SaunaScape

Photo by Crossett Library Bennington College on Flickr

A common claim is that sweating in a sauna will help rid your body of toxins. It is a common claim of infrared sauna manufacturers and the sauna-based “purification rundown” is a mainstay of Scientology. However, many other experts say that using a sauna to detox is hogwash. Yes, a sauna will expel metabolic wastes, but there is no chance that you can excrete any environmental toxins in a sauna.

A study is now underway at Bastyr University near Seattle, Washington to study whether sauna use can cleanse the body of toxic chemicals.

Dr. Jason Allen is the lead researcher in the study. He notes that there are over 200 synthetic chemicals that are detectable in human umbilical cord blood. Accumulations of these chemicals can cause cancer, obesity, infertility, heart disease, birth defects and other illnesses and developmental issues. At present, science has no proven mechanism to remove these toxins from the body.

In an interview with a Seattle-area radio station, Dr. Allen said “Products are out there that slowly degrade in the environment and accumulate in humans, particularly in fat. So in this study, we picked one chemical that’s detectable in 100 percent of the human population, in fact 100 percent of the mammalian population, and those are PCBs.”

PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls are industrial chemicals that were commonly used in electrical components. PCBs were banned in the US in 1979 and worldwide in 2001. The pesticide DDT has been banned since 1972, but Dr. Allen notes that DDT compounds can also be found in 100% of the population, even those born years after the ban.

For his study, Dr. Allen built a special sauna that combines both a traditional sauna stove and radiant heating panels. Three groups of otherwise healthy people who are not using any other detox regimen will be studied for three weeks. One group will use the sauna five days each week for two hours. A second group will use the sauna three days a week for one hour. The third group is a control and will not use the sauna at all.

Throughout the study, the sauna using groups will be monitored for health, their mood, and blood samples will be taken to monitor PCB levels in their blood.

Dr. Allen does not expect the sauna to cause people just to “sweat out” the toxins. He expects instead that the sauna will help break down fatty tissues that store these toxins which will then allow the body to expel them through normal means.

If you live near Seattle and want to be part of this study, you can find more information on the Bastyr University Website.

A common claim is that sweating in a sauna will help rid your body of toxins. It is a common claim of infrared sauna manufacturers and the sauna-based “purification rundown”...

From Indexed (with a slight modification)

We saw this cartoon last week on the excellent web comic Indexed, and it got us thinking, about how many people are missing out on the joys of sauna because of poor body image.

We started a poll here in March 2010 asking you what you would do if you encountered a sauna full of naked people. As of today, 87% of you said you would strip down and head in, including 89% of the Americans who responded.

We know our survey is biased, so we looked for some more mass-market validation. American newspaper USA Today has a poll running on its website asking if they would bare it all at the beach. 44% of the 16,000 respondents so far have said yes, and only 41% said no.

That 41% is about the same amount who said that they were unhappy with their bodies in a Glamour magazine survey of 16,000 of their readers from early 2009.

Most detailed and most telling was a survey by French pollsters IFOP. In April of 2009 they surveyed 1000 French women representative of the whole French population to gauge their attitudes about nudity and themselves. One expects the French to be liberal, but the poll results don’t seem to support this.

48% of French women said they are bothered by the sight of another woman’s naked body at a nude beach. 40% were bothered by another woman in a locker room.

When asked what situations they had personally been naked in public before, only 1/3 had ever been naked in a locker room, and only 13% had ever bared it all on a public beach.

The survey also asked the women whether or not they liked their bodies. 52% of French women do not.  Women who liked their bodies a lot were three times as likely to bare it all in a locker room as those who didn’t like their bodies a lot, and were more than twice as likely to have visited a nude beach.

Going back to our webcomic at the top of this post, this French survey refutes her graph. Women over 65 were least likely to go naked in the locker room. Women between 35 and 49 were the most likely (30 vs 36%). However, more than half of all women under age 25 were bothered by the sight of another woman naked in the locker room.

If you know of any more resources on this, let us know in the comments.

We saw this cartoon last week on the excellent web comic Indexed, and it got us thinking, about how many people are missing out on the joys of sauna because...

photo by whoaitsaimz on Flickr

You can’t explore “sauna” on the internet very long without coming across infomercial style weight loss claims: “Lose weight fast! With our new Super Sauna, you’ll be burning up to 600 calories every half hour, all without moving a muscle! Act now! Operators are standing by!”

Meanwhile, the fitness gurus, like Chris Klebba all say “the effects of saunas on weight loss are due to a loss of water from sweating, not actual fat loss. Bottom line, forget it for fat loss.”

So who’s right? Well in a strange twist of science, both of them are wrong! Saunas do help with weight loss by helping the body to equalize the hormones that control our desire to overeat. Interestingly, they also help those who don’t eat enough to eat more. Better still, regular sauna users have better circulation, which can help prevent  atherosclerosis, and reverse the effects of coronary heart disease.

These are conclusions from a 2003 study that was conducted at Kagoshima University in Japan, where a team of researchers studied the effects of thermal therapy on lifestyle diseases. The study began as a test to see if heat bathing could be used as a way to improve the health of patients with congestive heart failure. The team noted improvement in both the symptoms and cardiac function of their subjects after a single session, and continued improvement with additional, regular sessions.

When they examined the underlying mechanism of these improvements, they hypothesized that a similar improvement in the health of paitents with lifestyle-related diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking and obesity could also be improved with sauna therapy.

They tested a group of “at risk” people, who each had one or more of these conditions, and were not receiving treatment for any of these. What they found surprised them. After 2 weeks of daily sauna therapy at 140°F / 60°C, where their body temperature was elevated by 2°F / 1°C for 30 minutes, they found that blood pressure was significantly lowered.

Surprisingly, fasting plasma glucose, and body weight also went down for the group.

To study this further, they repeated the study with a group of 5 men and 5 women. For 2 weeks, they all ate a controlled diet of 1800 calories / day, and each took a single sauna session each day. At the end of the period, all 10 had lost weight, with their collective body fat falling from an average of 42% to 37%.

They did not attribute these results to calorie burn in the sauna, but instead to a better regulation of the body’s hormones that control appetite. They found that during the period, none of the subjects were not hungry as quickly, and did not tend to overeat or snack between meals.

The opposite effect was seen in coronary heart disease patients who were under eating as a result of their disease. Regular sauna sessions improved their appetite, and increased the quantity of food they consumed.

For the infrared marketers out there: Yes, this study was done in an infrared sauna, but they cited other similar research that was done using a hot bath. So these effects are not just for IR Sauna users.

[Clinical Implications of Thermal Therapy in Lifestyle-Related Diseases] via Stephen Colmant

You can’t explore “sauna” on the internet very long without coming across infomercial style weight loss claims: “Lose weight fast! With our new Super Sauna, you’ll be burning up to...