A breath of fresh air to help prevent diabetes
Cooling the body by a few degrees can help fight problems with weight and type 2 diabetes, study finds
Opening a bedroom window at night to bring down the temperature could help prevent obesity and type 2 diabetes, an Oxford academic has suggested. Professor Ashley Grossman said there was mounting evidence that cooling the body even by just a few degrees was beneficial for health. His comments were made after a study by Dutch scientists appeared to find a link between global warming and diabetes.
OPENING your bedroom window at night to allow in a cool breeze could be a simple, if chilly, way of preventing obesity and type 2 diabetes, an Oxford University academic has suggested.
Professor of endocrinology Ashley Grossman said there was mounting evidence that cooling the body even by just a few degrees was beneficial for health. His comments were made after a study by Dutch scientists appeared to find a link between global warming and diabetes.
The researchers suggested that a one-degree celsius rise in the average living temperature could lead to 100,000 new cases of diabetes in the US each year, because the body needed to burn less brown fat to keep warm, leading to insulin sensitivity and weight gain.
Prof Grossman said the study supported the “keep cool” theory of decreasing diabetes and obesity. “There is some rather encouraging evidence that cooling the body, even by a few degrees, may improve or reduce diabetes,” he said. “Living in a cool environment may be useful to increase insulin sensitivity and ward off diabetes.
“Together with work indicating that adequate sleep can also help avoid obesity and diabetes, maybe we should all aim have a good night’s sleep in a cool bedroom with the windows open to the night breeze.”
A recent study by Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands advised turning the thermostat down to between 15C and 17C for several hours a day to keep weight down. Experts claimed that because we spend so much time indoors, often in overheated homes and offices, our bodies do not naturally burn calories to keep warm.
Simply being colder raises the metabolic rate – the speed at which calories are burnt – by 30 per cent, and shivering can burn around 400 calories an hour as it increases the metabolic rate fivefold. The research by Leiden University Medical Center, which was published in BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, set out to investigate if global increases in temperature were contributing to the type 2 diabetes epidemic. Nearly two thirds of Britons are overweight or obese and some 3.6 million people have diabetes, most of which is type 2.
Researchers looked at temperature data and diabetes incidence in 50 US states, as well as the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. They found that on average, per one-degree celsius increase in temperature, type 2 diabetes incidence increased by 0.314 per 1,000.