Which would burn more calories?
I’ve always heard hot weather burns more, but wouldn’t bringing up your internal temperture in cold weather offset that amount?
EmAnJ
April 14, 2009, 10:55pm
2
I guess you could burn marginally more in hot weather, but I’d be more concerned with heat related problems from exerting yourself when you’re too hot, be it from high temperature, inadequate dress, improper training, or lack of hydration.
Your internal temperature should remain fairly consistent within a few tenths of a degree no matter what the ambient temperature. If you’re going up or down a degree or two either way, you’re going to have problems.
If you believe recent studies about “brown fat,” you’re better off in cold weather.
In the third study, Sven Enerback, MD, of the University of Goteborg in Sweden, used PET to examine how cold temperatures affected brown fat activity, this time in five people. Participants spent two hours in a room kept at 63° F to 66° F. During the scan, they submerged one foot in ice water, alternating five minutes in the water and five minutes out. The cold conditions boosted the amount of glucose the study participants’ brown fat consumed by a factor of 15.
In an accompanying editorial, Francesco Celi, MD, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., notes that “taken together, these studies point to a potential ‘natural’ intervention to stimulate energy expenditure: Turn down the heat and burn calories (and reduce the carbon footprint in the process).”
This is obviously an oversimplification, Dr. Celi says, but the demonstration that adults have brown fat that can be activated is, nevertheless, “powerful proof of concept” that the tissue could be a target for obesity-fighting drugs or even environmental fat-fighting strategies.