Is cold good for health?

Dr. Wayne Haze

Professor Wayne Hayes of the University of California, Irvine believes that cold is good for health because it helps burn off extra calories and lose weight. He invented and successfully sells Cold Shoulder special vests with ice inside. In one hour of wearing such a vest, until the ice has melted, up to 250 kilocalories is burned.

The idea of ​​Hayes is based on the research of Ray Cronise, a materials science specialist from NASA. He investigated the body's metabolism under the influence of low temperatures, writes The Atlantic.

In 2010, Kronays presented his ideas in a lecture at TEDMED Talks .
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The scientist believes that regular exposure to low temperatures stimulates metabolism and helps burn subcutaneous fat. The ideas of Kronays are often criticized in the scientific community, because freezing oneself is generally dangerous to health. But the author explains that not extremely low temperatures are useful, but approximately in the region of 12-18 ° C.

According to Ray Kronays, the real epidemic of obesity in modern society is also explained by the fact that people rarely are exposed to the cold, and live in comfortable "greenhouse" conditions. This is unnatural in the sense that our ancestors experienced regular temperature fluctuations, depending on the time of year. Over millions of years, the evolution of people was largely determined by two factors: lack of food and cold. And now these factors have suddenly disappeared.

It must be admitted that recently this theory has been increasingly considered in the scientific press. For example, last year, Cell Metabolism magazine published an article by researchers from the US National Institutes of Health about the endocrine response to cold. One of the authors of that work later published a study on the beneficial changes in the metabolism in the human body with a decrease in room temperature from 24 ° C to 19 ° C.

Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, a professor at the University of Maastricht (Netherlands), who also studies the phenomenon of enhanced metabolism when exposed to cold, arrived at similar conclusions.

Another interesting life hack, Ray Kronays uses in everyday life: he taught himself to sleep without a blanket. According to the scientist, blankets were invented at the time when you had to sleep in unheated rooms. Now we heat the houses, but at the same time we continue to use blankets. Kronais is sure that this is just a bad habit.