Ben Greenfield

At Coffee and Chill.

Yes, at Coffee and Chill.

The ice tub party.

Yeah.

That's the future of biology.

Yeah.

I mean, like women are more sensitive to cold, like no offense, but generally stereotyping.

They didn't know 100%.

We have lower amount of muscle mass and muscle is a thermogenic agent.

And so women tend to be more sensitive to the cold because of that.

And then if you are in your luteal phase, you're going to produce more estrogen and progesterone.

And both of those can cause a more vasoconstrictive response to the cold.

And the amount of vasoconstriction, you're making a blood vessel smaller, so you're able to heat yourself a little less well if you have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone.

The other thing that can happen is a higher cortisol response, like a higher sympathetic nervous system response.

the question becomes like is any of that going to manifest in any actual issues right it's kind of like theoretical that women have a different response to the cold but is that going to cause your body to like go into starvation mode gain fat get adrenal fatigue you know being sympathetic nervous system stimulation for hours on end

And it's interesting because there's been studies on male versus female response to cold and female cortisolic response to cold.

There was one study of almost 60 men and 60 women, and they exposed them to cold, and they measured a lot of the metabolic parameters that you would expect to be affected by cold, like insulin and glucose and a compound that fat cells make called adiponectin and leptin.

the female versus the male response was different but technically in that studies females almost across the board had a better metabolic response of all of those variables compared to the men so metabolically cold appears to be pretty good for women for things like fat burning sugar stabilization etc and then

There was another study where they did cold exposure for women for 12 weeks.

And for the first four weeks, as a lot of people would tell you, cortisol was spiking in those women.