A hot bath has benefits similar to exercise
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
No preventative intervention we have in medicine leads to that kind of gains (except maybe quiting smoking).
Articles like this are probably causing harm to the people that read them by discouraging them from exercise [conjecture]. Until I see rigorous mortality data on taking bath, I think I'll stick to my exercise routine...
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/resources/recommendatio... (see 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Report [PDF - 4.5MB])
Even George Jetson would sit around while the computer exercised for him, so I guess we know what's coming in the future.
People who don't exercise simply die young (in their 50s and 60s) and people who are healthy can cling on for decades fully utilizing the range of expensive treatments.
I would agree that a billionaire with predictable medical expenses will more options than a person in any sort of health and likely live longer. Most people in bad health don't have unlimited money thought (simply because most people don't have unlimited money).
I've just found an article about why to do it:
http://www.easy-immune-health.com/magnesium-and-vitamin-d.ht...
Seems like magnesium is needed to convert D to its active form.
Maybe you're somewhere particularly sunny?
I take 5000 IU a day, or 125 mcg.
But even discounting that, the claim that magnesium is "used up" converting Vitamin D sounds, well, wrong. The closest thing I can find to a need to convert vitamin D into an "active form" is the conversion of cholecalciferol to calcidiol and thence calcitriol. The relevant enzymes all seem to be heme cofactors using iron in the heme, not magnesium. I also don't see any peer-reviewed articles looking at magnesium impacts on vitamin D uptake. There's a few old ones (~1991, with some even earlier) that suggest that vitamin D might affect magnesium intake.
It might be that magnesium is associated with the vitamin D precursor enzymes, since magnesium is a fairly widespread inhibitor of certain enzymes (in particular, it looks like it impacts parathyroid hormone, which is also impacted by Ca²⁺ ions in the normal case of action for vitamin D). But if that's the case, it's not that magnesium is being "used up" by vitamin D but rather you need a certain amount of it in your bloodstream to keep your calcium metabolism working.
Vitamin D is currently the only Essential Vitamin or Mineral which appears to have deficiency rates at a similar level to Magnesium, if not greater. The metabolism of Vitamin D inherently is linked to Magnesium. Magnesium levels in the brain can be negatively regulated by an excess of parathyroid hormone (PTH), where PTH causes release of calcium into the blood (being met with an increase of magnesium to retain homeostasis) possibly being a contributing factor to chronic depletion of magnesium concentration in neural tissue. As vitamin D reliably suppresses excess PTH, it may exert neural benefits secondary to preservation of Magnesium levels in the brain.
A Vitamin D deficiency could lead to magnesium depletion (Vitamin D deficency allows excess PTH, releases calcium, depletes magnesium). So in fact, the opposite is the case right? At sufficient Vitamin D levels you shouldn't have to supplement magnesium, assuming no dietary deficiency of it. Right?
So the recommendation for vitamin D+magnesium would basically be "we think you've got low both if you've got low vitamin D, so just take both of them," relying on kidney functions to fix anything you've got too much of.
Also here is a good hyperthermic conditioning article Dr. Rhonda Patrick/Tim Ferriss put together http://tim.blog/2014/04/10/saunas-hyperthermic-conditioning-...
Increased endurance, increased muscle hypertrophy and positive brain effects.
So I read the study for fun and the non-adjusted rates are 3.84% death rate (cohort study) in no exercise vs. 2.35% in 1-30 minutes and 2.08% in more. And that's not adjusted for pre-existing conditions if I understood correctly. So meh. Even though 20% and 20% sounds really great!
I know people who gleefully say 'ice cream burns calories!' while scarfing down a huge portion of desert. It's thanks to these fantasy articles where doing something easy or damaging is the same as exercising or eating healthy.
I feel like many fad diets fit the bill here. It's easy to take something that is healthy for you (eating well) and sell it as an alternative to exercise, when the latter is complementary to the former.
With a very important caveat in the report:
> Because all of the studies in the evidence base were observational epidemiologic studies with no randomized controlled trials, the data cannot prove causality of effect.
People who don't feel that great when they exercise (despite everyone urging them to exercise) are probably not in the best health. The pervasive advice to exercise more will by itself confound the studies, because healthier people will tend to self-select into the "exercise" group.
I didn't find anything there for longer periods of time but odds ratio is not a great indicator if your base chance of dying is already really low. Or maybe spend the whole week exercising to squeeze that last 0.1% out of your chance of dying.
