The summer drink: a hot coffee
Summer is an absolutely wonderful time of year. It calls for evenings spent in beer gardens, money to be spent on sunglasses, shorts to become your normal attire and days out at the beach and the subsequent battle against the sand as it tries to claim your bag as its own.
It’s great time, we love it.
But, did you know that in the majority of circumstance grabbing a cold drink to stave off the sun’s rays is a bad move?
It might sound counter-productive, but opting for a freshly brew pot of tea or a long, hot coffee such as an Americano is actually that way to go and, as it turns out, there has recently been some research into this phenomenon.
Basically, to explain the science, it goes a little something like this:
When our body temperature rises – due to exercise or because it’s quite hot outside, we react naturally by sweating – which then evaporates from our skin. This happens because a network of thermosensors located within our skin and other important parts of the bodies sends messages to the brain which then initiates the sweating.
According to the research, it seems that whenever we take a sip of a hot drink these thermosensors then reach and in turn informs nervous system that our core temperature is increasing. In turn, the normal cooling down process is initiated and we begin to sweat.
This works especially well in hot weather because the heat energy gained by the drink is dwarfed by the amount of heat energy naturally expelled from the body. Due to this slightly awesome overreaction – proving that at times it’s brilliant to exaggerate things! – we end up cooler than we did before.
So if you’re feeling the heat, order a longer coffee rather than an iced one and you’ll feel the benefits!