One of the reasons you sweat is to excrete toxins. But if you live in the East, the important reason you are sweating today is to cool you down. Every drop of liquid on your skin requires a great deal of heat energy in order to be transformed from the liquid to the gaseous state as it evaporates. It pulls the heat it needs from your body.

If you keep your hair wet, repeatedly wetting it, you will notice you stay cooler. If you keep your clothes wet, and allow the water they contain to evaporate or partly evaporate before you get into water again, you will stay considerably cooler.

The reason is that for water to go from liquid to a gas, even if it stays at the same temperature, takes a great deal of energy, which is heat, and that heat is removed from your body as the water evaporates. Here is a graph that explains it. You have to add roughly as much heat to water to get it to evaporate as you must add to take its temperature from freezing to boiling!

The larger the body surface area in contact with water, the cooler you will get—which is why wearing wet clothes is the best way to stay cool, even without AC.

This is basic thermodynamics, but I urge you to prove it to yourself. Wet jeans will cool you more than wet shorts. A wet bathing suit will not cool you as much as wet long sleeves and pants will.

And stay hydrated, of course. Salt helps your body hold onto water, so these hot days are good times to eat salty food.

A breeze will speed the evaporative cooling—so run a fan on your wet self if the air is as still where you are as it is right here. You might actually find yourself feeling chilly! Wouldn’t that be nice!

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More