It's not 'my' percentage, nor subjective.
I mean you could argue the study is biased or the sample size too small, but your understanding of percentages seems flawed.
Approximately 5 from the "slobs" will die.
Approximately 4 from the "moderate exercise group" will die.
Approximately 3 from the "forrest gump group" will die.
On a personal level, to me these groups are more or less the same in terms of mortality, but somebody marketed the 20% really well.
If exercise was a drug, they'd never allow it on the market.
Plenty of drugs have much worse efficacy and "numbers needed to treat" figures than exercise.
Current exercise advice is about 30 minutes per session with 3 sessions a week.
And if you break your ankle or break your wrist or elbow when exercising, it'll never be as good as new.
You may break your wrist sure. In the same way that you may get wrist injury from typing too much. Exercise will reduce the likelihood of other injury.
Clearly any error from the self selection you described does not counter an demonstrable mechanism.
Self-selection can completely override other well-understood mechanisms...
Obviously this is not as great as a double-blind study. But you can't let one group do real exercise and the other one placebo exercise. So the cohort study is probably the best possible study design in this case.
The people doing these studies try very hard to minimize biases (sometimes failing, but ruling out every possible biases is hard).
And even your willing to exercise changes during live. It was easier and fun to exercise when was a teenager and so on. Become lot less when gained almost 40 pounds in a month due to medication. Become even less interesting when would get hurt for exercising while overweight. Become a no-go when got a muscle strain for simply going downstairs because a physiotherapist pushed a bit too much and was under muscular fatigue.
I'd prefer to take a bath and have some benefits that fell all that pain again and immobilize my leg and loose what I've earned in the past 4 months.
For those who already like to exercise (or are willing to despite saying "I don't like, just like the benefits", or any kind of wording of this idea), well, this study won't make a difference.
For me, yes, it makes.
Lindqvist PG, Epstein E, Nielsen K, Landin-Olsson M, Ingvar C, Olsson H. Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: a competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. J Intern Med. 2016 Oct;280(4):375-87
Lindqvist PG, Epstein E, Landin-Olsson M, Ingvar C, Nielsen K, Stenbeck M, Olsson H. Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality: results from the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. J Intern Med. 2014 Jul;276(1):77-86
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150223122602.h...
> For all-cause mortality, sauna bathing 2 to 3 times per week was associated with a 24 percent lower risk and 4 to 7 times per week with a 40 percent reduction in risk compared to only one sauna session per week.
I got the reference from Rhonda Patrick who did a summary of this any other research here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWKBsh7YTXQ
A combination of exercise and heat-stress is almost certainly best, but there is probably significant overlap in effect.
Related: the science is far from complete on cold exposure, but cryotherapy (cold air or ice baths) seems to enhance recovery for endurance training, but it strangely reduces progress in strength training, at least if it is done immediately following exercise. There is speculation that cold exposure reduces the post-exercise inflammation response enough to limit the body's repair response. This might not be the case if you do cold exposure outside of the post-exercise window (but this hasn't been studied afaik). Once again all credit to Rhonda Patrick who covers this in one of her videos on cryotherapy.
That makes me wonder how much the 'red wine is good for you' study added to alcoholism.
Of course people will interpret it as they wish but this is interesting research, not "vaccines-cause-x" type of research. For those looking for excuses I'm sure they can find plenty of others already.
I'm waiting for the study that shows binge drinking is good :)
Fasting invokes all your counter-regulatory hormones: cortisol, adrenaline, others but they are the big players - because not having easy access to sugar leads to a stress response.
So it isn't gut rest, it's physiological phase change that is causing the stress response
Thyroid hormone is also going to be implicated somewhere along with a host of other hormones so I have simplified but suffice to say it's shades of grey on the way in and out
The digestive tract may not do anything, but the body gets into "we're fighting possible starvation" mode.
(Because I'm feeling kind I won't even make you groan by asking if the studies were double-blind.)
That's some cult-level wishful thinking.
I'm convinced a decent session has seen off an impending cold on occasions. Presumably by giving my antibodies a home advantage.
We all wish. Binge drinking is great if you want to put on some fat :) Sorry, I have some bad news for you.
The evidence here is unfortunately pretty strong - binge drinking causes all sorts of negative effects, upsetting your metabolism and muscle synthesis.
