Could Turning Down the Heat Help you Lose Weight?

Want a cost-effective way to shed some pounds? Try just lowering your heat. A new study suggests that colder temperatures at home help people burn more calories in order to protect their health.

"What would it mean if we let our bodies work again to control body temperature? We hypothesize that the thermal environment affects human health," Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of Maastricht University Medical Center in The Netherlands said, via a press release.

For the study, researchers looked at the positive things lower temperatures do for our bodies.  For their research, they looked at a Japanese study that showed a decrease in the body fat of older individuals who spent two hours per day at 17 C over a six week period. They also found that after spending six hours a day at 15 C, people tended to be more comfortable in colder environments but were still able to activate and destroy dangerous fat cells.  

"Maximal thermal comfort in the built environment may increase our susceptibility to obesity and related disorders, and in parallel requires high energy use in buildings," Lichtenbelt and his co-authors concluded. "Letting our body spend more energy to maintain thermal balance may positively affect health on a population scale."

At the end of the study, researchers were curious if health facilities, particularly those addressing issues of overweight and obese individuals, should change their temperature settings if it might benefit patients.

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism.