It’s a normal practice to drink water during or after meals. Different schools of thought go by different philosophies. Some suggest not drinking water during or after meal is not advisable as it dissolves enzymes and acids that are secreted to help digestion. Drinking water 15-20 minutes after meals is considered ideal.
Some people who are dieting believe in drinking several glasses of water a little before meals. It reduces hunger and as a result the amount of food we would otherwise have eaten. Many such theories are doing the rounds all the time basically encouraging healthy life free of diseases and complications.
This is one such suggestion that promotes drinking hot water during and after meals. French and Japanese women follow this. The Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals…
Drinking hot water after meals reduces cancer risk. Let me explain how. Drinking cold water will solidify the oil part of the food we have eaten. This will slow down the digestion process. And when this sludge reacts with the digestive enzymes and acids, it will break down and will start getting absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. This lines the intestine. The consequence is that this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. Therefore it is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.
Cold water can also in extreme circumstances lead to heart attacks. As we have our meals enzymes and acid secretions start and this process sort of warms up the body. Drinking cold water is like attacking the body with an exactly opposite temperature. Not only does the whole procedure of digestion gets interrupted or slows down, the body can also react in the form of a heart attack. It does not always come after a pain in the right arm or pain in the chest.
So warm water is the way to go to keep off cancer. It makes sense and it doesn’t cost anything. Just calls for a change in habit. In the beginning hot water doesn’t taste good but that’s simply because we have never had hot water as a routine. Once we get used to it feels fine.
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Interesting find and it makes sense. Thanks for the tip!
Gives a brief reason why cold water is bad, but does not completely explain how hot water is beneficial.
This is listed on Snopes.com as an Urban Ledgend and states there is no validity to the information you provided.
I scoured every available medical database for articles confirming — or even suggesting — that drinking cold water with meals is harmful, and found not a single one. There’s no scientific basis for the claim that cold water will “solidify the oily stuff” you have just consumed, or that this “sludge” will “line the intestine,” let alone “turn into fats” and “lead to cancer.”
It’s mumbo-jumbo, and self-contradictory mumbo-jumbo at that. This states that drinking cold water “slows down the digestion,” yet in the very next sentence declares that it will cause the your stomach contents to “break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster.” Which is it?
The studies that do exist mainly extol the benefits of drinking cold water, especially during and after vigorous exercise. Cold water is absorbed by the body faster than warm water and can help lower one’s body temperature, preventing dehydration.
I totally agree. Hot water or soup not only help you not to overeat, it also ease digestion and ease constipation.
Absolute nonsense with no basis in fact. None of the cancer research societies agree with it and basic knowledge of how the body’s digestive system works would quickly show you how it cannot be true.
Soup or (any kind of) water will help you not to overeat by virtue of filling your stomach, but to make the jump to reducing or causing cancer is completely spurious.
Do you have any scientific source for this information. Looks to me like something somebody just sat around and thought up without the benefit of any experimentation or research.
There is no scientific research behind the claims about hot water and fat digestion.
It is irresponsible of a website to publish such inaccurate information since there
are actually uneducated individuals out there that will believe this information.
Agree that some of the description in the article may not make scientific sense but the motive of encouraging healthy eating habit is good. There are just too many things in the world science has not been able to explain. Sometimes we have to rely on our basic instincts and experiences of our own as well as others to have a healthy and longer life.
Well for me it’s ok to experiment with ourselves. Try to drink warm water before and after
meal for a couple of times and observe if this will cause proper digestion. There’s nothing
wrong if you want to try it and see the effects.
Try this experiment with chocolate.
Chocolate is 30-50% cocoa butter/fat. It also melts at close to body temperature, which means it will easily solidify at temperatures lower than body temp.
Eat a piece and let it melt in your mouth. Then drink cold water (heck, eat the ice cubes too). See if the chocolate solidifies in your mouth.
It won’t.
The fact is that our body regulates the temperature of all the food we eat. Hot food will be cooled to body temp, cold food will be warmed to body temp.
