Heat from Sauna & Hot Tubs Has Loads of Health Benefits Blood Sugar, Heart Dise
00:00By now you know that heat therapy is really good for your heart and reducing the risk of all cause mortality. Data from Finland finds that people who sauna at least four days per week have a reduction of cardiovascular specific mortality by 63% and a reduction in all-c causeed mortality by some 40%. But which modality or which form of heat is most timeefficient and most effective? In today's show, we're going to help explain that and break that down. What you have here is just the sun. for example, going outside, sweating in the sun, getting hot in your car. Then we have a sauna blanket. We have an infrared sauna. And on the end here, we have, and admittedly, I'm biased here. I have a classic finished sauna, which I used after years of doing an electric sauna and an infrared sauna. And I'll share with you the details here, but I wanted to break this down in the minimum effective dose. You want to aim for four sessions per week uh for between 15 and 20 minutes. And this is again accord according to the Kiopu ashimic heart disease cohort that has been studied
01:00since 1984 by Yari Lcommen over in Finland. Again finding that going in the sauna a Finnish sauna four sessions per week for between 15 and 20 minutes has been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular specific mortality specifically sudden cardiac death by 63% also reducing the risk of all cause mortality by 40%. So you want to get into sonotherapy. There's a lot of health benefits here. Improving cardiovascular function, improving nitric oxide release, possibly improving erectile function, erectile quality, uh decreasing blood pressure by 6 millm of mercury uh in the systolic d uh blood pressure, systolic blood pressure. So uh let's say you're short on time. What is going to be the most effective way to get these health benefits? Well, obviously the classic finished sauna with a woodf fired stove, but that can be hard to access and can be a little bit more expensive. So, what are some options? Well, this is where your personal preference and location where
02:00you live and what your access will help you dictate. What you could do is honestly, this sounds crazy, but I think there's benefits here. Sitting in your car on a hot day. I know in Texas, I was just in Omaha, Nebraska. I was in Phoenix recently. It can get up to 110, 120 degrees. So, if you don't have access to any of these other types of sauna, I would recommend taking your car, parking it somewhere, and getting really hot in the car and starting to sweat and then go taking a walk and maybe doing that again at night. It can help calm you down. It can move blood flow. What you really want to do is get hot. So, what is happening is blood is being diverted away from your core to the periphery of your skin. And in so doing, you're exercising your venus and arterial system, improving nitric oxide, decreasing uh what's known as arterial resistance and also improving uh the stiffness of your vessels, which has been shown to be reduced whether you go in a sauna, whether you go in electric sauna or a classic finish sauna. So this is going to be the minimum effective dose, just getting hot in the sun. Of course, the sun has other health
03:00benefits, possibly improving tes testosterone, sexual vigor. There's a study in 2022 that found that people who go out in the sun are have higher sexual feelings uh increasing testosterone and all that. And actually scientists are now studying uh the perennial bathing where people are going out in the sun and exposing their genitals. This is actually being investigated by researchers which is really cool. Now let's say you have just $1,000 to invest in say a sauna. Well, would you want to go for an infrared sauna or a sauna blanket? It really depends on the space that you have in your living situation. If you live with a roommate or you travel a lot, you have a minimalist lifestyle, you might want to start with a sauna blanket. Surprisingly, these can get quite hot. We have one from Bond Charge. It gets up to 177°. You will be dripping in sweat after utilizing this. I've talked with many people. I present on this uh these types of topics. I've had people come up to me when they first start going in the sauna blankets. They don't sweat at all. They're not heat acclimated. After several months of
04:00continued use, three to four sessions per week, they are dripping in sweat. One particular lady came up to me and said, "It looks like I got out of a swimming pool after I go in my sauna blanket for just 15 minutes." So, sauna blankets are a great entry point to learn how to train your body to become heat acclimated. Again, what happens with heat acclamation? Reduced arterial stiffness, improved arterial compliance, reduced blood viscosity, possibly improving erectile quality and function, which is great. Now, if you have between a,000 and $3,000, you can invest in an infrared sauna. I used this for years. We got one from High-Tech Health back in 2016. Utilize that all the way up to 2020. We sold that to a friend. They are still using that today. This thing is a workhorse. The High-Tech Health infrared sauna. I'll put links below. Great company. You can get free shipping by mentioning highintensity health. This gets up to 165 degrees. Now, if you go in with a friend or a partner, you get the two person one, you can get it
