. This is because:
- weight loss a very common goal for many
- it’s easy to measure so there’s a lot of science for it
Incidentally, if it’s a goal of yours, here’s what 10almonds had to say about that, along with two follow-up articles for other related goals:
Spoiler: we agree with Aragon, and recommend a relaxed and flexible approach to all three of these things
Aragon’s evidence-based approach to nutrition has found that this holds true for other aspects of healthy eating, too. For example…
To count or not to count?
It’s hard to do evidence-based anything without counting, and so Aragon talks a lot about this. Indeed, he does a lot of counting in scientific papers of his own, such as:
and
The effect of protein timing on muscle strength and hypertrophy: a meta-analysis
…as well as non-protein-related but diet-related topics such as:
But! For the at-home health enthusiast, Aragon recommends that the answer to the question “to count or not to count?” is “both”:
- Start off by indeed counting and tracking everything that is important to you (per whatever your current personal health intervention is, so it might be about calories, or grams of protein, or grams of carbs, or a certain fat balance, or something else entirely)
- Switch to a more relaxed counting approach once you get used to the above. By now you probably know the macros for a lot of your common meals, snacks, etc, and can tally them in your head without worrying about weighing portions and knowing the exact figures.
- Alternatively, count moderately standardized portions of relevant foods, such as “three servings of beans or legumes per day” or “no more than one portion of refined carbohydrates per day”
- Eventually, let habit take the wheel. Assuming you have established good dietary habits, this will now do you just fine.
This latter is the point whereby the advice (that Aragon also champions) of “allow yourself an unhealthy indulgence of 10–20% of your daily food”, as a budget of “discretionary calories”, eventually becomes redundant—because chances are, you’re no longer craving that donut, and at a certain point, eating foods far outside the range of healthiness you usually eat is not even something that you would feel inclined to do if offered.
But until that kicks in, allow yourself that budget of whatever unhealthy thing you enjoy, and (this next part is important…) do enjoy it.
Because it is no good whatsoever eating that cream-filled chocolate croissant and then feeling guilty about it; that’s the dichotomous thinking we had back in the 80s. Decide in advance you’re going to eat and enjoy it, then eat and enjoy it, then look back on it with a sense of “that was enjoyable” and move on.
The flipside of this is that the importance of allowing oneself a “little treat” is that doing so actively helps ensure that the “little treat” remains “little”. Without giving oneself permission, then suddenly, “well, since I broke my diet, I might as well throw the whole thing out the window and try again on Monday”.
On enjoying food fully, by the way:
Mindful Eating: How To Get More Nutrition Out Of The Same Food
Want to know more from Alan Aragon?
Today we’ve been working heavily from this book of his; we haven’t reviewed it yet, but we do recommend checking it out:
Enjoy!
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Stretching & Mobility – by James Atkinson
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“I will stretch for just 10 minutes per day”, we think, and do our best. Then there are a plethora of videos saying “Stretching mistakes that you are making!” and it turns out we haven’t been doing them in a way that actually helps.
This book fixes that. Unlike some books of the genre, it’s not full of jargon and you won’t need an anatomy and physiology degree to understand it. It is, however, dense in terms of the information it gives—it’s not padded out at all; it contains a lot of value.
The stretches are all well-explained and well-illustrated; the cover art will give you an idea of the anatomical illustration style contained with in.
Atkinson also gives workout plans, so that we know we’re not over- or under-training or trying to do too much or missing important things out.
Bottom line: if you’re looking to start a New Year routine to develop better suppleness, this book is a great primer for that.
Click here to check out Stretching and Mobility, and improve yours!
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Lyme Disease At-A-Glance
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Good info as always…was wondering if you have any recommendations for fighting Lyme disease naturally along wDr advice? Dr’s aren’t real keen on alternatives so always interested. Thanks❞
That depends on whether we’re looking at prevention or cure!
Prevention:
- Try not to get bitten by Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Boots and long socks are your friends. As are long-gauntletted gloves for gardening.
- If you are in a high-risk area and/or engage in high-risk activities, check your body daily.
