We’re suffering through the first heat wave of the summer where I am, and the tendency is to try to cool off by heading for cooled buildings with a cold drink in hand.
Someone mentioned to me that the proper response to hot weather, though, is hot food, because it causes you to sweat more, thus cooling you. Is this true? Will both spicy and warm food work?
Also, these 35-degree-plus days with high humidity are relatively uncommon when spread across the whole year here in Toronto, and we remain uncomfortable during them. It I were to move to someplace where this kind of weather is usual, for a period of years, would I become acclimatized to heat and humidity?
I know that sometimes I can take a hot shower and feel cooler afterwards, only because the hot air outside is still cooler than the hot water I’d been under for 20 minutes.
But if that theory is true (that you’ll sweat more), I still wouldn’t do it, because it’s humid here. Sweat doesn’t dry off, it stays on your body getting sticky and gummy and yucky, making you feel hotter. I’d prefer to sweat much less in this weather. JMHO, though.
Well I’m sweating like a pig and it certainly doesn’t seem to be cooling me off too much. If I could sweat ice water, that might be different!
The idea of sweat, as I understand it, is that it cools you off when it evaporates. Sweat evaporates much more slowly in humid weather, and I doubt that an increase in the amount of sweat would speed up the evaporation. I would guess that the rate of evaporation would depend on the temperature and humidity of the air (as well as of your body, but that’s pretty much a constant), and that in the scenario where your sweat is just sitting on your body, making you all wet and sticky, there would be no advantage to sweating more. If your sweat is simply evaporating away, leaving you dry and still hot, then maybe you’d want to sweat more.
You really never get acclimated to the heat we have in the SE of the USA. (By 35 degrees, I assume you mean Celsius.) However, you sort of get “used to it.”
Sweat cools you off by 3 mechanisms: conduction, convection, and evaporation. Radiation also cools you off. However, by far the greatest cooling effect is by evaporation, and that will depend upon the relative humidity. (“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity.”)
I live in Charleston, SC and it has been in the 90s for weeks now, but I love it. Sure beats the cold and snow you have in Canada.
The connection spicy food - hot climate has to do with masking the taste of rancid meat. Note that all food from northern climates is more bland, whereas food from around the equator is the most spicy, no matter where you are in the world.
I have lived in a hot (but dry) climate for three years. Moving from Sweden to the south of Spain really knocked me out the first summer. ALL of July and August is way into the F90’s at midday and rarely go under F75 at night. Seville has the all time worst climate, where day-time temps often stay around F105 for all of august, with very high humidity on top (special case, rest of So Spain is dry). It was during my 2nd summer I started to hate a/c. Going in and out buildings, going from 65 to 95 over and over again. I could deal with either, but not the constant change.
And the third summer I was just fine. I even started wearing a sweater at night, when going out, during the summer, in case there was a cool breeze. So yes, at least in my own personal case, I got used to it.
Cold (as in ice cold) drinks are not so good. Try to have them at (normal) room temperature. Drink lotsa water. If you get thirsty, it’s too late. Start the day with a pint of water and then keep sipping. Three showers a day at least. No tight clothes, let are circulate over your skin. Stay in the shade.
Writing from a Sweden which today, on the 4th of July, had constant rain and F55. I’ll take the heat anytime.
Yep, I grew up and live in Brisbane, Australia and I love the heat. Not that I find it comfortable, but it’s home. It means something emotional to me. It envelops you and holds you. It has associations with holidays and Christmas (you Northerners won’t understand that, but there you go). And as long as I can wear the clothes I want (ie very little) rather than the clothes my profession demands, mostly I don’t find it too bad. So I suppose I am used to it.
And now on to the hot shower, hot food and drink thing.
The only people I hear this from are people who do not live somewhere hot. It is just absolute tosh. It doesn’t work, any more than hitting yourself with a hammer so you can stop (thereby making your hand feel better) works. It is, in a single word, dumbass.
Drink and eat cold things. It is really very simple physics. If you drink something very cold, your body’s average temperature drops by the weight of the drink over your bodyweight. If you drink or eat something hot, the reverse.
My wife is English. In England, she used to spout nonsense about drinking cups of hot tea to stay cool. I argued with her. She argued back. Then she got here and experienced summer. I never heard that theory ever again, but suddenly an ice dispenser became according to her an essential feature of a new fridge. Need I say more?
And as to sweating, don’t disparage it till you’ve tried doing without it. If you are in a hot place, and you stop sweating, you are in serious, serious danger. You are (quite literally) going to die shortly. Sweating may not appear to be doing much more than make you sticky, but it is working. In Brisbane, humidity over 90% is common in Summer. Yes, evaporative cooling decreases due to high humidity. But it still works. And if it didn’t I would have died a long time ago.
I hope I didn’t give the impression that I was disagreeing with this. I was merely trying to point out that the cooling effect of sweat is unlikely to increase with more sweat if you are already sweating faster than the sweat is evaporating.
No, it was more the two posters prior to you.