November 14, 2024

Ice Cream Makes You Hotter or Cooler?

ice-cream-wpWe’ve hinted at eating cooler foods during summer’s peak making you much cooler.  This is, in many people’s opinion and generally speaking, the obvious truth!  But how obvious is it?  Did you know that some cold foods might actually make you hotter?  A very fascinating article that Time recently produced inspired us to drop some interesting tidbits on how certain foods make you cooler or hotter.

Ice cream

We hope you’re sitting down so you don’t faint and hurt yourself when you hear this.  Ice cream makes your body warmer.  Though this popular frozen treat will, at first, cool your mouth off and give the idea that you’re getting cooled, the digestion process will require energy that warms you up.  This ice cream digestion in particular, due to the offset in extreme temperature, will really take some work!  Ice cream has plenty of fat in it that needs heavy digestion.  That type of digestion will get you warmer before you know it.

Now you can be a smarty-pants the next time your buddies ask if you want to cool off by grabbing some ice cream.  But also prepare to become unpopular as ice cream is pretty much universally loved not matter what the temperature is outside or what it’s really doing to your body!

Peppers

Because peppers can make you sweat, these hot foods can actually cool your skin.  We might also add that peppers, especially those sweet ghost peppers, might make you cry.  That would cool off your face!  Maybe that last crying part is a stretch.  But the sweating aspect is completely accurate!

Green Tea

Green tea can warm you up!  How so?  It has thermogenic properties!  Though green tea is traditionally served hot, iced drinks are gaining popularity and this tea seems to always be available at local coffee shops in some sort of cold form.  Frappachinos, iced lattes, you name it!  This TLC guide explains:

“Green tea has… caffeine and catechins, [those] have been shown to produce thermogenesis. Green tea containing caffeine significantly increased thermogenesis by 28 percent to 77 percent.”

You can add that green-tea iced latte to your new list of things you thought might cool you but instead warm you up.

What foods are your go-to munchies when you have to get cooler or hotter?  Let us know on our official Facebook page.  Your body can also experience Austin heating or Austin cooling the easy way: with an HVAC system from the air conditioning pros at CSS!