@ iamyuanwu very good
explained in an very humorous manner…
the stuff is a total crap
I’ve been getting this article in the mail so often.
Personally, this article is written by person’s without any scientific prove and grossly misleading on the cancer claim.
However, drinking hot rather than cold stuffs does has it’s beneficial effect.
I experienced back pain(behind the chest) for yrs and not knowing what was the cause of it. One day, a fren told me of possible serious illness, freak out, i took some hot medicinal herbal drink and the pain was gone almost immediately. My first tot was the effectiveness of the herb, but it was actually the hotness of the drink itself.
I used to take cold drinks all the time, it somehow caused my back to reduced blood circulation and hence the pain and stiffness.
I still take cold drinks though, but lesser. So, these days whenever the pain comes back, all i need is take a glass of hot water(as hot as i can) and the pain goes off.
“Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea”… I’m betting the rich antioxidants content of their tea play a more significant role in cancer prevention than the temperature of the beverage itself… Why ignore that and suggest drinking hot WATER?
Hot soup or hot tea after meal is good for you, I do agree but it will not prevent you with cancer. Cold water has nothing to do with cancer. This article has no scitific prove and misleading to the reader. To the writter, do you know any experiment support your article or it’s your opinion? Before you write this article I suggest you to do a research for it.
More than half of all cancers are genetic rather than related to diet. Scare stories about drinking cold water are irresponsible at best.
First, I would assume that when drinking cold liqud, it begins to warm up as soon as it reaches the normal 98.6 degrees warmth in your mouth and body. By the time it goes through the stomach the ice must be melted, the water getting closer to body temperature. When it finally hits the intestines, in this warm environment, how cold can it be to turn oil into sludge? Does anyone actually feel ice inside their stomach or intestines? A person can feel a cold drink if gulping quickly when it hits their stomach, but after that, the feeling completely disappears. It’s probably all warmed up. It certainly isn’t ice cold anymore. We all know that too much fat can lead to clogging of the arteries. I think that this is due to eating too many fatty foods and one’s own body chemistry, and not drinking ice water.
Does anyone ever notice some strange sludge coming out of them besides the normal stuff when using the toilet? And it doesn’t just stay in the lining if it really were there. If that were true, the stuff would show up on a barium enema x ray or certainly would be seen by a doctor doing a routine colonoscopy. The doctor would comment on the sludge build up and do extra roto rooter on you if that were the case!
How does this person who wrote such a silly thing get their information? From some 2,000 year old book written by people with little medical knowledge that we would accept in today’s doctor’s office? Puh-leeze!
if Japanese and Chinese take hot tea with their meals then why not recommend that instead of jumping to hot water?But hot water helps to those who diet,so try it fellows
Many ppl adviced dont drink hotwater mixed with Ice water,they told mixed with plain water.I dont know whats the reason behind this.Can anybody explain?
Ridiculous. Doesn’t it concern you that the Asian population has a higher rate of colon and gastrointestional cancer than other ethnic groups?
That article was sent to me this morninig by a friend. I immediately felt incredulity. What a bunch of claptrap! Thanks for all of the great posts here that refute the claim that drinking warm water after a meal can/may prevent cancer. Unfortunately, there will be too many ppl who will accept that claim – just because they read it on their computer. Let’s all of us learn to be skeptics and do some checking of these rediculous claims that come our way via our computers..
I find that soaking my feet in hot soup immediately after a meal reduces both intestinal gas and bunions, so I think this article makes good sense.
I’m happy to see that most of you feel as I do. That the information is total bunk. I kept thinking about the fact the your body will warm the water up. I do know it burns about 100 calories to heat ice cold water to body temp.
I agree with many of the other readers…no scientific evidence found what so ever.
