What I love about Dr. Tom Seager is that he came to cold exposure the way engineers always approach problems: a system is failing, so you change the inputs and measure the outputs. His PSA levels were climbing. His doctors had conventional answers. He had a different question — what if the body could regulate this itself, given the right conditions?
That question led him to daily ice baths. And the results — a PSA that dropped to 0.8, testosterone at 1180 nanograms per deciliter — are the kind of numbers that stop you in your tracks. Not because they're magic, but because they reveal something the medical establishment struggles to teach: metabolic health is upstream of almost everything else.
We have multiple conversations with Dr. Seager in the knowledge base — the testosterone deep dive, the Morozko Forge origin story, the deliberate cold exposure protocols. The pattern across all of them is consistent. Cold exposure isn't a treatment for PSA or testosterone. It's a metabolic reset that allows the body's own regulatory systems to function as intended. When inflammation drops, when insulin sensitivity improves, when the body stops spending resources managing metabolic dysfunction — hormones normalize. That's not controversial. That's physiology.
Rhonda Patrick's work on heat shock proteins points to the same principle from the opposite thermal direction. Whether you're applying cold or heat, you're introducing a controlled stressor that forces cellular adaptation. The mechanism differs. The outcome — improved metabolic function, reduced systemic inflammation, better hormonal signaling — runs parallel.
The medical community's response to Dr. Seager's results is telling. His doctor didn't know what to do with a patient whose labs looked like that. Not because the data was wrong, but because the intervention — ice baths and dietary changes — doesn't fit the treatment paradigm. Conventional medicine is built around pharmaceutical interventions with defined mechanisms and clinical trial pathways. "Get in cold water every morning" doesn't move through that pipeline easily.
This isn't a criticism. It's a structural reality. And it's why self-directed health management, informed by good research, matters so much for people willing to do the work.
If your lab results are trending in the wrong direction — and especially if you're in the category where doctors are watching and waiting — cold exposure is worth serious consideration. Not as a replacement for medical care. As a metabolic tool that addresses root causes rather than symptoms. Daily immersion, cold enough to be uncomfortable, long enough to trigger adaptation. Pair it with seasonal whole foods, as Seager advocates, and you're addressing the system, not just the symptom.
Seager's framing of food as information rather than energy is something I find deeply underappreciated. Seasonal eating isn't nostalgia — it's biological signaling. Your body evolved to receive cold temperatures and reduced caloric density in winter as signals to shift metabolic priorities: burn stored fat, reduce inflammation, consolidate cellular repair. When you eat summer foods in January and never experience cold, you're sending confused signals to systems that depend on those seasonal cues. Cold exposure, even in a modern context, may be doing part of what winter used to do automatically. It's not just about the temperature. It's about restoring a signal the body has been waiting for.