Why should the fan turn off when it is too hot?

With hot waves everywhere from Japan to England, from Algeria to California, everyone has a lot of cool tips.

But what tips and information can stand before the judgment of science? We have reviewed the evidence to see if you should .

Drink cold drinks instead of hot items

Drinking plenty of water is the right thing to do when a heat wave happens: keeping water in your body to protect your kidneys is essential. However, drinking cold water like ice or hot water is a controversial issue.

The argument to prove the benefits of drinking hot water is that it will temporarily heat your body from the inside. So you will sweat more and that sweat will soothe your heat. The human body can produce up to two liters of sweat every hour and it is an effective way to reduce body temperature from within.

But if the water loss is not replenished, your body will soon become dehydrated - so some people recommend not to drink hot water.

Hot drinks help cool faster, not cold water.

Some people also argue that you should not drink too much tea or coffee because these drinks contain caffeine that causes dehydration. However, there is not much evidence that moderate amounts of caffeine will have a diuretic effect.

It is true that some studies have shown that the thesis of drinking cold water is better. There have been studies that some people have intense exercise and then take body temperature while drinking hot water or cold water, and the result is that cold water is most effective in helping to do cool body.

However, there may be a problem with these findings: that is the method used to measure temperature. Volunteers were given thermometers in the anus. As Ollie Jay, associate professor of thermoregulation at the University of Ottawa, points out, the liquid of cold water goes straight to the stomach, which is located not far from the position of the anal thermometer. Therefore, it is not surprising that the measured temperature seems to drop.

When his team experimented by measuring the temperature with eight thermometers in different places on the body, they found that hot water helped reduce body heat more because it increased the reaction to a grave. foul as predicted.

So hot water helps cool your body more - by making you sweat.

However, there is a case where hot water cannot be cooled: if the weather is unusually humid or if you are wearing too many layers of clothing, the sweat is unlikely to evaporate. In that case, you should use cold drinks.

Conclusion: Wrong. Hot drinks help cool faster - unless the weather is extremely moist .

Use a fan

The wind from the fan blows out to help you feel comfortable. Fan does not cool the air. It only moves the circular air with the goal of creating a cool breeze to increase the effectiveness of the body's normal cooling functions through the convection of the heat from the skin and sweat from the skin. evaporation.

The fan is very widely used. A report also said a case of three sun-hit patients was cooled down by using the wind blowing from a light helicopter rotor.

But the evidence that the effect of the fan is unclear.

Fans are less effective when the air is moist.

The authors of the Cochrane Reviews medical research journal have traveled the world to practice the most accurate experiments, assess them and try to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. different.

When they tried to do this in 2012 with any type of fan, their effort was hampered by not having enough controlled experiments on randomly selected subjects. Instead, most studies are observational. Some of these experiments found that the fan worked while other experiments showed that if the temperature was too high, the fan was a hindrance.

In general, it is assumed that the fan will work if the maximum temperature is 35 degrees Celsius. If it is above that level (some studies suggest 37C or more), blowing hot air into the body can do increased convection heat again, making the situation worse and leading to heat exhaustion. Therefore, if the weather is extremely hot, the fan may increase the dehydration.

Fans are less effective when the air is moist. Although the air is still moving, it is full of water vapor, making it hard for sweat to evaporate.

However, until the controlled experiments on any object are done, we cannot know for sure what effect the fan has - and that kind of experiment is not easy to do. Researchers will need to have everything ready to conduct the experiment as soon as a batch of hot air begins. Even so, they may have to wait several years until the temperature is right.

What we know is that fans are not always a beautiful solution. In the 1999 heat wave in Cincinnati, Ohio, 17 people were killed - and 10 of them were found dead beside the running fan. Of course, what we do not know is whether they will die earlier without a fan or why the victims are fanless because they live in the hottest buildings.

Conclusion : Need more information . but if the temperature is up to 37C, it may be best to turn off the fan .

Only older people need to worry about the effects of heat

It is true that the number of patients hospitalized in the heat waves increases and many of these patients are older people.

The temperature threshold that the human body works best only lies in a narrow range from - 36 to 37.5 degrees C.

When the weather is hot, any age should be careful.

The temperature-sensing organs throughout the skin, deep under the muscle and organs can immediately notice if the temperature is only 1 degree Celsius. If the ambient temperature is higher than the body temperature, we Will start sweating to cool.

When blood is pumped more to the hands and feet, our body also radiates heat - that's why these parts feel so hot at night. Both ways of regulating this body temperature make the heart work harder, which is why older people sometimes have heart failure or heart failure.

And unlike the impact of cold air, in hot weather this phenomenon occurs quickly: most deaths occur within the first 24 hours of the heat wave.

Another problem is that older people often have difficulty maintaining body temperature inside their bodies and they don't even realize that their bodies are overheating - meaning they can lose water faster than young people.

However, that does not mean that only older people are at risk when the weather is hot.

Newborn babies and people with chronic diseases are also more likely to experience health problems.

People who have mobility problems too, simply because they will be hard to step to the window to open the door or go to get drinking water to supplement the amount of water that the body lost due to sweating.

If it is hot all day and night, then it is difficult for the body to cool down. The heat wave in Europe in 2003 is estimated to have killed at least 30,000 people, some statistics also suggest that the number of deaths is up to 70,000 people. Of the 15,000 people who die in France, 1,321 people are under 64 years of age.

Conclusion: Wrong. Older people need to be especially careful, but people at other ages need it too .

Open all windows

Opening a window is the first thing most of us do when it's hot. But during the day, this can have the opposite effect.

You should only open the window if the outside air is cooler inside - this is more likely to happen at night. When the weather is really hot, you should close the window during the day. When there is a lot of shade in the room, the air will be cooler. Even if you open a window to help the wind blow into the house or office, but if it is the wind carrying the heat, you will not feel cooler. Not to mention if the amount of pollen in the air is high, the condition of pollen fever will become more serious.

Conclusion: False - if outside air is hotter than indoor. However, at night, opening a window will help you somewhat .

Drink beer

In "Ice Cold in Alex" released in 1958, the character played by Sir John Mills is expected to escape the desert and drink a bottle of cold beer. When he finally did that, he sat at the pub and was served a light beer. Emptying the beer, he said a famous sentence: "Worth to wait".

If it was just a beer, it wouldn't be harmful.

You don't have to cross yourself across the North African desert to get a beer at the end of a hot day. But does it help cool you? Not necessarily.

If it was just a beer, it wouldn't be harmful. In many studies, participants were asked to exercise until their bodies heated up and then researchers compared their recovery when drinking beer, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers. .

In a study in 1985, participants exercised in a hot and humid environment and after drinking beer they encountered a situation of "peak urine" which was not good. It shows that the body is losing, not holding water. However, compared to non-alcoholic beer or low alcohol content, the difference is only surprisingly small.

A recent study showed similar results. Although sports drinks and water are often more effective at preventing dehydration, beer is also more effective than expected. A study conducted in Spain for cases running on 40-minute episodes showed that both water and beer had the same anti-dehydration effect. No one knows exactly why and when we know that drinking beer makes people want to go to the toilet more. There is a hypothesis given, which is because our body wants to eliminate the fluids present in the body to hold the beer.

However, these are only small-scale studies and they do not specifically consider body temperature, so we cannot prove that beer will help cool your body. However, they do show that one or perhaps two small beers may supply water and not dehydrate you. So maybe a beer in "Ice Cold in Alex" is worth waiting for.

Conclusion: Yes - at least if you only drink one or two beers .

1. Simple ways to cool your body in hot days
2. How to cool your body on a hot day without air conditioning