Everything you always wanted to know about sweatWhy do we sweat?

Like it or not, we cant live without sweat. Perspiration keeps the body from overheating and short-circuiting. When your core temperature rises much higher than 98.6 degrees F, the hypothalamus your brains thermostat signals the exocrine systems sweat glands to activate. Perspiration rises to the skins surface through pores and evaporates when it hits the air, keeping you cool. We often sweat during exercise, but plenty of other things can prompt sweating, like a hot summer day or situations that make us feel anxious, embarrassed, or mad.

How much do we sweat?

More than you might think: According to the National Institutes of Health, an average adult can produce up to a quart of sweat per day. Children dont start reaching those levels until puberty.

How many sweat glands do we have?

We are born with between 2 million and 4 million sweat glands located all over our bodies except a few places like our lips and ear canals.

Why does my sweat stink when Im stressed?

Remember the Saturday Night Live schoolgirl character, Mary Katherine Gallagher, who would stick her fingers under her arms and then smell them whenever she got nervous? Its likely she was getting a whiff of something strong: Sweat produced when were under emotional duress is made by the apocrine glands, which are responsible for the stinkiest sweat. What exactly triggers stress sweat is still unclear, though scientists hypothesize it is linked to the adrenaline release that accompanies a fight-or-flight situation, serving as an evolutionary and odorous warning signal.

Stress may also cause a vicious circle of sweat: When you notice youre perspiring a lot, it can increase your anxiety what if someone notices my wet underarms? which in turn can make you sweat even more.

What does the scent of sweat tell us?

Sweat may play a role in nonverbal human communication. The sweaty-T-shirt study, for example, conducted by Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind in 1995, found that women rated most pleasant the scent of men whose genes were most unlike their own, ensuring a stronger immune system for their offspring. Talk about chemistry! Sweat can also speak poorly of us: Research published in PLOS ONE in 2013 shows that womens stress sweat can make men perceive them as less confident, competent, and trustworthy.

And a report published in Psychological Science finds that we can detect other peoples emotions, thanks to sweat. In fact, researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands suspect that sweats scent actually makes emotions contagious.

In the study, underarm sweat was collected from men as they watched scary scenes from The Shining and gross-out clips from the TV show Jackass. When women smelled the fear sweat samples, they opened their eyes wide and had a frightened expression. When they smelled the disgust sweat, they grimaced.

Is it possible to sweat too little?

Yes. Sweating too little a condition called anhidrosis can be life-threatening, because the lack of sweat can lead to heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Anhidrosis happens when your sweat glands stop working. It may be caused by nerve damage, burns, certain medications, genetics, or dehydration.

If anhidrosis affects only a small area of your body, its typically not harmful. If you cant sweat from a large area of your body, however, its wise to seek professional counsel.

Do certain foods make us sweat?

Just like hot weather, hot-tasting foods raise your body temperature, affecting the receptors in your skin that tell the nervous system to kick into cool down mode and produce sweat. In addition to five-alarm chili and kicky curries, substances like caffeine, nicotine, and certain prescription drugs can also stimulate the sweat glands. And drinking large amounts of alcohol promotes profuse sweating, too, by

increasing your heart rate and dilating the blood vessels in your skin.

Extreme food-related perspiration is called gustatory sweating, or Freys syndrome. While it is sometimes linked to conditions like diabetes and Parkinsons disease, many cases happen after trauma to a parotid gland the largest salivary glands. When damage occurs, an individual may sweat when he or she is supposed to salivate.

What are the health benefits of sweating?

Aside from its temperature-regulating effect, sweating has been shown in recent studies to excrete toxins, including arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium, as well as rev up circulation and clear the pores.

Researchers have found that exercise is not the only way to reap these rewards saunas can be a part of your sweat-inducing regimen. Infrared saunas, in particular, which heat the body without warming the surrounding air, can provide such benefits as improved circulation and pain relief. Scientists are exploring the use of this therapy in treating health issues like rheumatoid arthritis and high blood pressure.

Still, many experts contend that perspirations key benefit is preventing overheating not ridding our bodies of unwanted pollution noting that sweats detoxification powers are mild compared with that of our kidneys and livers.

Does sweating protect me from overheating?

Not necessarily. In order for sweat to cool us down, it needs to evaporate into the air, and humidity makes that difficult. For this reason, experts warn against overdoing it at hot-yoga studios; when exercising outdoors on a hot, humid day with little-to-no wind; or when sitting in a steam room. The sweating itself isnt dangerous, but humid environments can make it ineffective. You will still sweat a lot! But sweat beading up on your skin and rolling off onto the ground is not helping you to regulate temperature.

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