Population studies of alcohol consumption overall show that even minimal drinking habits (1/day) increase your risk of death from various cancers and issues. It's offset by reduction in cardiovascular deaths until a break-even of about 3/day for men.
Most of these studies are self-reported, based off correlation not causation. Health problems lead some to a reduction in drinking. I'm unconvinced the benefits are real. We just enjoy drinking too damn much.
A standard drink is often much less than what we'll consider a drink. A 20oz pint of some strong craft beer can hit 3 standard drinks. Optimal dosages based on a health Canada study were 0.25 drinks for women and 0.5 for men. Enjoy your half-can of beer!
Don't drink for the health benefits. They're at best overstated and, if they do exist, are likely better obtained by doing something we've actually tested for causality.
I know you're joking, but even if you were looking to get fat, there're still better ways to do it.
If your aim was to get hungover, then maybe drinking is the best way, haha.
I would add not only "unable", but "unwilling". Some people don't get any pleasure by exercising, and perhaps having 50% of the benefits of cycling is better than having none.
Personally, I wonder how much of the benefit comes from facing and overcoming that unpleasantness. I feel that must be a part of how exercise engages your mind as well as your body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...
Serious question. With pre- and post phases (changing clothes, shower) and the post-sluggishness, the exercise that you are doing in your free time just to do exercise can be quite an extra time investment.
(no anti-exercise opinion here, but I find it better to combine exercise with commuting or real hobbies)
Studying without exercise would be like studying by only skimming text. It's really not worth the time if you can't understand and retain what you are studying.
Hobbies are for fun. Commuting is for travel. They may involve physical exertion, but they repeat the same movement patterns over and over. You don't exercise all your muscles.
E.g rock climbing is hard but doesn't exercise any pushing movements. Which can become a problem when only one set of muscles is trained.
Good exercise will not only make you fitter in a generally useful way, but help you fix problems like flexibility or posture. I.E we are trying to fix your weaknesses, not just cater to your strengths.
I've never been able to motivate myself to do that when I'm not forced to.
I seriously doubt, however, that that is an actual trade-off being made in real life. As in, no one I know or have ever met is _actually_ making that trade-off. I've known people that claimed similar reasons for not exercising regularly, but the reality is that they just don't want to -- not that they are making a conscious trade-off based on opportunity cost.
Reality: Most people are probably better off taking 1-1.5 hours of low quality work/fucking around on their computers and use it to exercise instead.
Because she can't find 30 mins per day (or less) not devoted to programming skills or other stuff, to do exercise?
Does the question takes into account the less years of practicing those programming skills because of earlier demise due to bad shape?
If yes, please name the type of effective exercise that you can complete in 30min, including preparations and clean-up afterwards. Really curious.
(Commuting and hobbies that are not for the sake of doing exercise don't count because they were already mentioned.)
Yes, and I find it wrong.
I'm not sure what "preparations" and "clean-up" afterwards you imagine, sounds like excuses not to do any or overthinking it.
It can be just doing some sets of repetitions of body only exercises, without any equipment to put out (a towel on the floor will do). Or a jogging run -- no preparations, just putting on your running shoes and a shower afterwards. Or dancing around in your room. And countless other ways (e.g. getting some gym equipment, a stationary bike, etc).
One showers at the end or start of the day (or should) anyway, and that doesn't have to take more than 5 minutes. And 30 minutes, or even 15-20 minutes, of exercise per day is more than enough to see health benefits.
In fact: "For most healthy adults, the Department of Health and Human Services recommends these exercise guidelines: Aerobic activity. Get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity".
It was one of the most important lessons I learned at the time because I had gone through a year or so of no real exercise and when I started again everything became so much easier.
I get that other people enjoy it. Wish I did, but I hate it. The only choice of activity that makes physical work bearable for me is some sort of tangible payoff - I can work hard building things. Some of my heaviest physical activity is carpentry and light construction. I still don't enjoy it, but working towards making something is enough payoff to make it worth it. For this reason, I do quite a bit more of that sort of thing than is probably normal for a desk jockey. I also walk about two miles a day, just two and from work.
For whatever reason, my brain wiring doesn't see "vaguely feeling a bit better in three months, maybe living an extra year or two when everything is falling apart anyway" as sufficient.
