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Being Colder May Be Good For Your Health
An anonymous reader writes: If you live in a developed nation, you're probably pretty warm throughout most of the day. Enclosed spaces, thick clothing, and heating devices do a good job to keep the cold away. But this hasn't been the case for most of human history. Even in warmer climates, humans often had to deal with chilly nights and tough winters. That's where our metabolic system evolved, and now people are doing research to figure out if that's a better natural state for maintaining our health.
One recent study found that "when people cool their bedrooms from 75 degrees to 66 degrees, they gain brown fat, the metabolically active fat that burns calories to generate heat." Another showed that "even after controlling for diet, lifestyle, and other factors, people who live in warmer parts of Spain are more likely to be obese than people who live in the cooler parts." The article talks about people letting their house temperatures drop into the 50s and wearing ice vests during the day, all in the name of further research.
One recent study found that "when people cool their bedrooms from 75 degrees to 66 degrees, they gain brown fat, the metabolically active fat that burns calories to generate heat." Another showed that "even after controlling for diet, lifestyle, and other factors, people who live in warmer parts of Spain are more likely to be obese than people who live in the cooler parts." The article talks about people letting their house temperatures drop into the 50s and wearing ice vests during the day, all in the name of further research.
I keep my house at 62F during the winter, and it never ceases to amaze me when my guests demand the heat be turned up. It's as if they don't understand that there are real costs involved when warming a space up. Besides, those who are cold can add any number of layers of clothing, those who are too warm can only strip so far.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Compare typical Thai food to American food.
That, and Asians also have had a few thousand more years of agricultural society compared to hunter/gatherer Westerners. Food grows everywhere and is available year-round, so southeast asian bodies haven't exactly had to evolve the "pack it away for the winter!" approach to carbs.
Honestly, 20ÂC (68F) in normal lifing space and 16/18ÂC (60/64.4F) for the bedroom are already communicated for decades as a good environment. So what is new?
On a side note: I know Slashdot is an US based site.However, Fahrenheit is only used in the US and some territories where you go for holidays. Is it so impossible to at least add the celcius values in brackets?
And exercise is the rest.
The human body is so efficiently optimized to run on as few calories as possible that exercise simply is not effective as a counter to overeating. The calories in a piece of cheesecake would take hours of moderate exercise to burn off. Of course exercise has many benefits, especially in keeping the cardiovascular system in shape which mitigates some of the risks of obesity even if not loosing weight.
I think part of the story is that when you live in the more northerly regions, where seasons are more pronounced, you have to rely more on meat as a food source, and therefore have to process more saturated fat; this, on the other hand, tends to be balanced out by the need to spend more energy on keeping warm - thus it is a great advantage to be able to produce brown fat even as an adult. This may be an adaptation along similar lines as the ability to digest milk - all children can do this, obviously, but adults in cultures that have had no dairy farming generally can't; this is relatively new mutation, something like a fewish thousand years old. Anecdotally, I have noticed how many of my friends from Africa are absolutely freezing when they come to UK, even when I feel moderately warm - they probably have very little brown fat compared to me.
A few thousand years is not enough for significant mutations, but in a large pool of individuals there already exist a wide range genetic variation from previous mutations gathered over longer times. By themselves, these are fairly small, but a period of harsh times can combine and concentrate the beneficial mutations in a smaller group of survivors creating a sudden change in the average genetic makeup.