nigma
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from: Human Bodies Have Steadily Grown Colder Over The Past Century, Evidence Shows
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Human Bodies Have Steadily Grown Colder Over The Past Century, Evidence Shows
MIKE MCRAE
9 JAN 2020
For more than a century, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit – 37 degrees Celsius – has been used as a landmark of human health. We've suspected for a while now that the number needs adjusting, but a new study shows it's not for the reasons we thought.
...
"What everybody grew up learning, which is that our normal temperature is 98.6, is wrong."
...
To find out, the researchers dug through the medical records of nearly 24,000 Union Army veterans following the US Civil War to work out just how hot we ran around a century ago.
These numbers were then compared to around 15,000 records from an early 1970s national health survey and 150,000 records from a Stanford clinical data platform representing the early 2000s. In total, the team had details on more than half a million individual temperature measurements.
Sure enough, there was a clear, significant difference over time. Temperatures among those living at the end of the 19th century were slightly warmer. Men born in the 2000s, for example, were 0.59 degrees Celsius cooler than those born in the early 1800s, representing a steady decline of 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade.
The drop was similar for women, with a drop of 0.32 degrees Celsius since the 1890s.
...
Since it's unlikely that thermometer technology or methods evolved at a rate that would explain this steady drop, we're free to ask whether something about our own bodies – or our environment – caused temperatures to slip south.
"Physiologically, we're just different from what we were in the past," says Parsonnet.
"The environment that we're living in has changed, including the temperature in our homes, our contact with microorganisms and the food that we have access to. All these things mean that although we think of human beings as if we're monomorphic and have been the same for all of human evolution, we're not the same. We're actually changing physiologically."
Improvements in health and nutrition could be a fruitful place to search for an explanation. Our increasing body masses would push metabolisms into warmer categories, but inflammation is linked closely with variations in body temperature, and a decline in chronic infections just might explain why we're a little less feverish.
...
This research was published in eLife."
***
AKA more and more people are becoming hypothyroid.
***
Human Bodies Have Steadily Grown Colder Over The Past Century, Evidence Shows
MIKE MCRAE
9 JAN 2020
For more than a century, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit – 37 degrees Celsius – has been used as a landmark of human health. We've suspected for a while now that the number needs adjusting, but a new study shows it's not for the reasons we thought.
...
"What everybody grew up learning, which is that our normal temperature is 98.6, is wrong."
...
To find out, the researchers dug through the medical records of nearly 24,000 Union Army veterans following the US Civil War to work out just how hot we ran around a century ago.
These numbers were then compared to around 15,000 records from an early 1970s national health survey and 150,000 records from a Stanford clinical data platform representing the early 2000s. In total, the team had details on more than half a million individual temperature measurements.
Sure enough, there was a clear, significant difference over time. Temperatures among those living at the end of the 19th century were slightly warmer. Men born in the 2000s, for example, were 0.59 degrees Celsius cooler than those born in the early 1800s, representing a steady decline of 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade.
The drop was similar for women, with a drop of 0.32 degrees Celsius since the 1890s.
...
Since it's unlikely that thermometer technology or methods evolved at a rate that would explain this steady drop, we're free to ask whether something about our own bodies – or our environment – caused temperatures to slip south.
"Physiologically, we're just different from what we were in the past," says Parsonnet.
"The environment that we're living in has changed, including the temperature in our homes, our contact with microorganisms and the food that we have access to. All these things mean that although we think of human beings as if we're monomorphic and have been the same for all of human evolution, we're not the same. We're actually changing physiologically."
Improvements in health and nutrition could be a fruitful place to search for an explanation. Our increasing body masses would push metabolisms into warmer categories, but inflammation is linked closely with variations in body temperature, and a decline in chronic infections just might explain why we're a little less feverish.
...
This research was published in eLife."
***
AKA more and more people are becoming hypothyroid.