05:00cranking up to 170 degrees, which is really nice. Now, again, the time efficiency with an infrared sauna is not the same as a finished sauna. You're going to have to get in there for 30 to 40 minutes. So, you can play an audiobook through the speaker system. You can listen to a podcast, maybe watch high-intensity health, whatever it is. Uh, that can be a benefit of the infrared sauna is you're learning as you're getting hot. So, you want to be time efficient there while you're getting hot. So infrared sauna is not magic. Now it does penetrate potentially deeper into your tissues, but it's at a lower heat level compared to the finished sauna. So there could be benefits there. Maybe people if you're a little bit more sensitive to heat, you're new to this. This is a great launching place to see if you can make this a habit. Moving on to what's known as the electric sauna. This might be a barrel sauna. This might be a sauna at your gym and so forth. The only downside to gym saunas is sometimes people come in there with their shoes on, they have cologne, they have, you know, deodorant that smells and things like that. But if you can find a really good gym that has
06:00a clean sauna that's wellmaintained and deters people from going in with cell phones and and perfumes and all that, that's another great place to start. Uh those get up to between 180 degrees and 190 degrees. The downside of both infrared and the electric sauna is that as it gets over 200 degrees, the electronic components in these uh particular sauna units can start to melt. So there's a finite increase in the temperature kind of caps out at 190° again, which is why I think for time efficiency, uh, one of the best sources of heat is a woodf fired stove because nothing's going to melt. You have a stainless, you have a real nice steel firebox. it can get really hot and this has been quite amazing. So, if you can find a sauna center, you can build one in your backyard. We made a video all about how to do that and so forth. If you're interested in that, check out the website sauna times.com. Glenn uh Glenn Arba is a great uh individual. He has a bunch of resources for do-it-yourselfers if you want to learn how to do this or tell a contractor how to build this for
07:00you. So, with the finish sauna, you can either have it dry heat or wet heat. And what do I mean by that? Well, if it's dry, you're not pouring water on the rocks. But when it's wet heat, you're pouring water on the the rocks that are on top of the sauna stove. And that actually increases the humidity and causes you to sweat more. It increases your internal temperature, causes more blood flow to be diverted from your core to the periphery of your skin, which is good for detoxifying potentially heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants and plastics, and the things that are in your tap water, that are in your clothing, and also in your food. So, you want to get rid of that stuff because we know it's problematic for your health. And so this is why the Finnish sauna in my opinion is one of the better ways to go. Uh but not everyone has access to this. Uh it can be a little bit more expensive. If you live in an apartment or you're traveling, you're in the military. It might be hard to do. So you can maybe start here and have that as the ultimate goal. I will tell you that for a long time I didn't have the resources, didn't have the space. I found a part of my backyard. This was in
08:00I want to say it was 2016. And I put some cinder blocks and I literally said one day. I took a picture. I said one day I will build a sauna there. It took me five years till I had the resources and the wherewithal and develop the knowledge to be able to build a sauna like this. So I do believe in manifestation, the law of attraction. So if this is something you want to do, go put a brick in your backyard and just put sauna. You know, your spouse might think you're totally crazy, but in a few years you might have the resources and the time and the knowledge to be able to build something like that. But I also want to put right here hot tub. And so we know that um going in the hot tub has a lot of health benefits. It probably is linked somewhere uh in here, the hot tub. We know that hot tub sessions have been shown to improve vascular uh tone and temperature and also blood sugar levels in people with diabetes. We talked about this study from the New England Journal of Medicine in the late 1990s found that people who are insulin dependent type 2 diabetics when they just go in the hot tub 3 to four days per week, they have uh better
