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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Arthritis-Proof Your Life – by Dr. Michelle Cook
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First, a note about that title of doctor. Sometimes we will mention “you may be wondering, is that an MD or a PhD? It’s both!” because there is some physician-scientist with an MD plus a PhD in, say, neurology or biochemistry of some kind or be it what it may. In this case, the author has two claims to doctorship: a PhD in traditional natural medicine, and a “DNP”, the “doctor of naturopathic medicine” qualification which is usually a four-year degree, and/but is not generally considered a medical degree, or equivalent, or similar.
This may explain some medical errors in the book, such as the claims that “Fibromyalgia is a type of arthritis” (it isn’t, and in fact by definition will only be diagnosed as such if other disorders such as arthritis have been ruled out as the cause of the symptoms) and “Tylenol is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug” (it isn’t, it’s an antipyretic analgesic, which despite the similar uses and shared reference to the imagery of fire, is a completely different class of drugs and works differently to NSAIDs).
However, it’s not all bad. One thing this book has as a strength is that it offers a lot of things to try, if you’ve already tried everything else, ranging from dietary tweaks to try outside of the usual anti-inflammatory recommendations (but yes, those too), complementary medicine methods such as acupressure and aromatherapy, and the two-way relationship between arthritis and mental health.
The style is bold and lively, and proceeds without citations to interrupt one’s flow, though there is a bibliography at the back, mostly for references to herbalism.
Bottom line: if you have arthritis, have tried many things, and are looking for more things to try, this book may have options you wouldn’t have thought of!
Click here to check out Arthritis-Proof Your Life, and get creative with your problem-solving!
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Stress Resets – by Dr. Jennifer Taitz
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You may be thinking: “that’s a bold claim in the subtitle; does the book deliver?”
And yes, yes it does.
The “resets” themselves are divided into categories:
- Mind resets, which are mostly CBT,
- Body resets, which include assorted somatic therapies such as vagus nerve resets, the judicious use of ice-water, what 1-minute sprints of exercise can do for your mental state, and why not to use the wrong somatic therapy for the wrong situation!
- Behavior resets, which are more about the big picture, and not falling into common traps.
What common traps, you ask? This is about how we often have maladaptive responses to stress, e.g. we’re short of money so we overspend, we have an important deadline so we over-research and procrastinate, we’re anxious so we hyperfixate on the problem, we’re grieving so we look to substances to try to cope, we’re exhausted so we stay up late to try to claw back some lost time. Things where our attempt to cope actually makes things worse for us.
Instead, Dr. Taitz advises us of how to get ourselves from “knowing we shouldn’t do that” to actually not doing that, and how to respond more healthily to stress, how to turn general stress into eustress, or as she puts it, how to “turn your knots into bows”.
The style is… “Academic light”, perhaps we could say. It’s a step above pop-science, but a step below pure academic literature, which does make it a very pleasant read as well as informative. There are often footnotes at the bottom of each page to bridge any knowledge-gap, and for those who want to know the evidence of these evidence-based approaches, she does provide 35 pages of hard science sources to back up her claims.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn how better to manage stress from an evidence-based perspective that’s not just “do minfdulness meditation”, then this book gives a lot of ways.
Click here to check out Stress Resets, and indeed soothe your body and mind in minutes!
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Breast cancer screening is ripe for change. We need to assess a woman’s risk – not just her age
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Australia’s BreastScreen program offers women regular mammograms (breast X-rays) based on their age. And this screening for breast cancer saves lives.
But much has changed since the program was introduced in the early 90s. Technology has developed, as has our knowledge of which groups of women might be at higher risk of breast cancer. So how we screen women for breast cancer needs to adapt.
In a recent paper, we’ve proposed a fundamental shift away from an age-based approach to a screening program that takes into account women’s risk of breast cancer.
We argue we could save more lives if screening tests and schedules were personalised based on someone’s risk.
We don’t yet know exactly how this might work in practice. We need to consult with all parties involved, including health professionals, government and women, and we need to begin Australian trials.
But here’s why we need to rethink how we screen for breast cancer in Australia.
Pablo Heimplatz/Unsplash Why does breast screening need to change?
Australia’s BreastScreen program was introduced in 1991 and offers women regular mammograms based on their age. Women aged 50–74 are targeted, but screening is available from the age of 40.
The program is key to Australia’s efforts to reduce the burden of breast cancer, providing more than a million screens each year.
Women who attend BreastScreen reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 49% on average.
