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Full Transcript: Sauna Benefits Deep Dive

Dr. Rhonda Patrick and MedCram's Dr. Kyle Allred discuss the science of sauna use. Duration: 1h 21m. Click any timestamp to jump to that moment in the YouTube video.

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dr patrick you are a world expert on the many potential benefits of sauna use from better cardiovascular fitness to a lower risk of dementia to better mood mental health and immunity and you're also an expert on the specific ways that people can use saunas or hot baths in many cases to maximize these benefits what temperature should the sauna be how long should we stay in it how often should we use it so really excited to jump into this but i want to give you a brief introduction first you have a phd in biomedical science you're published in a variety of reputable journals including an excellent recent publication on saunas that was very comprehensive and you're the co-founder of a popular website and youtube channel called found my fitness dr patrick welcome back to the show thank you kyle i'm really excited to be here and thank you for that very kind introduction i look forward to getting into as many details as possible about both the benefits and how we can

effectively use saunas but first if you only had a couple minutes with someone who was totally new to saunas how would you briefly summarize the benefits well i would start with um a lot of the studies that have come out of finland which have been large you know very very large population-based studies these are observational studies where an association has been made and there have been quite a few that have found that frequent sauna use is associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease a lower risk of sudden cardiac death or lower risk of coronary heart disease a lower risk of stroke a lower risk of dementia of alzheimer's disease and when i say a lower risk it it occurs in a dose-dependent manner so what that means is the more frequent the sauna bathing the more robust the the health benefits are so for example

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people that use the sauna two to three times a week are about 22 less likely to die from sudden cardiac death compared to people that only use the sauna one time a week but people that use the sauna four to seven times a week are 63 percent less likely to die from sudden cardiac death compared to people that use the sauna one time per week so there's a dose-dependent effect with more frequent sauna bathing more robust effects on cardiovascular health and i would say that to people that are not familiar with the sauna a lot of people think of it as a time to relax it's a very it's a it's a time to take some space out of your day and and and have it to yourself um so so there is an aspect of this relaxation almost a meditation type of um quality to to sauna bathing but there's also a very interesting aspect of it which is sauna use is essentially mimicking moderate aerobic cardiovascular exercise

and so a lot of the same physiological responses that happen when you're exercising for example your heart rate elevates while you're exercising you elevate your core body temperature you get hot you start to sweat these are the same things that are occurring while someone is in the sauna so heart rate elevates it elevates to around 120 beats per minute you sweat your core body temperature is elevated after the sauna and after exercise and this has actually been compared head to head comparison of these two blood pressure is lower after sauna bathing or after exercise your resting heart rate is lower than before you did the exercise or before you started using the sauna so um i think that's also a really interesting aspect of sauna that most people are unfamiliar with that it's really sort of a mimicker of moderate intense cardiovascular exercise and then the other thing is is that there's there seems to be really

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profound effects on the brain and i don't think all the mechanisms have been teased out just yet we can certainly dive into some details but you know there's obviously a very strong link between cardiovascular health and brain function you know having proper blood flow to the brain is very important for for lowering dementia risk so there's definitely that aspect there but you know there's been some some observational studies looking at dementia risk and alzheimer's risk in sonobators and again it's a very dose dependent robust effect frequency matters and so people that use this on a two to three times a week you know they have some somewhere like a 20 percent lower dementia risk 20 lower alzheimer's risk more or less but using the sauna 4 to 7 times a week it's associated with between a 60 to 66 reduction in dementia and alzheimer's disease compared to people that use this on a one time a week so um it seems like you know four times a week is kind of the sweet spot and we

can talk about all the details of that um in a little bit but but there's a lot of interest into why sauna use seems to help prevent neurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's disease and dementia so um i certainly have some hypothesis and hypotheses i guess they're more than one so i'd love to dive into some of that but um i think that's a kind of a good start into the sauna oh and also all cause mortality that's a really big one too because you know there's been these studies these large population studies finding that people that use this on four to seven times a week have a 40 lower risk of dying from all causes of death um than people that use this on one time a week so um to me it really is is the beginning of understanding that you know sauna use seems to really be beneficial for our health and much like a lot of these lifestyle factors that that are well known to to modify our disease risk so

