Comment on [deleted]

• Sunforged@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  And it’s effect on the human body is widely known. You’re not making the point you’re trying to.

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  • metapod@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think the point was just that the argument was flawed.

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    • Sunforged@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Flawed in that a staple of civilizations diets is somehow comparable to a known intoxicant?

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      • metapod@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        To say something is good merely because it has been consumed for a long period. Very often people use terrible argument and reach the right conclusion by chance.

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      • qaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I tried to point out that the fact that societies have consumed it for a long amount of time doesn’t have to mean it’s healthy.

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• AppaYipYip@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Alcoholic drinks, for a good part of history, were safer to drink than water because its production includes a boiling step that kills bacteria. We know now that you have to boil or treat water before drinking but for most of history alcohol was safer.

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  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    dude people back then knew how to sanitize water, this just isn’t true.

    The only time you might prefer alcohol over water because it’s safer is in some sort of disaster or emergency.

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    • nul@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Or because it provided both hydration and calories to people doing manual labor, like field work. It was the Gatorade of the time.

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      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        huh yeah i never thought about that but it would be a nice benefit.

        i’d expand on that with that you could have also used something like a very dilute gruel except that would go nasty in the heat, which alcohol doesn’t do because it’s already nasty (but perfectly drinkable).

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    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They did not know to sanitize water pre germ theory, during cholera outbreaks they would just keep drinking the untreated contaminated water and infecting themselves.

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      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Because it wasn’t obvious that there had been contact with sewer water, if people go out of their way to get water from a pump that tastes “sweet” then they obviously do not understand that there’s sewage in it, as humans universally agree that drinking sewage is disgusting.

        It doesn’t take germ theory to figure out that funky water tends to make you sick, and ever since we invented fire and had access to waterproof vessels people would have realized that boiling water made it safe. People just don’t tend to bother with such things when they get comfortable, much like how we now very much know about bacteria and yet people don’t bother washing their hands after taking a dump.

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• Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  And it has shaped human culture like perhaps no other food item has.

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