Get a grip people, let’s educate ourselves PROPERLY instead of believing every internet article someone takes a notion to publish.
absolute rubbish. it makes sense if one doesn’t understand the physiological processes of fat digestion.
the function that the stomach plays in fat digestion is physical emulsification of the fat–this means, that the acids in the stomach don’t really contribute to the digestion in the sense of breaking bonds, rather, the acids in the stomach contribute to protein digestion–water should generally not be consumed around the time of eating a meal because it may interfere a bit with protein digestion (but it isn’t that great of an issue to be concerned with).
bile, which is stored in the gallbladder, is what contributes to further emulsification of the fats when they enter the small intestines
enzymes such as lipase (pancreatic and phospholipase) further break down the fats in the small intestines
fatty acids are then formed. fatty acids with a chain length of less than 14 carbons are absorbed (through the cillia in the small intestines) directly into the portal vein system (circulatory system); meanwhile, chains longer than 14 carbons are re-esterfied (broken down further by pancreatic cholesterol ester hydrolase) then enter the circulation via the lymphatic route.
therefore, cold water does not really play a role in fat digesterion, rather, diseases that impair the secretion of bile, etc. are what can interfere with digestion.
if we are talking colon cancer specifically (which is the only one that i think this may apply to, if any type of cancer..), then yes, fat does play a role. however, the cold water doesn’t really matter.. as long as one is eating enough fiber and thus has regular bowel movements! additionally, epidemiological studies have shown that increasing regular physical activity (eg. going for regular runs) increases bowl movements and thus reduces the risk of colon cancer.
as for heart attacks… drinking cold water leads to heart attacks! come on now! clearly this is a scapegoat.. the issue is eating fats in general! do you people even understand what causes heart attacks? it’s the buildup of plaques in the arteries (also known as atherosclerosis–of which signs can be seen in the arteries of children through fatty streaks). plaques can be caused by physical damage of the artery walls (causing clots and scar tissue buildup), high fat concentration in the blood, cigarette smoking, etc. etc. these plaques end up blocking arteries, and when it’s a major artery such as one that supplies blood to the heart itself, it causes a “heart attack.”
and you know what else, even if you’re drinking cold water, within minutes, your body will warm it up to body temperature…so it doesn’t really matter. the only thing is that you may lose a few extra kilocalories in the process…
and think about this one: if this really was true, i’m sure you would be able to find peer-reviewed epidemiological studies showing this to be the case. and if you can’t find any? it’s probably because there is no biological reason for there to be an epidemiological study–which means that there is no reason to even suspect this to be true.
come on now people. don’t take everything that you are told at face value. think a little.
and all i can say, 25 mins of cardio, 6 days a week… and eat relatively healthy. that’s your best bet for preventing most chronic diseases (diabetes, certain cancers, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease–heart attacks, strokes etc.)
..and that’s my primary prevention rant.
OLD URBAN LEGEND
Claim: Drinking cold water after meals will lead to cancer.
Status: False.
Examples:
[Collected on the Internet, 2006]
Drinking Cold water after meal = Cancer!
For those who like to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you.
It is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down the digestion.
Once this “sludge” reacted with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine.
Very soon, this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.
Origins: This
admonition against the ingestion of cold beverages immediately following meals first surfaced on the Internet in February 2006, when it appeared as an item tagged onto a diatribe against the eating of too much rice. By July 2006, it was circulating as the lead-in to the “cough CPR” mailing (which dangerously advocates that medically-unsupervised heart attack victims attempt to cough rhythmically to get themselves through cardiac events). In October 2006 we began receiving e-mailed versions that conclude with the following bit of text that implies a connection between the ingestion of cold water and heart attacks in women (the additional text appearing after the previously-standard “best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal” ending):
A serious note about heart attacks:
Women should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line.
You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack.
Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms.
60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up.
Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive…
A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we’ll save at least one life.
While the above-quoted bit is accurate with regard to what it says about heart attack symptoms, the implied connection between the drinking of cold water and cardiac disruption (derived from the text’s having been appended to the “cold water causes cancer” e-mail) should be dismissed. Medical literature does not offer support for there being such a link.
The “drinking cold water causes cancer” rumor is a bit of an odd duck in that at first blush it appears to have much in common with a previously-circulated false belief about instant noodles posing a danger to consumers because the cups’ wax linings were becoming their ingesters’ wax linings and so causing deaths.