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exercise for example so you don't want to be sedentary good sleep um you know healthy diet meditation i think these are pretty common knowledge at this point to be beneficial for overall health and i think that sauna you should be up there i think it should be included in that in that sort of um you know bag of things that are known to improve what's called our health span our health span is it's it's basically compressing the diseases that we get into a shorter time period so it's essentially extending the youthful part of our life so you may not necessarily live you know x many years longer although you may if you don't get cancer earlier you'll probably end up not dying from cancer earlier but ultimately it's a health span improving your health spend is about improving the quality of your life not getting parkinson's disease not getting alzheimer's disease not getting cancer not getting cardiovascular

disease type 2 diabetes and and having a better quality of life so that you're essentially enjoying your life and living living healthier for a longer period of time i do want to make sure to distinguish the difference between my publication on the sauna which was a a very comprehensive review article covering multiple aspects of sauna health and someone doing primary research where they're they're actually doing experiments and having people you know come into a sauna and measuring heart rate and blood pressure changes for example um so i am not doing those experiments and a lot of the research that has that has been done on the the health benefits of the sauna have actually come out of finland from dr yari laukanin's lab in eastern finland and so i just wanted to give him a little shout out because his work has been invaluable in in our understanding of the health benefits of the sauna well let's start by diving in

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a little bit deeper into the cardiovascular system because you mentioned there's some potentially excellent benefits from the sauna on the cardiovascular system so could you review what the cardiovascular system is briefly and then what's what's known about the sauna's impact on that and i think this is so important because um as you know it's right there neck and neck are cardiovascular disease and cancer as a number one and two killers of both men and women in the united states so what's known about the sauna's impact on the cardiovascular system well what's known about the impact so i mean i think generally speaking when people think about cardiovascular health they think about their cholesterol they think about the health of their arteries they think about not having a bunch of plaques build up inside their arteries and block blood flow and oxygen from getting to different tissues it's definitely known that a lot of dietary and lifestyle factors can modify cardiovascular disease risk one of the

best ones being exercise i don't know that there's anything better for cardiovascular health than than exercise so um you know the fact that sauna use mimics moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise as i as i mentioned a moment ago is it's just sort of like this proof of principle that you know sauna sauna is going to be good for cardiovascular health the same sort of physiological changes are happening you know you have an increased blood flow to the skin also to the muscles so that's to help facilitate sweating um plasma volume increases heart rate elevates during sauna bathing you're you're getting hot you know you're getting hot and sweating and you're you're doing the same thing that's happening while you're exercising and changes in blood pressure go down as well afterwards just like exercise so i think that that is partly probably responsible for some of the cardiovascular benefits dr yari laukanin and his colleagues have looked at so many different aspects of

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cardiovascular health with respect to sauna bathing and they found time and time again whether you're talking about sudden cardiac death whether you're talking about death from cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease and even talking about stroke risk stroke risk is also significantly lowered something in the realm of like 40 lower for people that use this on a four to seven times a week versus once a week so there's a really large body of evidence that suggests that sauna use does mimic a moderate aerobic activity and and this is potentially why it's beneficial for cardiac you know for cardiovascular health excellent and does it lower cholesterol and hypertension as well regular sauna use hypertension yes like so there's been um there's been some studies looking at hypertension risk so this again these are observational studies and again it's

one of those dose-dependent effects where you see people that use the sauna two to three times a week they have like a 24 lower risk of hypert hypertension versus people that use the sauna four to seven times a week who have about a 46 lower risk of um hypertension but there's also been just like studies where they've looked at a single sauna use again where they just when a person goes into the sauna uses it for you know 20 minutes and they measure blood pressure before and after the sauna and one even just a single sauna use lowers blood pressure so both systolic and diastolic blood pressure after the sauna bathing similar to what exercise does and so i think that helps sort of establish causality because there's always a question about associations and how much association how much can you you know derive causality from these associations when it comes to observational studies you mentioned how you know sauna use mimics exercise in

