It’s important to stay cool and hydrated, especially during the summer months. Many folks would buy a bottle of water from a convenience store and sometimes forget about it, leaving it in the car during a hot day and drinking it later. While not ideal, the water is there and you figure it's best not to waste it. However, you might want to reconsider.
Many publications, including the New York Times among others, say to drink bottled water left in a hot car with caution or to just avoid drinking it at all. This may seem terribly wasteful but your health could be at risk. There is more than one reason to either make sure you consume your beverages fully when they’re cold within the day or to throw them out if they’ve been left in your car during a hot day. Some folks even claim that it could possibly start a fire in the car.
@z100newyork PSA for anyone leaving their car in the heat 🥵 @iHeartRadio
Internet stories and anecdotes about water bottles being magnifying glasses for the sun aside, if you’ve opened and sipped a plastic bottle of water or soda and then left it in the car, there is an issue with microbes. Since the airtight seal has been broken, the beverage has been exposed to bacteria from your mouth, your hands, and the air. Those microbes could get into the drink and as it gets warmer, multiply. A 2013 study of opened bottled beverages found that bacteria, yeast, and mold grew within them at 77 degrees Fahrenheit after two weeks upon exposure. Your car during a hot summer day would encourage any microbes to multiply even faster and could make you sick if you make a habit of it.
@neenziemd Things they dont tell you pt 178 #hot #heat #heatwave #weather #carsoftiktok #waterbottle #waterbottles #fire
But what about sealed bottles? Well, in that case, the potential danger isn’t in the beverage, but in the bottle itself. Many disposable plastic bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. When sitting in the sunlight or heated up, this PET plastic can release phenols and phthalates into the drink. Exposure to phenols such as bisphenol A (BPA) has been linked to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, allergies, and Type 2 diabetes. Heating up plastic water bottles also releases microplastics into the beverage, too, which could lead to health issues over time. The Food and Drug Administration has declared that BPA is safe for food and beverage packaging, as they consider it to be “low dose exposure" and that most beverages are shipped in cooled trucks, sealed and refrigerated. However, there are still critics that say otherwise and that even drinking from BPA-free plastic has some risk.
@imjustwasim Featuring @HEALTH WITH HUNTER 💧💦 **Upgrade Your Hydration Game!** 💦💧 🚫 **Worst:** Plastic bottles are a no-go! They contain microplastics. 🤢 📦 **Better:** Boxed water from @flow - a step in the right direction! 🌱 🥇 **Even Better:** 100% recyclable aluminum cans from @Proud Source Water and Mountain Valley. ♻️✨ 🏆 **Best:** Water in glass bottles! @Saratoga Water and @mountainvalleywater are top-notch. 🌊💎 #bottledwater #springwater #mountainvalley
If you wish to lower the risks, there are some tips and alternatives to plastic bottles. If you choose to drink from plastic bottles, be sure that the beverage was sealed and is cold before consumption. If you keep plastic water bottles in the car, be sure to store them in a cooler with ice or an ice pack to ensure they stay below room temperature. However, you can avoid the majority of these issues altogether if you choose to drink water from reusable water bottles that aren’t made of plastic at all but made from glass, porcelain, or stainless steel.
Drink to good health.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.