- This is because it usually takes 36–48 hours of being attached for a tick to cause an infection
- Obviously best if you can get a partner or close friend to help you with this, unless you have mastered some advanced pretzel positions of yoga.
- Contrary to many folk remedies, the safest way to remove a tick is with tweezers (carefully!).
- If you find and remove a tick, or otherwise suspect you have developed symptoms, go to your doctor immediately (not next week; today; time really counts for this).
Cure:
- No. Sorry. Regretfully, antibiotics are the only known effective treatment.
However! As with almost any kind of recovery, getting good rest, including good quality sleep, will hasten things. Also sensible is reducing stress if possible, and anything that could worsen inflammation.
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Osteoarthritis Of The Knee
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Very informative thank you. And made me think. I am a 72 yr old whitewoman, have never used ( or even been offered) HRT since menopause ~15 yrs ago. Now I’m wondering if it would have delayed the onset of osteoarthritis ( knee) and give me more energy in general. And is it wise to start taking hrt after being without those hormones for so long?❞
(this was in response to our article about menopausal HRT)
Thanks for writing! To answer your first question, obviously we can never know for sure now, but it certainly is possible, per for example a large-ish (n=1003) study of women aged 45–64, in which:
- Those with HRT were significantly less likely to have knee arthritis than those without
- However, to enjoy this benefit depended on continued use (those who used it for a bit and then stopped did not enjoy the same results)
- While it made a big difference to knee arthritis, it made only a small (but still beneficial) difference to wrist/hand arthritis.
We could hypothesize that this is because the mechanism of action is more about strengthening the bones (proofing against osteoporosis is one of the main reasons many people take HRT) and cartilage than it is against inflammation directly.
Since the knee is load-bearing and the hand/wrist joints usually are not, this would mean the HRT strengthening the bones makes a big difference to the “wear and tear” aspect of potential osteoarthritis of the knee, but not the same level of benefit for the hand/wrist, which is less about wear and tear and more about inflammatory factors. But that latter, about it being load-bearing, is just this writer’s hypothesis as to why the big difference.
The researchers do mention:
❝In OA the mechanisms by which HRT might act are highly speculative, but could entail changes in cartilage repair or bone turnover, perhaps with cytokines such as interleukin 6, for example.❞
What is clear though, is that it does indeed appear to have a protective effect against osteoarthritis of the knee.
With regard to the timing, the researchers do note:
❝Why as little as three years of HRT should have a demonstrable effect is unclear. Given the difficulty in ascertaining when the disease starts, it is hard to be sure of the importance of the timing of HRT, and whether early or subclinical disease was present.
These results taken together suggest that HRT has a metabolic action that is only effective if given continuously, perhaps by preventing disease initiation; once HRT is stopped there might be a ‘rebound’ effect, explaining the rapid return to normal risk❞
~ Ibid.
You can read the study here:
On whether it is worth it now…
Again, do speak with an endocrinologist because your situation may vary, but:
- hormones are simply messengers, and your body categorically will respond to those messages regardless of age, or time elapsed without having received such a message. Whether it will repair all damage done is another matter entirely, but it would take a biological miracle for it to have no effect at all.
- anecdotally, many women do enjoy life-changing benefits upon starting HRT at your age and older!
(We don’t like to rely on “anecdotally”, but we couldn’t find studies isolating according to “length of time since menopause”—we’ll keep an eye out and if we find something in the future, we’ll mention it!)
Meanwhile, take care!
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Is Dairy Scary?
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Is Dairy Scary?
Milk and milk products are popularly enjoyed as a good source of calcium and vitamin D.
In contrast, critics of dairy products (for medical reasons, rather than ethical, which is another matter entirely and beyond the scope of this article) point to risks of cancer, heart disease, and—counterintuitively—osteoporosis. We’ll focus more on the former, but touch on the latter two before closing.
Dairy & Cancer
Evidence is highly conflicting. There are so many studies with so many different results. This is partially explicable by noting that not only is cancer a many-headed beast that comes in more than a hundred different forms and all or any of them may be affected one way or another by a given dietary element, but also… Not all milk is created equal, either!
