tina

Why do old Asian people say drinking cold water is unhealthy for you? My theory is that it's a holdover from food-scarce times where the caloric heat used to warm the cold water to body temp was a non-trivial percentage of daily calorie intake. So, I did some math on it... Actually, I told grok to do the math: x.com/i/grok/share/W… The summary is that, yes, drinking ~2 liters daily at (5°C, or 41°F), could require ~256 kcal to warm to body temperature. Since you don't have the option to warm it to body temp - the water sucks the heat from your body upon drinking it - it would literally sap that energy from your body. In a pre-modern society with scarce food (e.g. 1500 kcal/day), this would be ~17% of caloric intake, with a range of 8-25% depending on water temperature, volume, and food availability. That would definitely be a non-trivial percentage of caloric intake diverted from other metabolic processes - enough to make a difference if your health was marginal. The point of heating the water, therefore, would be to expend energy from burning wood - essentially using another calorie source that humans couldn't digest (we can't eat wood) - rather than the calories we got from scarce digestible food. Today, of course, when we all get enough food (including in Asia), the custom is falling away and young people just make fun of the idea. I was prompted to think of this by a Word of Honor BTS where they all called one of the lead actors an old man because he only ever drank warm water.

@chrislakin serious q: how would your framework explain the fact that e.g. dexamphetamine reduces procrastination? seems you would predict that it makes people stop suppressing feelings and intuitive signals, but that seems false