Water-Drinking

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 28, 1900

WATER-DRINKING in summer may be either a source of health or of illness. Huge draughts of ice-cold fluids check digestion often, if one is overheated, in a dangerous way. As reaction is sure to follow, a rise of temperature after a brief space is inevitable. Yet there is a way to drink water cooled by standing in the immediate neighborhood of ice, so that it will be most wholesome. A distinguished scientist declares that sipping a liquid is a powerful stimulation to the circulation, which ordinary drinking is not. He continues: “During the action of sipping, the action of the nerve that slows the beating of the heart is much lessened. As a consequence, that organ contracts much more rapidly, the pulse beats more quickly, and the circulation is increased. In addition, the pressure under which the bile is secreted is raised by the sipping of fluid.”

It follows that the slow sipping of a glass of cold water not only serves as a stimulant to pulse action, it enters into the general circulation without depressing the digestion, and allays thirst much more effectually than the gulping down of double the quantity at one draught. Try it, fathers and mothers, and induce your children to drink slowly. When they come, heated and weary, from the street or from play, show them how to sip a tumbler of cool—not ice-cold—water, as rational beings ought, — not like animals. Otherwise the tone of the stomach, in time, will be permanently lowered.—Good Housekeeping.