Why do we love drinking boiled water?

When it comes to drinking boiled water, I believe everyone is very familiar with it. After all, both us and our elders have been taught since childhood that water must be boiled before drinking. This includes the current direct commercial sales, which shows the Chinese people's obsession with drinking boiled water.

Drinking boiled water has become a deeply rooted concept in the hearts of Chinese people. Drinking boiled water is healthier is the most intuitive understanding of people. Some people even regard "Drink more boiled water!" as a universal greeting. This has caused many people to wonder: Why do Chinese people love to drink boiled water? Is drinking boiled water just a habit? Or is it really related to health? Let's talk about it today.

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01. Is drinking boiled water a biological inheritance?

As a biological researcher, when I encounter this kind of problem, the first thing I think of is biological factors. After all, many difficult-to-explain phenomena have biological factors behind them, especially when it comes to drinking water, which may involve physiological and even biochemical metabolism. However, after carefully looking through various studies, I found no research on boiled water and different populations. Could it be that the Chinese population is special, and during the migration of ancient humans, due to the founder effect, unique group characteristics were formed, which led to us drinking boiled water?

With this research in mind, I looked at the population situations in China, Japan and South Korea and found that the three populations actually have the same evolutionary origins. Their common ancestors can be traced back to 3,000-3,600 years ago. The mainstream populations in Japan and South Korea entered Japan through the Korean Peninsula more than 2,000 years ago through the Great Migration[1].

This means that the Chinese, Japanese and Korean groups actually maintain a great deal of genetic consistency. In fact, if we look at it from a large group perspective, China, Japan and South Korea actually belong to the same group. There is no so-called "drinking boiled water gene" in these three groups, so the biological genetic factor of Chinese people drinking boiled water has been ruled out!

02. Is it because of the historical inheritance of eating habits?

When it comes to hot or cooked food, it has to be said that the Chinese are at the forefront of the world. This is also proven by archaeology. In 2012, a study titled "Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China" was published in Science[2]. In this study, archaeologists discovered 20,000-year-old pottery in Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi, China. What is even more surprising is that the traces of burning and soot on these pottery indicate that these pottery were probably used for cooking. A large number of deer bones were also found in the cave.

Therefore, China's hot food culture can be said to have a long history, and this has also influenced our current eating habits to a certain extent, such as the habit of cooking various cooked foods, unlike the neighboring countries who like to eat raw food.

This may to some extent explain our preference for drinking boiled water. However, considering that after entering agricultural civilization, people all over the world began to widely eat cooked food, but they did not form the habit of drinking boiled water, the cooked food culture may only be weakly related to our drinking of boiled water.

03. Inheritance of public health habits

More than 300 years ago, Leeuwenhoek first discovered microorganisms. In the mid-19th century, two giants, Pasteur of France and Koch of Germany, formally opened up microbiological research, from morphological description to physiological research, and finally revealed the important factor causing human diseases: microorganisms. Since then, we have realized that the miasma that makes people sick in the uninhabited jungle is essentially microorganisms, and the factors that eventually lead to wound ulcers and even death are also microorganisms. Many other diseases are related to microorganisms, such as colds, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., which are closely related to microorganisms.

Because of this, before the emergence of antibiotics, avoiding microbial infection became a top priority in the field of public health. High temperature is the most common and simplest way to kill microorganisms, and naturally it has become an important measure for us to improve the health of the whole people. Therefore, since the Republic of China, our country has begun to promote the drinking of boiled water, and places that provide boiled water appeared all over the country. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the government has intensified the promotion of drinking boiled water and launched a campaign for all people to drink boiled water, so that for quite a long time, thermos bottles have been an essential infrastructure in families.

04. Is it out of date to drink boiled water?

Today our public health situation has been greatly improved, and we even have special direct drinking water systems, which reduces the possibility of us getting sick from the mouth. So is drinking boiled water out of date?

The answer is no.

Although public health conditions have improved today, our tap water still cannot be drunk directly due to the long-distance transportation of tap water in our country and the corrosion of pipes, so boiling it is good for health.

In fact, even today, the habit of drinking boiled water still needs to be maintained, and the important factor is sterilization. Living in cities today, using tap water, it may be hard to imagine that in many areas, primitive water collection methods are still used, and some people even drink wild water directly, which is very unsafe and not recommended.

Even for city tap water, although disinfection is done at the source, it is still difficult to prevent pollution during pipeline transportation.

It can be said that healthy drinking water is still an important issue. Therefore, for us today, drinking boiled water is not only a sentiment, but also a continuation of a healthy lifestyle.

Finally, drinking boiled water here does not mean that you can drink [boiled water] directly, but drink the boiled water after cooling it down (the water temperature should be lower than 65℃ to avoid damage to the esophagus).

1. Wang Y, Lu D, Chung YJ, et al. Genetic structure, divergence and admixture of Han Chinese, Japanese and Korean populations[J]. Hereditas, 2018, 155(1): 19.

2. Wu X, Zhang C, Goldberg P, et al. Early pottery at 20,000 years ago in Xianrendong Cave, China[J]. Science, 2012, 336(6089): 1696-1700.