Alicia Meehan, Campus Carrier deputy news editor
As someone who suffers from frequent stomach problems nearly every meal, it’s important to me to find out what can calm my stomach down. Now, I will say, I’m not completely on top of making sure I eat food that won’t hurt my stomach. When all your favorite foods and ingredients negatively affect you, it’s hard to avoid them. While my mom avoids things like dairy and soy like the plague, I still eat those foods very regularly.
A year or so ago, my mom became obsessed with a book by a Spanish author, Sandra Moñino. “Goodbye to Inflammation: Your All-Natural Plan to Reclaim Health, Lose Weight, and Feel Better than Ever” is all about food, digestion and how to manage both. Moñino’s book includes a section about the effects of drinking ice-cold drinks with meals.
According to Moñino, cold liquid directly and negatively impacts digestion. To get technical, the enzymes within your gut change shape, and this affects the chemical reactions they do as part of the digestion process. When the enzymes’ shapes are wrong, they can’t properly break down the chunks of food you just ate.
As soon as I learned this information, it made perfect sense to me. I mean, to me, it became obvious humans weren’t built to digest food when paired with cold drinks. Unless you were from the far north, when would you regularly drink ice water? I began noticing the problem every meal that I drank something cold with.
As soon as I began drinking hot tea with my meals, I felt a change. Again, I don’t avoid my problem foods, so obviously I still regularly get stomachaches. But they are significantly better, and sometimes I don’t get them at all. For this reason, I’d strongly recommend everyone to drink some hot coffee, tea or just plain water with their meals.
I’ve become somewhat of a nuisance about this topic. Most of my friends and family have heard my speech about how they should switch to hot drinks, and most of them have ignored me. One of my friends also suffers from regular stomach pain, but when I offered her a potential solution, she dismissed it.
Her reasoning was that she felt more hydrated when drinking iced drinks than hot. While a cup of ice water and a cup of hot water will give you the same hydration, I can understand they feel different. For the same reason that I continue to eat my “problem” foods while my mom avoids them, my friend continues to put ice in all her drinks.
This is because my friends and I think that food should be enjoyed. When most foods tend to cause stomach problems, it can be easy have bad relationship with food in general. I continue to eat these foods, and my friend continues to drink cold water for the simple reason that we want to enjoy our meals.
I will continue to preach my “hot drinks” doctrine to anybody who will listen, but what I really hope for is that people will enjoy eating. I already enjoyed drinking hot tea, so learning about its benefits was a bonus. I encourage anyone to stop drinking cold drinks with their meals, even if they don’t regularly experience stomach issues.