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Children aged between 11 and 18 drink a bathtub full of sugary drinks in a year, according to Cancer Research UK. This is a disturbing thought, for two reasons. First, because that is a lot of sugary drinks (nearly 80 litres) and, second, because the prospect of a bath of cola or similar is gross – the beige scum, the stickiness, the bubbles sticking to the edge of a tub. I need a shower just thinking about it. (If you want to know what a cola bath is really like – apparently it’s quite smooth – you can watch this video of a pool being filled with Coke and a young man called Ryan then leaping into it. “How does it feel, dude?” “Feels really good!”)
In fact, the researchers, who took the figures from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2015, included all drinks with added sugar – non-diet soft drinks and sodas, flavoured juice drinks, sports drinks, sweetened tea, coffee drinks, energy drinks and electrolyte-replacement drinks. But why measure it all in bathtubs? “We tried a lot of different things. It was just a way of representing the amount so people could visualise it,” a spokesperson explains.
Maybe if we all pictured our beverages in bath form, we would moderate our drinking habits. So, based on the idea that a standard tub contains 80 litres of liquid, how many bathtubs-ful of tea do British people drink a year? According to YouGov research last year, commissioned by the charity Contact the Elderly, the average British person drinks 876 cups of tea a year, which is more than two bathtubs’ worth.
People tend to under-report their consumption of alcohol, but findings collected by Statista last year suggested that British people consume almost 15,000 pints of beer a minute – and that’s just the teachers (joke) – which is the equivalent of 106-and-a-half baths a minute. I don’t know how you could even run them in that time. The annual figure for beer is 67.2 litres a person – a slightly meagre bath. Research by the Drinks Business, which has a vested interest, forecasts that, by 2018, wine consumption in Britain will be, on average, 24.6 litres a head. If you were to bathe in that, it would barely reach your hip bone.
How about water? In the US, a person drank on average 36.3 gallons of bottled water in 2015 – just more than two baths. In the UK, according to the British Soft Drinks Association, each person drinks just 40.6 litres a year, or half a bath, and uses approximately 150 litres of tap water a day – another two baths full. Presumably, one of those is for their actual bath.
According to the British Coffee Association, Britons drink 55m cups of coffee each day. Assuming each cup contains 250ml, all those cups would fill 171,875 baths. Which means that British drinkers get through 63m baths of coffee every year, or just under a bathful (approximately 79 litres) a person.
Thought of like that, your daily caffeine hit becomes a lot less appealing. Forget recommended daily allowances, how about a recommended yearly bathtub?
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