What are you drinking?

Most everyone you meet today has one of two things, or both, in their hands: one is a cell phone and the other is a drink. Usually they are either talking on the cell phone, or they are texting on it. When someone is walking, the drink will most likely be in one of those 32- or 44-ounce Styrofoam cups. If they are driving, there is a good chance they will be using the cell phone. They might have the cell phone in some type of holder, maybe. Many are yacking on the phone oblivious as to where they are driving and what they are doing. The drink could be in a Styrofoam cup, but could also be in one of those steel insulated cups.

Now what's in the cup? Most likely it will be soda of some kind. I looked up the 10 most popular sodas and wasn't much surprised. The 10 most popular from the No. 1 down are Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Diet Pepsi, Diet Mountain Dew, Diet Dr Pepper and Fanta. Americans drink an average of 45 gallons of pop or soda a year which figures out to be about 20 pounds of sugar per person on the average. I do think that diet pop or soda is getting more and more popular.

I drink maybe a diet soda a day, but I do consume more coffee then soda. The first thing in the morning, I make coffee. Statisticians say that 31% of Americans make coffee an important drink in the morning. A statistic I find amazing is that 49% of coffee drinkers would rather give up their cell phone then their coffee. This might be because most older coffee drinkers aren't that attached to their cell phones. Americans consume 400 million cups of coffee per day or about 146 billion cups of coffee per year. Now that's a lot of coffee. Another statistic is that the United States imports more than $4 billion dollars worth of coffee each year.

One resource I looked at said 519 million pounds of tea is imported into the United States every year. The only country that imports more tea is Russia. Nearly a million and a half pounds of tea are consumed by Americans every single day. One pound of loose tea leaves will make up to 200 cups of tea, with Turkey leading the world in tea consumption, with each person using 7 pounds of tea every year or about 1,400 tea servings.

There appears to be some benefit to drinking black tea where it seems to lower the risk of cancer and heart disease and stroke. One other plus is that sodas can easily reach 40 cents per serving, but tea that is made at home will cost just 3 cents per serving. At 3 servings consumed per day, that's a lot of money saved over the course of a year. Coffee is more expensive than tea though.

In by-gone days, water wasn't as pure and clean and usually had all kinds of nasties in it. So many ended up drinking spirits which took care of the nasties. If push comes to shove, we can clean up unsafe drinking water with a little shot of Clorox. One needs to filter all the visual junk from the water by running it through a cloth or coffee filter or such. Then the formula is eight drops of Clorox per gallon of water. Another way of measuring the Clorox is 3/16th teaspoon of Clorox per two gallons. Simple way is to just get the water to a rolling boil and let it boil for over a minute.

When a group of us went to Russia, we stayed in Moscow and a suburb of Moscow, and I drank a lot of coffee. Water wasn't the greatest so we were told not to drink the city's water. I'm not sure if those making the coffee used bottled water or made sure the water for coffee was boiled, but I didn't get sick. It was interesting that the bottled water was either with air or plain. The water with air was carbonated.

I pulled up a bit of info from the Mayo Clinic and according to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine determined that an adequate daily fluid intake is about 16 cups of water for men and about 12 for women. Normally we take in about 20% of our water through foods and such. This would be about 3 cups give or take a little so we'd end up needing about 13 cups of water or about 6 bottles of water if they are the 16-ounce bottles. One can drink too much water, but normally we don't. I drink a lot in the summer and then not nearly as much during the winter. I figure I need to drink enough so that I have to use the outhouse.

If for some reason your regular water supply would go on the blink, it might be nice to have a week's supply of water on hand. With the disappearance of toilet paper this past summer, we are all aware of how suddenly items we need and depend on can disappear. Two cases of water should supply one person a week's worth of water or close to a week. Now don't do bottled water like some did toilet paper and buy a year's supply. Do it with some smarts. When shopping, buy a case of bottle water. Mark on it when you bought it, so when it gets older replace it and drink the older. Maybe next week buy another case. Do this until you have say two cases per person in storage.

I'm finishing this article after having a couple cups of coffee and one cup of beef broth. I enjoy both.