The proffered bit of advice about eschewing cold drinks after a meal is claptrap. We were unable to find in reputable medical literature mention of frosty beverages causing cancer. Also, chilled liquids do not solidify ingested fats when the two meet in the stomach: the internal heat of the human body quickly nullifies any temperature differences among the various items that have been swallowed, and stomach acids very efficiently break down lumps of ingestibles before they are passed into the Glass of water intestines.
As for oils reacting with stomach acids to form a resultant sludge that is subsequently absorbed more quickly by the intestine than solid food is, remember that “solid food” doesn’t generally get into the intestines. By the time most of what we ingest gets that far along in our digestive process, it’s all pretty much the same consistency.
The belief that fats (particularly animal fats) will “line the intestine” underpins a common scare story about alleged post-mortem discoveries that celebrities (such as John Wayne and Elvis Presley) who epitomized the “meat and potatoes” diet, gluttony, or other negative eating habits had some tremendous amount (40, 60, or even 80 pounds) of “impacted fecal matter” or “impacted feces” lodged in their bowels.
The e-mailed advisory against downing cold water after a meal advances a claim that the sludge supposedly formed by the reaction of stomach acids and ingested oils and now said to be adhering to the walls of the intestine will “turn into fats and lead to cancer.” That oils (fats) would turn into fats is the least improbable claim made in the e-mail, but it would be better stated that oils (fats) remain fats, rather than change into them. As for such fats “lead[ing] to cancer,” a look at the medical literature of the day does not support that allegation. (One genuinely-studied link between fats and cancer has to do with a higher incidence of lung cancer noted in Asian women who over the course of their lives have performed a great deal of wok cooking. The extreme high heat of that form of cookery causes the oils used to break down and give off chemicals capable of causing mutations in cells. Those intent upon doing large amounts of wok cooking should therefore lower their frying temperature from the 240°C to 280°C called for in Chinese cooking to 180°C.)
Over the years, decades, and even centuries, a variety of things have been pointed to as causing cancer. Once, when it was noted that there had been an increase in the consumption of tomatoes and an increase in the number of cancer patients, the erroneous conclusion was drawn from this correlation that tomatoes in some fashion caused or induced cancer. As to how old that belief was or how seriously it was taken at the time it was being bruited about, we note that in 1896 the Yorkshire Weekly Post printed an item by a physician who felt moved to publicly combat the rumor: “Let me say that the eating of tomatoes has nothing whatever to do with the production of the disease [cancer].”
If that now seems laughable, consider that to this day cancer continues to attract a number of misconceptions, and not just about its potential causes. In 2005 the American Cancer Society conducted a telephone survey of 957 adult Americans who had never had cancer, asking each of them about five common fallacies about the disease. Of the participants, nearly 41 percent believed surgeries to remove cancer actually caused the disease to spread, and another 13 percent weren’t sure whether that was true or not. 27 percent of those surveyed believed the medical industry was withholding from the public a cure for cancer just to increase profits, and another 14 percent weren’t sure but thought they might be. 19 percent believed pain medications were ineffective against cancer pain (with a further 13 percent unsure), and 7 percent thought the disease was an illness that could not be effectively treated. Finally, 5 percent of those taking part in the survey believed that all that was needed to beat the Big C was a positive attitude.
As for the act of drinking water immediately after eating something being bad for you, those claims have also been kicking about for a bit, as evidenced by this entry from a book of common misconceptions published in 1923:
That it is Bad to Drink Water Directly after Eating Fruit
This idea used to be extremely popular at the Cape when the author was there nearly 40 years ago. He has inquired of a Wimpole Street physician (who was also formerly at the Cape), and cannot find that there is any truth in the belief, except the general one that it is not good to dilute the gastric juices too much after eating anything, and especially, of course if the food be indigestible.
Far more recently, we found on the Internet the advice to “drink water at room temperature if possible, as ice-cold water can harm the delicate lining of your stomach.” If the lining of the human stomach were that delicate, our tummies would not long survive their being constantly bathed in strong digestive acids.