The puritans can start on with the you-weren't-raised-right judgements now. I've heard it before.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: If done at a proper relative intensity, everyone finds exercise extremely unpleasant in the moment. It's why we give up on planks, wuss-out on an uphill run or climb, back off the pace, listen to music, blab with others, skip the next rep, try to squeak out a few extra seconds before the next interval, and all sorts of other distractions while exercising. So your friends are BSing themselves or not working hard enough.
What people actually enjoy is the feeling of accomplishment that comes after the fact, getting out in nature, or the validation of being in shape, being able to cheat more on meals... basically all the side benefits. It's fine that you don't want to do whatever you prop up in your head as "extremely unpleasant" exercise... just stay active like you are already doing. But please, cut out the mental baloney that you're some special snowflake because you find exercise unpleasant... we're all feeling the pain here.
Are you positing that everyone hates exercise to the same degree? I don't buy it. It's pretty obvious some people enjoy running. It's also pretty obvious some people hate it. Why should running be any different in that way from Brussels sprouts?
The other poster already addressed this, but I'll add: this is the sort response that always comes up.
It clearly costs different people differently, in terms of mental energy and willpower. This "we're all feeling the pain here" is a vaguely polite form of the sort of "just suck it up, wimp" response that I've come to expect.
Comparatively speaking, we are all wimps anyway. A Kenyan elite marathoner can run my old mile PR twenty-six times over. An elite powerlifter reps out my squat max for a warmup.
Which is why I said "proper relative intensity." If 10 pushups for you scores a four on the pain scale, but 100 pushups for me scores a four, then you do 10 pushups while I do my 100, and we both feel the same amount of "extremely unpleasant" feelings together. Both of us gain in terms of adaptation to capacity for work and pain tolerance.
I'm not sure what you're envisioning in your head as "extremely unpleasant" pain, but the saying goes that you don't have to train AT your max to UP your max. Exercise done at relatively comfortable levels of pain will still produce positive adaptations. That's why Couch->5K is so successful, it basically starts people off walking instead of running. But again, I don't care if you dance, run, row, lift, bike, hike, walk, whatever... it sounds like you are staying active already, which is great.
As it happens, I dislike exercise as well, and it's not because it hurts. (As you point out, it doesn't have to hurt.) It's because it's unpleasant in a lot of ways, it's boring (no matter what exercise I try), and I don't get anything else out of it. I don't enjoy being out in nature, I don't get a feeling of accomplishment from moving around, I don't feel better afterwards. This is true for exercise at any intensity level. As it happens, my life is active enough to keep me fit without extra exercise, but if I had to dance/run/row/lift/bike/hike/walk/roller skate/rock climb/ski/anything in order to stay healthy, I'd dislike it. That's just how it is. Some people do not like physical exercise, period.
I exercise nearly every damn day, and I find it UNPLEASANT. Of course it's unpleasant! My brain screams at me to just sit down and sleep.
But exercise, if anything, is a mental challenge. The brain screams at you to stop, but your body, deep down, wants and needs to move. So I make myself do it, and OP makes themselves do it.
I'm shocked that OOP doesn't seem to get any exercise-euphoria. That high is absolutely worth it.
> Your body WANTS to move around. There has to be some sport or physical activity you enjoy!
I had a roommate that refused to shower for a week when we ran out of gas because he couldn't even bear the thought of a single 30-second cold shower.
I hate every moment of exercising, but as soon as I'm leaving the gym, it doesn't matter anymore and I'm glad I did it. Even if I wasn't glad, it's necessary for my health. Tough potatoes.
I don't think anyone is surprised that people hate exercise. That's why a tiny portion of the population exercises daily, and everyone else has excuses for why they can't, like "it's particularly unpleasant for me, you just don't understand."
Saying no to another donut also sucks, but that's not a very good reason to eat donuts.
In my experience, plenty of people are surprised when I tell them there is no form of physical activity that I enjoy for its own sake. They start listing activities ("but what about skiing? Playing soccer?") and they seem genuinely surprised when I say that no, in fact, I really don't enjoy any of those things.
I don't understand their surprise either, but there it is.
Once you are middle-aged (and even before for many people) it is much more than "vaguely feeling a bit better". Without reasonable muscle-tone and fitness your joints will ache every single day and you will begin losing mobility and getting injured more easily.
I hate exercising. I do it because it is too costly not to.
The difference between 39 and 46 at the same apparent level of non-fitness is shocking. Stuff hurts that never did before.
Getting and staying in shape is key after 40.