Joanna Lampe, of the Public Health Sciences division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, writes:
❝Dairy products are a complex group of foods and composition varies by region, which makes evaluation of their association with disease risk difficult. For most cancers, associations between cancer risk and intake of milk and dairy products have been examined only in a small number of cohort studies, and data are inconsistent or lacking❞
In her systematic review of studies, she noted, for example, that:
- Milk and dairy products contain micronutrients and several bioactive constituents that may influence cancer risk and progression
- There’s probable association between milk intake and lower risk of colorectal cancer
- There’s a probable association between diets high in calcium and increased risk of prostate cancer
- Some studies show an inverse association between intake of cultured dairy products and bladder cancer (i.e., if you eat yogurt you’re less likely to get bladder cancer)
Since that systemic review was undertaken, more research has been conducted, and the results are… Not conclusive, but converging towards a conclusion:
- Dairy products can increase or decrease cancer risk
- The increase in cancer risk seems strongest when milk is consumed in quantities that result in too much calcium. When it comes to calcium, you can absolutely have too much of a good thing—just ask your arteries!
- The decrease in cancer seems to be mostly, if not exclusively, from fermented dairy products. This usually means yogurts. The benefit here is not from the milk itself, but rather from the gut-friendly bacteria.
You may be wondering: “Hardened arteries, gut microbiome health? I thought we were talking about cancer?” and yes we are. No part of your health is an island unrelated to other parts of your health. One thing can lead to another. Sometimes we know how and why, sometimes we don’t, but it’s best to not ignore the data.
The bottom line on dairy products and cancer is:
- Consuming dairy products in general is probably fine
- Yogurt, specifically, is probably beneficial
Dairy and Heart Disease
The reason for the concern is clear enough: it’s largely assumed to be a matter of saturated fat intake.
The best combination of “large” and “recent” that we found was a three-cohort longitudinal study in 2019, which pretty much confirms what was found in smaller or less recent studies:
- There is some evidence to suggest that consumption of dairy can increase all-cause mortality in general, and death from (cancer and) cardiovascular disease in particular
- The evidence is not, however, overwhelming. It is marginal.
Dairy and Osteoporosis
Does dairy cause osteoporosis? Research here tends to fall into one of two categories when it comes to conclusions, so we’ll give an example of each:
- “Results are conflicting, saying yes/no/maybe, and basically we just don’t know”
- “Results are conflicting, but look: cross-sectional and case-control studies say yes; cohort studies say maybe or no; we prefer the cohort studies”
See them for yourself:
- Osteoporosis: Is milk a kindness or a curse?
- Consumption of milk and dairy products and risk of osteoporosis and hip fracture
Conclusion: really, the jury is very much still out on this one
Summary:
- Moderate consumption of dairy products is almost certainly fine
- More specifically: it probably has some (small) pros and some (small) cons
- Yogurt is almost certainly healthier than other dairy products, and is almost universally considered a healthy food (assuming not being full of added sugar etc, of course)
- If you’re going to have non-dairy alternatives to milk, choose wisely!
That’s all we have time for today, but perhaps in a future edition we’ll do a run-down of the pros and cons of various dairy alternatives!
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Bird flu has been detected in a pig in the US. Why does that matter?
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The United States Department of Agriculture last week reported that a pig on a backyard farm in Oregon was infected with bird flu.
As the bird flu situation has evolved, we’ve heard about the A/H5N1 strain of the virus infecting a range of animals, including a variety of birds, wild animals and dairy cattle.
Fortunately, we haven’t seen any sustained spread between humans at this stage. But the detection of the virus in a pig marks a worrying development in the trajectory of this virus.
David MG/Shutterstock How did we get here?
The most concerning type of bird flu currently circulating is clade 2.3.4.4b of A/H5N1, a strain of influenza A.
Since 2020, A/H5N1 2.3.4.4b has spread to a vast range of birds, wild animals and farm animals that have never been infected with bird flu before.
While Europe is a hotspot for A/H5N1, attention is currently focused on the US. Dairy cattle were infected for the first time in 2024, with more than 400 herds affected across at least 14 US states.
Bird flu has enormous impacts on farming and commercial food production, because infected poultry flocks have to be culled, and infected cows can result in contaminated diary products. That said, pasteurisation should make milk safe to drink.