Is it true that drinking hot water after a meal is better than cold water?
Everyone one knows the EFFECTS of Hot or Cold, Day or Night, Wet or Dry, Dead or Alive, etc.; It doesn’t take a nuclear scientist to know that HOT water has it’s own benefits and likewise with COLD water. Hot water or hot tea is simply a means to an end, an aid to better digestion, in turn promoting better overall health and function to our bodily systems.
So drink up and stay healthy!!
Salud!!
People I couldn’t be more happy to see how everyone is actually doing their research before believing everything they hear. When my mother asked me if this was true I chuckled and told her who told you this. Then I explained to her the digestion of food and how this hot water cold water thing makes no sense and we carried on. Then I thought let me verify my knowledge and I found myself reading comments that prove people take the time to think before spreading nonsense. This is exactly how wrong information is shared. Live life healthy by eating right, working out and keeping a positive attitude (low stress) and respecting your inner and outer being.
Try this: use your george forman to cook burgers but let the fat drip into your sink, try wash the fat out with cold water and then repeat with hot water
ull see the effexct the temp of water has on fat, this may not apply to food in your stomach due to body temp etc, but food still in your throat etc will digest easier obviously
not sure if it will lead to cancer etc, but it is logical that the warm water is better!
someone needs to do a thesis on this
I agree with drinking Hot water after a meal,and it ease digestion,also it helps to brek down fat and Carbohydrate contents in the food,and lets the fats to dissolve and not to coagulate with blood as proteins and vitamins do..But the quote saying cold water leads to solidify fats and cholestrols in food is absolutely unacceptable,becoz the human body maintains a certain temperature to do the digestion activities and to maintain the Metabolism.I f body looses its temperature and if temperature gets down,just think its not a living body,its a dead body.So whats my argue is the cold water never makes the body to get cool like refigerator as human body is not a Glass or Vessel to become hot when we take hot liquids and gets cooled when we take cold liquids,Even if we take cold water,it gets warm as when its reaches the inner tongue and gets more warmer at reaching the stomach.Even when we stay in a cool water pool and swim for a long time,our body inner parts remains warm…The act of Metabolism in human body balances as per the intake and surrounding Temperature..So just think a lot before acting…………………DHASS.A.K
Since drinking hot water does not have any proved negative medical effect on human body as long as it is not too hot for the mouth to hold, let us try drinking it for one month first thing in the morning and after every meal as desirable and publish our experiences afterwards. This may serve as a trial experiment on its own.
I agree with Ayoade’s comment on2009/08/14. “Why not at least try drinking hot water first thing in the morning and after every meal? Publish our experiences afterwards and this may serve as a trial experiment on its own. ” My Dad was a strong believer in drinking a cup of hot water after each meal. Dad lived to the ripe old age of 96 and remained healthy and active all of his life! His 7 siblings also drank hot water and they all lived to be old and healthy, and not a one of them ever had any form of cancer! It certainly can’t hurt to at least have an open mind about the subject! Modern medicine doesn’t have all the answers, otherwise Cancer would be conquered by now! Cold water may not directly cause cancer, but I for one feel better drinking a cup of hot water after my meals. I am convinced that it helps with digestion. Why be narrow minded about alternitive ideas?
I drink hot water everyday. First thing in the morning and most late afternoons before dinner. It’s called coffee. Barring any other major malfunction, I should live well into my 90s too. Wow. I guess I should adjust my retirement plan accordingly.
Chinese (green) Tea does have scientific evidence to reduce cancer.
Also, arguably cold water which solidifies fats could infact reduce intestinal absorption by virtue of being soldified, there are numerous medical conditions that can cause steatorrhoea (fatty motions)- fat which stays in the gut lumen is thus not absorbed, which perhaps can lead to reduced weight and also cancer risk.
Fat itself doesn’t cause the cancer it is the fat soluble chemicals (pesticides and other contaminants) that cause cancer, but also if the fat is from cooked meat, then chemicals like Heterocyclic Amines from grilled/roasted meats are also carcinogenic.
General Practitioner
Wirral, UK.