09:00improvements in their long-term blood sugar regulation and require less insulin. And so any heat is better than no heat at all. And that's why, as crazy as it might sound, sitting in your car in the hot sun getting a sweat on is better than than nothing whatsoever. So we know that heat is beneficial. Getting heat adapted leads to these beneficial changes in your cardiovascular system. And if you pair heat therapy with exercise and nutrition changes, there are additive and synergistic benefits. One study in elderly uh Japanese individuals in their 60s found when they randomize people to either change their diet, nutrition, and exercise or just go in the hot tub or go in the hot tub and change your diet, nutrition, and exercise, they had the greatest improvements in body composition, blood sugar health, cardioabolic health. So, if you're already doing diet changes and exercise, it behooves you to start focusing on heat therapy because these are synergistic benefits that we really can't ignore. Large cohort studies like the Coupio study uh ongoing since 1984
10:00in Finland and much more show that people who get hot on purpose have improved outcomes on the carvascular side on the lung side even outcomes with CO 19 for example chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may even affect bone health I mean there's so many benefits including mental health you will notice that if you start to read in the sauna you will actually visually remember the things that you were reading it's really important that might have to do with all the different uh peptides and and uh endorphins that are released from the heat. So very beneficial. Now you might say when should I go in the sauna? Should I go in the sauna then exercise? Well, most of the studies find and I think anecdotal reports from people find that if they exercise then go in the sauna that might be more beneficial. you're moving blood around after you go in the sauna. That might help with recovery potentially with hypertrophy and moving uh blood flow and so forth uh to the muscles that you just worked on uh during your exercise session. So try to do your resistance training or cardiovascular training then go in the
11:00sauna. One study found that when they have trained cyclist do their cycling then go immediately into the sauna they have an improvement in blood volume and blood flow and a reduction in blood pressure which is all favorable. So, uh, when it comes to the types, again, it's just a matter of cost, access, and time. Uh, if it doesn't get as hot as an infrared or sorry, a finished sauna, you're going to have to spend more time uh in the sauna blanket. You could watch a movie, watch a documentary, listen to a podcast. All of which are beneficial, and you want to start somewhere. Again, some heat is better than no heat at all. So hopefully you found this a little bit helpful to contextualize how to start incorporating heat therapy into your nutrition and lifestyle practices. We know that the gold standard should be the Finnish sauna. Uh it gets up to 100 I'm sorry 220 degrees. Then you add in the water on the rocks and the relative humidity. I mean most people that I bring in there, we do a podcast and we go in the sauna can barely last 5 minutes. It gets so hot sometimes. You
12:00have to cover your eyes and your nose. And in so doing, you're creating that stress, that short-term hormetic stress that can enable you to become better heat acclimated. And it's a great exercise for your venus system, for your arterial system, uh improving arterial stiffness, decreasing that, improving vascular resistance, uh possibly heart rate variability, the list goes on. So there's a lot of benefits here, especially metabolic health benefits as well. So hot tub is great, sauna blanket is great, infrared sauna. It just depends upon where you're at. So start somewhere and then you can work up over time to these uh different types of modalities and eventually maybe access a classic finish sauna because that's where the research is coming from. People that are using woodfired stoves doing this three to four days per week in Finland. Again the uh Coupio uh cohort has been studied since 1984. Major outcomes there reduction in dementia, Alzheimer's prevalence, uh sudden cardiac death by 63%, all cause mortality by 40%. If this was a drug,
13:00it'd be all over the news. You would hear all about it. So, I think it's time that we make saunas great again. This is a a thing that people in Eastern Europe and the Nordic regions have been doing for a long time. We know generally they're healthier than here uh in North America. So, let's start to emulate some of these lifestyle practices that other cultures are benefiting from and bring them here into North America. So, friends, hopefully you found this helpful. Definitely check out High-Tech Health. Uh they make an amazing infrared sauna. We the folks over at Bond Charge, they make a great sauna blanket. It gets up to 170 degrees which is just phenomenal. I'll put all those links in the description below. Appreciate you tuning in. If you found this helpful, please hit that like button, share this with a friend, and I look forward to hearing from you in the comments section below.