Breast screening saves lives because it makes a big difference to find breast cancers early, before they spread to other parts of the body.
Despite this, around 75,000 Australian women are expected to die from breast cancer over the next 20 years if we continue with current approaches to breast cancer screening and management.
Who’s at high risk, and how best to target them?
International evidence confirms it is possible to identify groups of women at higher risk of breast cancer. These include:
- women with denser breasts (where there’s more glandular and fibrous tissue than fatty tissue in the breasts) are more likely to develop breast cancer, and their cancers are harder to find on standard mammograms
- women whose mother, sisters, grandmother or aunts have had breast or ovarian cancer, especially if there are multiple relatives and the cancers occurred at young ages
- women who have been found to carry genetic mutations that lead to a higher risk of breast cancer (including women with multiple moderate risk mutations, as indicated by what’s known as a polygenic risk score).
For some higher-risk women, could MRI be an option? VesnaArt/Shutterstock Women in these and other high-risk groups might warrant a different form of screening. This could include screening from a younger age, screening more frequently, and offering more sensitive tests such as digital breast tomosynthesis (a 3D version of mammography), MRI or contrast-enhanced mammography (a type of mammography that uses a dye to highlight cancerous lesions).
But we don’t yet know:
- how to best identify women at higher risk
- which screening tests should be offered, how often and to whom
- how to staff and run a risk-based screening program
- how to deliver this in a cost-effective and equitable way.
The road ahead
This is what we have been working on, for Cancer Council Australia, as part of the ROSA Breast project.
This federally funded project has estimated and compared the expected outcomes and costs for a range of screening scenarios.
For each scenario we estimated the benefits (saving lives or less intense treatment) and harms (overdiagnosis and rates of investigations in women recalled for further investigation after a screening test who are found to not have breast cancer).
Of 160 potential screening scenarios we modelled, we shortlisted 19 which produced the best outcomes for women and were the most cost effective. The shortlisted scenarios tended to involve either targeted screening technologies for higher-risk women or screening technologies other than mammography for all screened women.
For example, in our estimates, making no change to the target age range or screening intervals but offering a more sensitive screening test to the 20% of women deemed to be at highest risk would save 113 lives over ten years.
Alternatively, commencing targeted screening from age 40 and offering a more sensitive screening test annually to the 20% of women at highest risk, and three-yearly screening (of the current kind) to the 30% of women at lowest risk, would save 849 lives over ten years.
However, less frequent screening of the lower risk group was expected to lead to small increases in breast cancer deaths in that group.
How do we best assess women for their risk of breast cancer? At this stage, there’s no one answer. Tint Media/Shutterstock We also outlined 25 recommendations to put into action, and set out a five-year roadmap of how to get there. This includes:
- a large scale trial to find out what is feasible, effective and affordable in Australia
- making sure women at higher risk in different parts of Australia are offered suitable options regardless of where they live and who they see
- better data collection and reporting to support risk-based screening
- testing how we assess women for their risk of breast cancer, including whether these assessments work as intended and make sense to women from a range of backgrounds
- clinical studies of screening technologies to determine the best delivery models and associated costs
- ongoing engagement with groups including women, health professionals and government.
Breast cancer screening review out soon
Federal health minister Mark Butler said a review of the BreastScreen program would consider our recommendations. The results of this review are expected soon.
We’re not alone in calling for a move towards risk-based breast cancer screening. This is backed by national and international submissions to government, policy briefing documents and the Breast Cancer Network Australia.
We’ve provided an evidence-based roadmap towards better screening for breast cancer. Now is the time to commit to this journey.
We acknowledge Louiza Velentzis from the Daffodil Centre, and Paul Grogan and Deborah Bateson from the University of Sydney, who co-authored the paper mentioned in this article.
Carolyn Nickson, Adjunct Associate Professor, The Daffodil Centre, a joint venture between the University of Sydney and Cancer Council NSW, and Associate Professor, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, University of Sydney; Bruce Mann, Professor of Surgery, Specialist Breast Surgeon, The University of Melbourne, and Karen Canfell, Professor & NHMRC Leadership Fellow, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How Internal Organs Can Be Affected By Spicy Foods (Doctor Explains)
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Capsaicin has an array of health-giving properties in moderation, but consumed in immoderation and/or without building up tolerance first, can cause problems—serious health issues such as heart attacks, brain spasms, torn esophagus, and even death can occur.