While farmers have suffered major losses due to H5N1 bird flu, it also has the potential to mutate to cause a human pandemic.
Birds and humans have different types of receptors in their respiratory tract that flu viruses attach to, like a lock (receptors) and key (virus). The attachment of the virus allows it to invade a cell and the body and cause illness. Avian flu viruses are adapted to birds, and spread easily among birds, but not in humans.
So far, human cases have mainly occurred in people who have been in close contact with infected farm animals or birds. In the US, most have been farm workers.
The concern is that the virus will mutate and adapt to humans. One of the key steps for this to happen would be a shift in the virus’ affinity from the bird receptors to those found in the human respiratory tract. In other words, if the virus’ “key” mutated to better fit with the human “lock”.
A recent study of a sample of A/H5N1 2.3.4.4b from an infected human had worrying findings, identifying mutations in the virus with the potential to increase transmission between human hosts.
Why are pigs a problem?
A human pandemic strain of influenza can arise in several ways. One involves close contact between humans and animals infected with their own specific flu viruses, creating opportunities for genetic mixing between avian and human viruses.
Pigs are the ideal genetic mixing vessel to generate a human pandemic influenza strain, because they have receptors in their respiratory tracts which both avian and human flu viruses can bind to.
This means pigs can be infected with a bird flu virus and a human flu virus at the same time. These viruses can exchange genetic material to mutate and become easily transmissible in humans.
The Conversation, CC BY-SA Interestingly, in the past pigs were less susceptible to A/H5N1 viruses. However, the virus has recently mutated to infect pigs more readily.
In the recent case in Oregon, A/H5N1 was detected in a pig on a non-commercial farm after an outbreak occurred among the poultry housed on the same farm. This strain of A/H5N1 was from wild birds, not the one that is widespread in US dairy cows.
The infection of a pig is a warning. If the virus enters commercial piggeries, it would create a far greater level of risk of a pandemic, especially as the US goes into winter, when human seasonal flu starts to rise.
How can we mitigate the risk?
Surveillance is key to early detection of a possible pandemic. This includes comprehensive testing and reporting of infections in birds and animals, alongside financial compensation and support measures for farmers to encourage timely reporting.
Strengthening global influenza surveillance is crucial, as unusual spikes in pneumonia and severe respiratory illnesses could signal a human pandemic. Our EPIWATCH system looks for early warnings of such activity, which can speed up vaccine development.
If a cluster of human cases occurs, and influenza A is detected, further testing (called subtyping) is essential to ascertain whether it’s a seasonal strain, an avian strain from a spillover event, or a novel pandemic strain.
Early identification can prevent a pandemic. Any delay in identifying an emerging pandemic strain enables the virus to spread widely across international borders.
Australia’s first human case of A/H5N1 occurred in a child who acquired the infection while travelling in India, and was hospitalised with illness in March 2024. At the time, testing revealed Influenza A (which could be seasonal flu or avian flu), but subtyping to identify A/H5N1 was delayed.
This kind of delay can be costly if a human-transmissible A/H5N1 arises and is assumed to be seasonal flu because the test is positive for influenza A. Only about 5% of tests positive for influenza A are subtyped further in Australia and most countries.
In light of the current situation, there should be a low threshold for subtyping influenza A strains in humans. Rapid tests which can distinguish between seasonal and H5 influenza A are emerging, and should form part of governments’ pandemic preparedness.
A higher risk than ever before
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the current risk posed by H5N1 to the general public remains low.
But with H5N1 now able to infect pigs, and showing worrying mutations for human adaptation, the level of risk has increased. Given the virus is so widespread in animals and birds, the statistical probability of a pandemic arising is higher than ever before.
The good news is, we are better prepared for an influenza pandemic than other pandemics, because vaccines can be made in the same way as seasonal flu vaccines. As soon as the genome of a pandemic influenza virus is known, the vaccines can be updated to match it.
Partially matched vaccines are already available, and some countries such as Finland are vaccinating high-risk farm workers.
C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC L3 Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney and Haley Stone, Research Associate, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute & CRUISE lab, Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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