Ashley Warren had been in Albania for work for about a week when
she realized it: She was really, really thirsty — and nobody else around her
seemed to be.
اضافة اعلان
Like many Americans, Warren carried a water bottle around with
her wherever she went, but she noticed that none of her European colleagues
did. When they went out for meals, they all drank roughly the same amount of
wine or espresso, she recalled, but Warren, 32, was always the one hogging the
table’s water.
In an April TikTok video, she posed “a serious question” to the
entire continent of Europe: “Why are you all not more thirsty?”
Are you a fish or a frog?
“I just thought it was funny,” Warren, a native of Washington,
D.C., who has lived and worked in several European countries, said in an
interview. “My colleagues even started noticing and joking around, calling me a
fish or a frog because they didn’t need to consume as much water as I did.”
A spiraled debate, who drinks more water?
The video set off a spirited debate that is still plugging along
three months later. After three years of pandemic travel restrictions, American
tourists are flooding cities like Paris; Venice, Italy; and Athens, Greece; in
record numbers this summer, and their presence has spawned dozens of TikToks
complaining about how little water the locals seem to drink. The cups at cafes
are like thimbles, they argue; tap water isn’t immediately offered at every
restaurant; and how, they wonder, do Europeans drink so much espresso and never
feel dehydrated?
One popular TikTok, which has more than 1.4 million likes, shows
three American tourists in Barcelona, Spain, guzzling from giant bottles, with
this caption: “Us the moment we can find water because Europeans don’t believe
in water.”
Does the theory fit?
Many Europeans have expressed amusement at the trend: “as a
European it has been so much fun watching the internet theorize on whether we
regularly drink water or not,” Dutch influencer Cindy Kimberly tweeted. Others
are quick to call out what they see as a lazy generalization: “Europe,” one
commenter deadpanned, “the big country where none of us drink water.” Americans
who can’t find water, Europeans argue, simply don’t know how to ask for it or
where to look.
Or perhaps Americans are actually drinking too much water.
Warren’s in-laws, who are Bulgarian, have wondered whether she was sick after
seeing how much water she drank while visiting. “They are like, ‘You get water
from the tomatoes and cucumbers,’” Warren said. “Well, not enough for this
lady.”
At one point or another, most Americans have heard that they
should drink about eight glasses of water a day to stay hydrated. Specifically,
the National Academy of Medicine recommends 13 cups (104 ounces) a day for men
and nine cups (72 ounces) for women, though how much water you actually need
depends on factors including your environment, lifestyle and weight.
But the recommended amount of water consumption in the US is
still higher than that of many other European countries. In France, for
example, it’s 1.5 to 2 liters a day (about 53 to 70 ounces) and in Italy, it is
slightly more.
Difficult to actually measure how much water people are actually
drinking
According to Jodi Stookey, a nutrition public health researcher
who specializes in hydration, it is difficult to measure how much water people
are actually drinking, and how much their bodies need because Europe and the
United States use different methods to measure water consumption. Stookey got
her start in hydration after moving to London, where she pursued a master’s
degree in nutrition. During her time there, she ate “like a local,” consuming a
lot of fried and salty food and alcoholic beverages.
“I was just so thirsty,” Stookey recalled of her time living in
Europe. “I was dreaming about water.” That thirst is what got her interested in
hydration in the first place. Still, even after years of research into the
topic, “we don’t have the right data sets,” she said. “So, we’re still trying
to define what hydration means.”
Yet the scientific uncertainty over hydration hasn’t prevented
Americans from applying a moralistic lens to water consumption. It seems that
not even a bodily need like thirst is exempt from the American culture of
excess. Americans buy status water bottles to carry around like fashion
accessories and enter their daily water consumption into fitness-tracking apps.
Many even brag about how much water they drink every day, as if the simple act
of hydrating is worthy of praise.
Competitively drinking water
“Americans have this mindset of, they are not just drinking water,
they are competitively drinking
water,” said Amanda Rollins, an American who has lived in Paris for the past
six years. “I feel like everything that Americans do, we turn into a
competition.”
“A French person would never walk up to another French person
and be like, ‘Hey bro, I just finished a liter of water,’” Rollins added. “That
would be the weirdest thing in the entire world.”
Classic America
Martin Riese, a professional “water sommelier” whose TikToks
ranking water brands and explaining the intricacies of hydration have earned
him more than half a million followers, said that ostentatious water drinking
was “classic America.”
Riese, who was born in Germany but lives in Los Angeles, sees a
stark difference in the culture around water in Europe compared with the United
States. “In Europe, we don’t sleep with our water bottles next to our beds,” he
said. “It is not like we are dehydrated, we just have a more balanced diet, and
therefore our diet already provides us with a lot of liquids.”
“This idea of ‘I need to have my bottle of water with me’ has
been created by water companies because they want to sell you water,” Riese
added.
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