Heating up
Capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their “heat”, is a chemical irritant and neurotoxin that activates pain receptors (TRPV1) tricking the brain into sensing heat, leading to a burning sensation, sweating, and flushing. The pain signal can also trigger the fight-or-flight response, causing a surge of adrenaline. Endorphins are eventually released, creating a pain-relief effect similar to a runner’s high, and ultimately it reduces systemic inflammation, boosts the metabolism, and increases healthy longevity.
However, in cases of extreme consumption and/or lack of preparation, woe can befall, for example:
- A man ruptured his esophagus after vomiting from eating a ghost pepper.
- A participant experienced severe brain blood vessel constriction (reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome) after eating a Carolina reaper.
- A 25-year-old suffered permanent heart damage from cayenne pepper pills due to restricted blood flow.
- A teenager died after the “one chip challenge,” although the cause of death was undetermined.
So, what does moderation and preparation look like?
Moderation can be different to different people, since genetics do play a part—some people have more TRPV1 receptors than other people. However, for all people (unless in case of having an allergy or similar), acclimatization is important, and a much bigger factor than genetics.
Writer’s anecdote: on the other hand, when my son was a toddler I once left the room and came back to find him cheerfully drinking hot sauce straight from the bottle, so it can be suspected that genetics are definitely relevant too, as while I did season his food and he did already enjoy curries and such, he didn’t exactly have a background of entering chili-eating competitions.
Still, regardless of genes (unless you actually have a medical condition that disallows this), a person who regularly eats spicy food will develop an increasing tolerance for spicy food, and will get to enjoy the benefits without the risks, provided they don’t suddenly jump way past their point of tolerance.
On which note, in this video you can also see what happens when Dr. Deshauer goes from biting a jalapeño (relatively low on the Scoville heat scale) to biting a Scotch bonnet pepper (about 10x higher on the Scoville heat scale):
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
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How Do DNA Repair Enzymes Actually Help?
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Dr. Andrea Suarez explains:
Are They Worth It?
DNA repair enzymes are what they sound like: enzymes that repair damage to DNA.
They’re derived from bacteria and plants and can function in human cells to fix UV- and oxidation-induced DNA damage.
How they get where they need to be: the enzymes are encapsulated in liposomes, which mimic cell membranes and allow penetration through the stratum corneum. Once inside keratinocytes, the liposomes dissolve and release the enzymes that then reach the nucleus to repair the DNA.
Does it work? The evidence is strong for some claims, not so much for others:
- Sunscreen plus DNA repair enzymes reduced markers of DNA damage and precancerous actinic keratoses more than sunscreen alone.
- Evidence for reducing wrinkles, reducing hyperpigmentation, or improving elasticity is limited and not yet convincing.
Is it safe? Human and animal studies—including in people with xeroderma pigmentosum—show excellent safety, even with long-term use. Rare issues include mild irritation or burning if you get it in your eyes, so maybe don’t put it there.
In few words: while it’s not yet a scientifically sound choice for beauty considerations, it does augment the protective power of sunscreen, on a cellular level, reducing sun-induced DNA damage that not only ages your skin, but also could turn cancerous if left unchecked.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Be warned, it is pricier than it looks!
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One Exercise To Walk Better After 60
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And no, it’s not “walking”; it’s what you can do in advance of the walking to make the walking easier and less likely to cause pain & fatigue:
It’s in your hips
Slowing down and/or find it more difficult walking after 60 is often caused less by weak legs, and more by reduced hip extension. This is because when your leg no longer moves effectively whenever it’s behind your body, your glutes stop generating strong push-off, leading to shorter strides, shuffling, slower speed, higher risk of tripping, and less confidence.
The key idea here: it’s important to build/restore glute strength through hip extension, rather than relying mainly on stretching. This can be done by training one key movement: the controlled backward drive of your leg.
This can be achieved through what’s basically one exercise, that can be done in various ways ranging from more easy to more difficult:
- Active hip extension: hold a chair or counter or such for balance, shift your weight onto one leg, move your free leg directly backwards about 10 degrees, squeeze your glute, and return slowly without leaning forwards or swinging, but with a pause at each end.
- Banded hip extension: add a resistance band around your ankles, and repeat the same motion while maintaining tension, pushing into resistance at the end range, and controlling the return all the way.
- Plank hip extension: do the same glute-driven leg lift from a forearm plank, to combine hip extension with core strength, keeping your body straight and avoiding twisting.
As with most such things, start as easy as necessary and work up to the more difficult levels, prioritize good form throughout, and also prioritize consistency over intensity.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
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