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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 live in Thailand. Don't really see obese people here. It's hot. Very hot.
In the living room I've got the windows closed, no heater yet, and it's 65. In the bedroom the window is open and it's in the 40s. I love snuggling under my pile of blankets, and sleep much better that way than I do in the summer when it's 80 in the bedroom.
Likewise, I despise warm climates. Give me the ice and cold and snow! Mind you I prefer to be warm in those climates, but having the option is important. In Nordic countries many parents leave their babies outside in sub zero temperatures.
This study is interesting, but I'm way more interested in the affect of conditioning and body temp regulation. I grew up in the US and all of houses/apartments always had good temperature control as well as ceiling fans in rooms. I got use to living in places where if the temperature was above say 70F, there was a fan running, the air in a room was circulating.
When I studied abroad in Japan and then moved there I discovered this wasn't the case and constructed a theory that early life conditions on body temp are 'imprinted' in a way. Japanese tend to let rooms run very hot. In the Summer/Winter rooms and trains are kept at about 28C maybe 30C (possibly higher in the winter), and I always found these miserable and always resulted in me sweating. I always noticed though that most other (Japanese) people never had this problem though, even in a room thats almost as hot as a mid-summer day in the winter, people would have 2-3 layers of clothes on and would be fine. I knew I wasn't alone either because in talking to other westerners living in Japan I learned that many of them had the same issue too. The only reason I've been able to come up with was that it had to do with how they were raised early on and the kind of temp. environment they are use to living in.
So I'd be curious to see if these physical effects in the study aren't something that isn't tuned by early conditioning.