What to drink on a hot day in order to stay cool? Instinctively, we tend to go for iced teas, lots of water and other cool options. Yet, as it turns out, drinking a hot beverage on the hottest days of the year does have its benefits.
When travelling, one sometimes gets to be surprised by traditions practiced by other countries. It is easy to wonder why people in some of the hottest countries around the world opt for hot drinks at all times of the day. While the fact that boiling your water eliminates most bacteria and other unwanted creatures may play a role in this, there could be another, more physiological reasoning behind it.
Indeed, according to a study from the University of Ottawa’s School of Human Kinetics, drinking a hot beverage on a hot day can help to cool you down, given the right circumstances.
“If you drink a hot drink, it does result in a lower amount of heat stored inside your body, provided the additional sweat that’s produced when you drink the hot drink can evaporate,” Ollie Jay, one of the researchers involved in the study, told Smithsonian Magazine. “What we found is that when you ingest a hot drink, you actually have a disproportionate increase in the amount that you sweat. Yes, the hot drink is hotter than your body temperature, so you are adding heat to the body, but the amount that you increase your sweating by — if that can all evaporate — more than compensates for the the added heat to the body from the fluid.”
We generally tend to see sweat as something bad, as something we want to hide and to avoid as much as possible. However, sweating is one of the natural ways our bodies cool down. When the sweat evaporates from our skin, it takes some of our excessive heat away and thus brings down our body temperature.
Sadly, this practice won’t work under all possible circumstances. In order for a hot drink to cool you down, the sweat produced by your body needs to actually be able to evaporate – when you’re wearing multiple layers of clothing or when the environment or climate you’re in is very humid, this won’t be possible. In that case, a hot beverage will only add heat to your body and a cold drink is a better choice.
