Now that we are in August you would think we are adjusting to the hot weather that we are experiencing. At night I have my air-con and a fan on and the cat still insists on jumping up for a cuddle about 6 times a night.
How do we cool down?
After looking at a few internet sites I discovered they had one thing in common and which you will find people doing all over Turkey, a hot tea is deemed necessary to cool down.
Peter McNaughton, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge agrees the whole thing is counterintuitive. “Obviously, a hot drink makes you hotter and a cold drink makes you colder. So why would you want to get hotter on a hot day?” he asked rhetorically.
Without going into the scientific explanation, it is basically that when you eat or drink something hot, receptors on your tongue get that heat signal, and that tells the nerve to let the brain know what’s going on.
When the brain gets the message “It’s hot in here,” it turns on the mechanism we have to cool ourselves off: sweating. Yes, the hot drink makes you hotter … but it does something else, too. “The hot drink somehow has an effect on your systemic cooling mechanisms, which exceeds its actual effect in terms of heating your body.
This is another reason why you see so many people eating chilli peppers in hot countries.
No matter what, my mother always saw a cup of tea as a cure-all for all of lives problems. No matter what the issue was she would say “here, sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea”.
