“Why Do Americans Love Cold Water and Cold Drinks?” (2024)

“Drinking cold water is not good for the body,” a president of a traditional Chinese medicine foundation said.

My parents immigrated to America in 1995, and I was born two years later. In China, there was a strict one-child policy, so since I already had an older brother, they didn’t expect to have another child. Consequences for my mother as a government employee were strict. If she had another child, she could lose her job. She had to take mandatory contraception from the government.

However, the birth control obviously didn’t work, because I came around in 1997. My mother has this to say about her childbirth experience for her second son.

But she also expressed some shock — shock that they gave her cold water in the hospital. In China, they didn’t give people cold water. It was considered blasphemy that they would give a recovering mother cold water.

“Why do Americans love cold water and cold drinks?” she still asks today.

With this unique insight into another culture, most people don’t realize cold water can be an American thing. People in China tend not to drink cold water. According to Vittoria Traverso at Atlas Obscura, many people in China actually boil water and put it in a thermos. The “default temperature for drinking water in China is lukewarm to hot.”

From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, there are five “essences” of food or drink: cold, cool, neutral, warm, and hot. Cold water falls into the “cold” essence and can upset the body and make someone dizzy.

Instead, many in China think hot water is more beneficial than cold water for the soul. During a cholera epidemic in northern China in 1862, many people in southern China believe southern China was spared due to southerners drinking more hot water.

Even Chiang Kai-shek, the famous Chinese nationalist leader during the Chinese Civil War, released a campaign called the “New Life Movement” where he suggested drinking water temperature had to be hot.

It was a neo-Confucian doctrine, and a point of agreement for Mao Zedong as well. Also, from a more public…