Quake3World

scared? wrote: Wtf?...is this poorness or are ppl in texas just morons?...

plained wrote:70 day

67 night

hehe

shaft wrote:
I would like to keep it that cold, but the kids would freeze.

Eraser wrote:72F? That's over 22 degrees C! And you people say that's cold?

Eraser wrote: We don't have AC

shaft wrote: I would like to keep it that cold, but the kids would freeze.

shaft wrote:

Eraser wrote:72F? That's over 22 degrees C! And you people say that's cold?

Its cold when its 90F outside and you're in shorts and a tee. In the winter you're dressed for it so keeping it cooler (60's) in the house is fine. Its all relative...

Two new studies concurrently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation last week demonstrate what I've suspected for a long time: brown fat can be 'trained' by cold exposure to be more active, and its activation by cold can reduce body fatness.


It was previously shown that non-shivering thermogenesis is higher in winter than in summer in the same people (1), suggesting that it may be a modifiable trait. As an aside, obese people tend to have low brown fat activity (2)****. The first new study demonstrates that brown fat can be trained to be more active in as little as 10 days, and that this training causes people to become more cold-tolerant (3). The protocol involved exposing people to 60 F (15-16 C) air for two hours on day 1, four hours on day 2, and six hours on days 3-10. Although I assume they were lightly clothed, this is a pretty mild cold exposure.

The second study went further, using a longer cold exposure protocol to investigate changes in fat mass among people with low brown fat activity at baseline (4). Researchers exposed volunteers to 63 F (17 C) air for two hours a day over a six-week period; again I assume they were lightly clothed. As in the previous study, they observed an increase in brown fat activity with cold training, and they found that calorie expenditure was higher when subjects were in the 'cold' air. After six weeks of training, body fat mass had declined by about 5 percent. This is despite the fact that all subjects were lean to begin with!

I think this is pretty impressive, given how wimpy the cold exposure protocol was. Think about it: two hours a day at 63 degrees F. That would seem downright luxurious to a person 100 years ago in winter in almost any temperate climate. Today, most people keep their central heat closer to 70 F in winter, apparently eliminating a major source of passive calorie burning.