Can opening your bedroom window at night and allowing the cool night air to fill your home help ward off diabetes? Well, an Oxford scientists recently suggested it might work, noting that it could be a simple and albeit, a chilly way of preventing obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
Ashley Grossman a professor of endocrinology at Oxford said there is mounting evidence that by keeping your room temperature just a couple of degrees cooler it can benefit your overall health. Professor Grossman said that the research suggests the ‘keep cool’ theory can help curb diabetes and obesity.
Living in a cool environment may be useful to increase insulin sensitivity and ward off diabetes, Grossman noted. He also suggested that sleep also plays an important role when it comes to managing diabetes. He insists that scheduling adequate amounts of sleep that can also help deter obesity and diabetes. “Maybe we should all aim at having a good night’s sleep in a cool bedroom with the windows open to the night breeze.”
A study at the Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands concluded that turning the thermostat down to between 59 F and 63 C for a few hours a day can provide increased opportunities to keep weight down.
Scientists worry that as a consequence of spending so much time indoors, too often in overheated homes and offices that our bodies burn fewer calories to keep warm.
Cooler temperatures help raise the metabolic rate – the speed at which calories are burnt – by up to 30 percent.
Here’s why exposing yourself to cooler temperatures may work. The human body stores two types of fat, white fat, and brown fat. White fat accumulates calories, while brown fat is converted into energy.
Shivering triggers brown fat production. Like an exercise, when you’re cool enough to shiver, you’re muscles secret a hormone that stimulates brown fat. So, the belief runs something like this: by remaining cool, healthy brown fat is stimulated, thus speeding up your metabolism and providing you with an opportunity for weight loss to occur.
So cool down and let the brown fat grow.
