So many assertions, so few cites, so little thought about the physics.
If you are comfortable, in a room at say 25C, your skin is much warmer than the surrounding air, and is therefore inevitably going to be losing a lot of heat to the surrounding air. But your body can reduce the extent to which it does so by vasoconstriction (we have all felt cold and had our skin on the extremities in particular, feel icy.
Agreed. Absolutely right. That’s why Cecil is wrong.
Cite please.
If you actually check any facts (something few people involved in this debate seem prepared to do) you will find that yes, shell temperature is below core temperature. By a few degrees. this site you will find (check near the bottom of the page) that at an ambient temperature of 9.5C, skin temperature is 28.5C. So even when we are seriously cold, our skin temp is way above external temp.
If you check that site you will also find that it says that vaso constriction is very effective above a nude skin temperature of 19C (which, incidentally, corroborates the cite that Truth Seeker found in the other thread which suggested 20C).
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The key point you are missing here is that the body is producing enormous amounts of heat anyway.
Check out the cite above. You will note that we have to lose 80% of 60 cal/hour per m[sup]2[/sup] of skin area just to get rid of the excess heat generated by the work involved in a desk job.
actually you do lose weight if your body is exposed to cold i.e:
i knew a guy who went scuba diving for an hour and a half in 40 degree F water. Afterwards he lost about 11 pounds.
Welcome to the boards, Bluemoonz.
I know a guy whose dog once pissed on the same lampost as another dog whose owner once drank six kegs of liquid nitrogen and he put on weight.
You never can tell, can you?
Princhester, I see you’ve been trying to fight the good fight here. I stopped paying attention to these threads, thinking the matter was pretty well sewn up. Maybe, if I take time to go thru them, I’ll come up with something new. But, frankly, I don’t see how your detractors are going to be convinced.
I don’t see how your post refute mine. You have yet to show that the body generates excess heat when a person is not sweating. Given that the entire purpose of sweating is to remove heat from the system, so when there is no excess heat to remove, there won’t be any sweating.
If you have a good refutation, I am all ears.
Your point being?
What do you think the point of vaso constriction is? To conserve body heat in a cold environment. If your body generates enough heat, there is no need for evolution to derive such a mechanism.
Yes it does - but not enough in a cold environment. Hence the temperature of the skin drops and people have cold hands and feet in the winter. Your body can only generate so much heat, and it is more important to keep the vital organs functioning properly.
I still haven’t seen any good argument supporting this “excess heat” POV.
The difficulty here Urban Ranger is that I have been involved in this debate for two fun filled pages in the other thread. I had hoped that people would just join in that debate, rather than make me start again. But it seems that is not going to happen.
It would really help me if you and others would read all the cites both here and more particularly in the other thread, learn what they have to say about how the body’s temperature control actually works (there seem to be a lot of urban myths out there) and then post.
The problem with your position is that you seem to be assuming that our only mechanism for heat loss is sweating and therefore if we are not sweating we are not trying to get rid of heat. That is just not true. What about conduction and radiation from warm skin? What about the body’s ability to increase and decrease that effect by vasodilation and constriction?
My point being that your assumption that the body is and can only have excess heat if we are sweating has no logical or actual foundation because as long as skin temp is above air temp we can lose heat perfectly well without.
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We could get into a whole discussion about this and from what you are saying, I don’t think we’d be in disagreement.
Now, to get back to the point, where exactly is your cite saying that upon drinking a reasonably amount of cold liquid, under normal human conditions, our metabolism increases? I seem to have missed it.
Bearing in mind that I have now provided two cites that suggest that below a nude skin temperature of 20C this does not happen or happen much.
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Indeed. And the bit about the cold environment is to be found where in the question the OP actually asked, exactly?
Check out the other thread, and the cites given there. They not only support the argument, they state categorically and quantitatively, the amount of heat that you dump, during normal daily activities.
Race Bannon, I’m about to go away for two weeks so it’s over to you…
The difficulty here Urban Ranger is that I have been involved in this debate for two fun filled pages in the other thread. I had hoped that people would just join in that debate, rather than make me start again. But it seems that is not going to happen.
It would really help me if you and others would read all the cites both here and more particularly in the other thread, learn what they have to say about how the body’s temperature control actually works (there seem to be a lot of urban myths out there) and then post.
The problem with your position is that you seem to be assuming that our only mechanism for heat loss is sweating and therefore if we are not sweating we are not trying to get rid of heat. That is just not true. What about conduction and radiation from warm skin? What about the body’s ability to increase and decrease that effect by vasodilation and constriction?
My point being that your assumption that the body is and can only have excess heat if we are sweating has no logical or actual foundation because as long as skin temp is above air temp we can lose heat perfectly well without.
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We could get into a whole discussion about this and from what you are saying, I don’t think we’d be in disagreement.
Now, to get back to the point, where exactly is your cite saying that upon drinking a reasonably amount of cold liquid, under normal human conditions, our metabolism increases? I seem to have missed it.
Bearing in mind that I have now provided two cites that suggest that below a nude skin temperature of 20C this does not happen or happen much.
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Indeed. And the bit about the cold environment is to be found where in the question the OP actually asked, exactly?
Check out the other thread, and the cites given there. They not only support the argument, they state categorically and quantitatively, the amount of heat generated during normal activities, many as light as “sitting at a desk doing office work”. Where do you propose that heat goes? Or do we all just heat up till we melt? Or do you perspire while sitting at a desk?
Race Bannon, I’m about to go away for two weeks so it’s over to you…
I could be misinterpreting, but I think you meant above a temperature of 20[sup]o[/sup]C. At least, that’s the way I interpreted two posts where you refer to outside links–one being a sd column.
Did I get that?
Sorry, you’re quite right, thanks RM. Above 20C.
With that, I think I’ll retire.