It's not the admission that's problematic. It's that, until said magic bullet is found, this mindset leads a person nowhere health wise...
Hard or not, that's a bad attitude in life in general. Instant gratification seldom got people places...
Anything important has a "poor reward system". General education for one. Better eating. Advancing at a career. Playing a musical instrument.
When I cycle for fun/exercise, with a heart rate monitor, I've burned (an estimated) as many as 650 calories in a half hour. A "normal" ride is typically closer to 800-1,000/hr. According to this chart[1] - a 150lb person cycling at a "moderate" pace would burn 563 calories.
In the study, people sitting in hot tubs for an hour burned about 150 calories per hour, which is about 2x what you'd expect to burn during an hour of sleep.
According to the study, sitting in a hot tub for an hour is more like 25% of the (calorie burning) benefit you'd expect from an hour of moderate cycling, and just under 20% of the benefit you'd expect from an hour of vigorous cycling.
Its 50% the caloric benefit of walking which seems a pretty low bar.
For my workouts, I've found sprints and lifting weights on the heavy side to be great because my body spends a lot of energy rebuilding that muscle for a day or two after.
I'd be surprised if baths can change your resting calorie burn rate but I could see them improving circulation and heart health. People should probably still exercise though. Heh, finally I have an excuse to get that jacuzzi in the living room...
No, that kind of exercise is what you do to assure that you are maintaining muscle in a deficit; not having that kind of exercise and having a calorie deficit is how you lose muscle instead of fat.
Couldn't this be a result of not exercising? It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that people who've made exercise a habit generally seem to enjoy it more.
My inspiration is simple [0]. Ultimately, I'm in control of how I look and feel. Exercise sucks - but it's the best way to keep myself looking how I want to look. That's the only motivation I need to suffer through it.
Exercise is tiring enough as it is (that's the point). You should at least find something you enjoy, otherwise it's even more likely that you won't do it.
The gym is a few minutes up the road, I'd jog but it's on an incline - terrible for the knees.
Scan in, get changed, throw some weight around, wipe off the sweat (not enough time for a full shower), leave. It's convenient enough and something I've managed to stick with long-term.
The only way I've found to keep myself in shape is to find activities I enjoy. For me it's dancing and rock climbing. But I had to try a bunch of things to discover that. I never imagined I would like dancing before I tried it.
Also, not everyone responds equally to exercise. Some people improve much faster than others. Some people see no progress at all unless they exercise at high intensity. Understandably it's harder to get motivated if you see little progress. I'm lucky in that, while I'm not athlete material, it's not super hard for me to gain muscle and improve my cardio.
See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/fitne...
I would find running without music to be frustrating and boring. Although, after about 15-20 minutes, I just drift off into thought-land and kinda forget that I'm running, so maybe it'd be doable. I guess that's runner's high/endocannabinoids for ya.
I find weightlifting less fun but it's SO healthy (and quick) that I push through and do it anyway.
I always enjoy having exercised.
Do you have a source for this? Sounds interesting.
I would assume OP means by "feedback" the constant ripping and tearing of meat and incessant chewing of highly fibrous plants and vegetables.
It’s a bit of a misnomer, actually. It was identified in e. coli as molecularly central to their response when exposed to immediate stress, such as going from 32 C to 40 C, but also on exposure to UV, or cold?, pH change, salinity change etc
Basically it’s bacterial-molecular version of calling 911. But because it was first identified by heat shock experimental condition, that’s what it was named.
Did the author just read about "heat shock protein" in humans and assume it was related how gene expression changes in human cells when body temperature is elevated 1 degree C? Or was it mentioned in the primary literature they are summarizing...
Where I live (North central Idaho, at an elevation of 2,500 feet), new houses were being built without air conditioning 10 years ago, because it typically didn't get hot enough in the summer to justify it. Our summers are getting hotter, so that's changing, but here that change has occurred in the past 10 years.
Many people still live without A/C on much of West Coast (Oregon, Washington and BC), so long as they live in a temperate climate near the water there's rarely a need.
So, living in a house where the temperature is A/C controlled at 75°F in the summertime, isn't going to be too different than living in a climate where summertime temps don't often get above 75°F.
There are a lot of things that may be bad for us as individuals but necessary to our society.
Seems to me not to be a replacement for exercise, a healthy diet, and good sleep. Maybe as a supplement. Or maybe for someone who is injured or old or has limited opportunity.
