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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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They didn’t know it had anything to do with the water at all, they thought it was evil smells.
    
    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,
    
    The problem is that water is very often contaminated without seeming contaminated. If you drink water out of a random stream in the woods that looks and tastes totally clean you will still very likely get sick, for example. Would people in the past have understood that it was the water from the stream that made them sick? I think they normally would not have made the connection. It’s normal even now when people get ecoli or something from salad, to end up believing the cause was something else before it gets officially tracked down, because what actually happened didn’t match their expectations, they weren’t thinking about salad as a possibility. Our natural disgust for the most obvious signs of disease is woefully inadequate and does not at all translate directly into an accurate understanding of how disease works and why it happens.
    
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