Crazy health benefits of sauna by Dr. Rhonda Patrick
00:00um sauna since you've been here last boy um I've read so much stuff about the sauna about the benefits of the sauna and then you published that thing saying there's a 40% decrease in mortality on basically on everything well I didn't publish it someone else published it but I you I'm sorry you tweeted it about this article sorry I did I wrote an article on some of the health benefits of the sauna and I predicted that I thought it would play a role in longevity based on some other evidence and then this study came out showing indeed that it there is a link between um sauna use and a decrease in all cause mortality so people dying from cancer from cardiovascular disease from a variety of different diseases um and that was like a big decrease right or something yeah so well there was a dose dependent um decrease in all cause mortality so so men that used this sauna once a week compared to those that used it two to time two to three times a week they had a decrease uh 24% decrease in
01:00all cause mortality and men that used it like four to seven times a week had a 40% decrease in all cause mortality so when I say A 40% decrease in alloc cause mortality I mean over the time span that these these men were followed which was 20 years so they're following these men for 20 years they were in their between 50 to 65 um when the study started and those men that had been using the sauna more frequently had a 40% reduction in you know dying from many causes that aren't accidental that's amazing yeah it's super super cool and um you know one of part of there's a lot of things going on with the sauna I just actually the place I'm staying at has a steam shower so I just had a steam shower before I came here I'm all endorphin buzzed and feeling does that work just as good um it's you know it doesn't get as hot as like a typical dry sauna where you know the air is it's like 747 ° F which is Dam hot J Christ that's how
02:00hot they get yeah that's like like in my gym that's that's pretty pretty much the the temperature it's like 170 degrees Fahrenheit so that's hot um steam showers they they get hot and I definitely feel you know my heart racing so what happens when you're in heat is you your heart starts to race like much like cardiovascular exercise where your heart starts to beat like between 100 and sometimes 150 beats like you know so it's like it's pretty fast and um part of the benefit of that is you have increased plasma and blood flow to the heart so the heart's actually doing less work than it normally would do um but that's and that's part of the cardiovascular benefits that are associated with like exercise and sauna use but the sauna in addition to that has other effects so you know heat stress is a stress as is exercise and you know the stress activates all these stress response mechanism is Ms in the
03:00body and and that's really good and that's part of the benefit from exercise it's part of the benefit from any type of you know good stress so heat specifically will activate something called um heat chock proteins so it's a gene that makes something called heat chock proteins and they're a class of proteins that are activated by heat so when you exercise and your core body temperature raises they get activated and heat chalk proteins are pretty awesome because they are able to prevent a certain type of damage that accumulates in our cell from from happening and if you think about the causes of Aging it's an accumulation of damage that's happening in the cell like if you're looking at it at the molecular level the cellular level and part of that damage occurs in proteins that we make you know so genes are DNA is the genetic code it makes RNA RNA gets translated into proteins and proteins are doing all the work inside of our body you know so for example glutathione peroxidase is a very potent antioxidant
04:00it's an enzyme that's using glutathione to do all this great antioxidant stuff that's a protein it's the type of protein so proteins in our inside of our cells as we age they start to dysfunction they start to aggregate they aggregate in our blood vessels can lead to plaques they aggregate in our brains amalo beta Plex and this happens you know this increases as we age but heat shock proteins prevent that from happening and so heat stress activates them and when you when you have heat stress and they're and they're activated they're actually activated for a long period of time in some cases it can be like a couple of weeks so it's it's kind of like you do this heat stress and then two weeks later you still have these activated heat chck proteins which are you know making preventing all this damage from accumulating in in your cells what's really interesting is that if you look in like worms or flies you expose them to one heat chock meaning like you you know you increase the temperature uh for like 15 minutes and it increases their lifespan by like 15% so that's pretty cool
05:00um also people that have a certain variation of the heat chock Gene that makes these proteins that makes them active all the time they're more likely to be a centenarian so they they actually have a higher chance of living to be 100 so you know the there's definitely evidence that these heat chog proteins are involved in longevity you know we know the mechanism we know that you know heat helps you know activate them and they're doing all this good stuff they also prevent muscle atrophy and that's been shown like in mice for example um if you make a you know a mouse in Mobile so it can't move like its high Lim for example for like 7 days and you let it like use kind of like a sauna where it's like a whole body heat shock for 30 minutes a day they are able to Rego grow their muscles faster and they have less mus muscle atrophy than mice that are not exposed to the heat but are also immobile