Unfortunately good scientific work along these lines very often lead to headlines that lead people to think: wow this is like a shake-weight but there's a science paper proving it.
There's no replacement for hard work.
Not yet for physical health. But that saying kind of annoys me in a general sense given that the majority of technological advancement has specifically been to replace hard work we don't want to do. So there's good reason to believe a technological solution for physical health that doesn't require hard work will exist some time in the future.
Just because we want something is not a good reason to think that it's possible.
As I understand it, the health benefits of hard work are currently believed to be an integral part of that hard work. And, they're at least somewhat localized to whatever systems are doing the work.
Or from another perspective, weight machines and indoor air-conditioned treadmills are your technological solution.
Similar to how biking uses the same inputs as walking, but makes it more efficient. So if your goal is to get somewhere as efficiently as possible rather than walking in and of itself being the goal, you're going to bike instead. Then comes along the car and you're no longer constrained to the natural capabilities of your body in order to travel, and it's a whole new ballgame.
Exercise has a lot of health benefits because it causes things in the body. From stretching things to tearing muscle fiber to causing your body to generate and release different hormones and steroids (and many, many other effects).
The technological solution the OP wants is something which simulates the effects of exercise on the body but without the exercise itself. Such as nanomachines that can be designed to stress test different components of the body and keep them active or that cause the same types of micro-tears in muscular tissue that weight lifting does. As we learn more about the body, and we make smaller and smaller machines that are capable of operating from within the body, we can leverage those machines and that knowledge to directly maintain an ideal state of fitness regardless of externalities such as an individuals predilection or capacity for the level of working out needed to maintain that ideal state.
It seems those among us (Mr. Money Mustache comes to mind) willing to live life the old-fashioned way: biking to work, mowing lawns manually, avoiding social media and eating home-cooked food are doing better than those of us early-adopting every technical solution under the sun.
But, that is considered "woo" by a lot of people. I am sort of annoyed at the heat molecules explanation at the end of the article. Like, we can't just admit that maybe our own body's mechanism for taking out the trash matters when it gets pumped up to a higher rate? That is too...weird? or something?
If you think you can't do a freezing cold shower, you'd be surprised. Start off luke warm and just keep lowering it little by little. Before long you'll have the water all the way on cold.
Once it's cold I try to do 2-3 minutes on front, back, left and right.
This will get the endorphins flowing and is good for weight loss. I've also read that it will release something in your body that tells it that it needs to start burning fat reserves, which makes sense given our history.
[1] https://twitter.com/WeeMissBea/status/843888937659744257
An ebook reader in one of those waterproof device bags might work. You'd need one with a resistive screen or all hard buttons, though.
Like the hot bath study, these were limited to very specific populations (Finnish). I have yet to see studies of hot bath or saunas on different ethnicities or different locations.
At the end of the day though, nothing beats regular moderate exercise. It's the only lifestyle that has no side-effects, cheap, accessible to everyone anywhere, and with demonstrated short-term and long-term effects. Walk, run 5k, hike, bike to work, your heart and your family will be grateful!
I think there's a huge qualitative difference between the two - breathing the outside air (and absorbing the sun if I'm lucky) probably do much more to improve my health and outlook than the simple calories burned.
On a serious note though, I've always known how good I feel after a nice 30-60 minute soak so I'm not entirely surprised. But I'll be sure to keep the water temp up from here on out though. I've grown accustomed to a "nice and warm but not excessively hot" setting. Come to think of it, 40 C (104 F) might be where I'm at already--that doesn't sound like a crazy high number. Perhaps it's time to take things to the next level and install a bath thermometer along with measuring my body temp pre and post bath.
A recent 30 year prospective study showed that lifelong sauna use reduces cardiovascular-related and all-cause mortality; however, the specific cardiovascular adaptations that cause this chronic protection are currently unknown.
A coal powerplant would produce ~ 8-10 pounds of CO2 to heat a bath, 3.5x more than a shower.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c7/page_50.shtml https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Was that reduction in blood pressure seen after the bath or only while in it?
If after, how long after?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was lower blood pressure while lying still in a bath compared to while performing vigorous exercise. But what about after?
The comparison to exercise is quite misleading.
1: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2007/03/5541/hot-tubs-hurt-fertili...
If blood flow to your limbs is impaired, your limbs can't process insulin very well.
Given this view, anything that promotes circulation is going to help diabetes.