The core tension here is one I've been sitting with for a while. Cold exposure has become a cultural phenomenon, and with that popularity comes inevitable overclaiming. Kevin Bass is right to push back on the weight loss narrative — but the critique, as presented here, risks throwing out something genuinely valuable along with the oversimplification.
The mechanism being debunked is real. Cold does stimulate brown adipose tissue activation. Brown fat does burn calories to generate heat. Huberman and Patrick didn't invent this — it's documented biology. What they understated is what happens next.
Your body is not passive. It doesn't sit quietly while you create a caloric deficit through shivering. It responds. Compensatory hunger mechanisms activate. Studies show a 77% average increase in energy intake following cold exposure in animal models, and a 29% increase in human hunger ratings. Your body wants to return to equilibrium. It will eat back everything thermogenesis burns, and then some. The drive for homeostasis is ancient and powerful. Thinking you can outsmart it with a cold plunge is like thinking you can outsmart sleep deprivation with coffee. Short term, maybe. Long term, the body wins.
Where Bass and I part company is in the implied conclusion. The critique of cold exposure as a weight loss tool is correct. A broader dismissal of cold exposure as a health practice is where the argument overreaches. The cardiovascular benefits are documented. The immune modulation is real — the 2014 PNAS study showing suppressed inflammatory response to endotoxin didn't happen because of thermogenesis. It happened because of systemic adaptation to controlled stress. Mood regulation, nervous system tone, resilience under pressure — these outcomes don't hinge on the weight loss mechanism at all.
Here's what surprises me: this is exactly the same argument we've had about exercise for decades. Controlled trials consistently show that people compensate for exercise-induced caloric expenditure through increased food intake and reduced spontaneous movement. Moderate exercise doesn't reliably cause weight loss either. We don't therefore conclude that exercise is useless. We recognize that weight loss is primarily a nutritional challenge, while exercise delivers cardiovascular health, metabolic resilience, and longevity. Cold exposure deserves the same nuanced framing — same principle, same compensation mechanism, same misattributed expectation.
Don't use cold exposure to lose weight. You won't — not because it doesn't work, but because your body will compensate. Do it because it sharpens your nervous system, supports immune function, and trains your relationship with discomfort in ways that translate across every domain of life. That's the real return on cold. The weight loss pitch was always the weakest part of the argument, and it's done more damage to the practice's credibility than any debunking video ever will.