Essentials: Cold & Heat Exposure for Metabolic Health | Dr. Susanna Søberg

“It's not right. You should not enjoy it. What are the differences in terms of impact short term and perhaps even long term between cold showers, cold plunge to the neck? So that could be in ice water or just very cold water.”

“You don't have to start in a cold shower, you don't have to start in a cold plunge if you're not really ready for that yet. But just exposing yourself to the cold wind has also shown to activate your brown fat.”

“a cold room, or if you have courage for it, you can go out and expose yourself in a cold plunge. Cold showers is also going to do the trick. So you can do different variations of this. Just exposing yourself to various temperatures is going to activate the brown fat because it was involved to keep us in a perfect homeostatic balance regarding temperature.”

“I'd like to talk about your study. It explored not just cold, but sauna and the co-use of cold and sauna as a way to probe metabolism and brown fat and other markers as well.”

“It was really uncomfortable just doing it, but afterwards, As soon as I got up, I felt fantastic. And we went into the sauna and I did three rounds because I just loved it.”

“And for the sauna, my study showed 57 minutes in total per week. And if we also then divide it out on these two to three days and two sessions each day correspond to 10 to 15 minutes.”

“So, the brown fat can be activated as soon as you just change your temperature in the skin. So, going outside in a t-shirt, wearing cooling vests, also studies have shown this for 10 days, it's going to also grow your brown fat. So, you can get more brown fat if you expose yourself to the cold.”