‘Meat sweats’: Fact or fiction?
By Melinda Wenner Moyer
The idea that consuming a meat-heavy meal can cause people to perspire profusely has been around for decades. Although it is unclear exactly when and where the term was coined, it was popularized in a 2001 episode of “Friends,” when Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani ate an entire turkey, wiped his forehead and said, “Here come the meat sweats.” More recently, in June 2022, the fast food chain Arby’s teamed up with Old Spice to sell a “Meat Sweat Defense” kit, which included a custom roast beef sweatsuit, gym towel, sweatband and a can of deodorant spray.
But is this just clever marketing, or will scarfing one too many roast beef sandwiches really make you sweat like you just ran a marathon?
Research suggests that eating protein does raise body temperature more than eating carbohydrates or fats. Yet there’s little evidence to suggest that this increase is large enough to incite sweating, said Donald Layman, a professor emeritus of food science and human nutrition who studies protein metabolism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So the phenomenon may be rooted more in myth than reality.
Protein warms the body
Some evidence suggests that protein-rich meals turn up the (body) heat, although most studies on the issue are small and from decades ago. In one landmark study published in 2002, researchers from Arizona State University asked 10 young women to eat either high-protein or high-carbohydrate meals for one day and took various measurements, including body temperature. Then, either four or eight weeks later, the women came back to the lab and ate the other meal option. The women’s body temperatures were nearly 60% higher, on average, after eating the more protein-heavy dinner than they were after eating the carbohydrate-rich dinner. Other small studies have suggested that the same thing happens in men.
Protein increases body temperature because your body must exert more energy to digest it, and this work releases heat, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, associate professor of nutritional medicine at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
That’s in part because protein is more difficult to break down than carbs or fats. Protein digestion is “energetically expensive,” said Stuart Phillips, a kinesiologist and director of the McMaster Centre for Nutrition, Exercise and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Our bodies use the proteins we eat to generate new proteins, too — and this process also produces heat, Layman said.
Still, meat sweats may be a stretch
Although protein does warm the body, experts aren’t convinced that eating lots of meat will cause a person to sweat much, if at all.
“Meat sweats are not a thing,” Layman said. In the studies that have been done, he added, “no one has ever reported sweating.”
Protein does increase body temperature more than other macronutrients do, but the relative increase is quite small.
The body temperatures of the women in the 2002 study were only 0.2 to 0.3 degrees higher, on average, after following the proteinheavy diet.
St-Onge said it’s possible that a person might slightly perspire after eating lots of meat, but “I don’t think that people would start sweating profusely.”