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many ways moderate intensity exercise so with regard to that can it also just improve overall fitness and endurance as well that's a great question uh we cover this in my co-author teresa johnson and i our review article that we published last year in experimental gerontology and i'd say um so far the evidence seems to suggest that sauna use may improve endurance exercise um there's there's been a variety of studies that have looked either at runners for example that use the sauna and then they're able to improve their time and running distance um there have been some studies looking at people wearing a sauna suit so this is like a type of clothing that's put on that sort of mimics the sauna because it makes you you know warm up and so people train in that sauna suit um and that's been shown to help improve endurance but i think there's there's a lot of evidence out there

looking at just acclimating yourself to heat and so you know when you're getting in the sauna there there's these physiological changes that start to occur where your body starts to adapt so like if someone's never used the sauna before it's really hard to stay and we haven't talked about temperature duration yet in any of these you know studies that i've referred to with respect to cardiovascular health and all-cause mortality for example but um you know if you're getting in a hot sauna that's 175 degrees fahrenheit and you've never done that before and certainly if you're not someone that's physically active you know people that are physically active also are sort of adapted to heat because they're elevating their core body temperature when they're physically active and so they're a little more heat acclimated so you take a person that's not you know a person that's sedentary not acclimated to heat and it's going to be hard for them to stay in that sauna hot sauna for more than five minutes um but as time goes on and um as people start to use the sauna more

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and become more acclimated then people start to sweat at a lower core body temperature and this helps facilitate cooling down and so they're able to tolerate it more and they also there's some other adaptations that we can talk about at the molecular level that occur as well and and so i think that um it all comes down to basically if you are adapted to heat well then when you're doing your marathon you're going to be you know more heat adapted because if you're used to using the sauna and you're you know you're sweating at a lower core body temperature and all these physiological changes are happening then that's going to affect you when you're also elevating your core body temperature through another modality that modality being running or exercise you know fill in the blank type of exercise so um you know it kind of makes sense when you think about it definitely well shifting gears to you mentioned the the mental and um potential benefits that protect against neurodegenerative diseases like dementia

or alzheimer's that's really you know once i saw the research on that that's something that keeps me using the sauna regularly even if i don't feel like it or if i don't have time is that potential significant reduction in dementia risk so could you talk a little bit more about that research and um yeah what's known about protection from neurodegenerative diseases well the research looking at sauna use and specifically it's looked at alzheimer's disease and dementia it's really limited to just observational data in which case sauna use is associated with a much lower risk so like i said around 60 60 to 66 percent lower if people are using the sauna four to seven times a week now why that is is um i probably you know again very interesting question probably something coming down to cardiovascular health right so if you're if you're basically in better

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cardiovascular health you're going to have increased blood flow to the brain and that's you know known to help protect against dementia but there's also some evidence and this kind of gets in some into some of the molecular details with um sauna use and something i'm extremely interested in are our heat shock proteins and heat shock proteins as their name implies are activated by heat stress um and sauna robustly activates them there's been some studies looking at people that have sat in a about 163 degree fahrenheit sauna for 30 minutes they're able to to activate their heat shock proteins about 50 over their baseline levels so what are heat shock proteins and why do we even care about them well heat shock proteins are a stress response protein we can talk a little bit more about what that means later but essentially what they do is they help proteins inside of your cells

they help keep their three-dimensional structure so every protein in your body has a three-dimensional structure and that's important for its function and these proteins in our body that are doing everything all the work inside of our cells they they don't stay around forever they eventually you know they get chewed up and degraded like in a in a garbage can basically you can think about it and so um sometimes you know that doesn't happen properly and as we age it definitely starts to go awry and so heat shock proteins kind of help prevent that from happening so they help prevent proteins from becoming disorganized and destructured because when they become that way they tend to aggregate and they can form aggregates and these aggregates can then form plaques and these plaques can form in places like the vascular system or they can form in places like the brain so probably the classical example of plaques in the brain are amyloid beta 42 plaques that are associated with alzheimer's disease so there's been

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a whole host of evidence in animal studies that have found that elevated levels of heat shock proteins can protect against the formation of amyloid beta plaques and they can help prevent an alzheimer's disease like disease in in animals so um there's been a lot of evidence of that and that i think is one interesting angle because saunas are well known to activate heat shock proteins and once they're activated they stay activated for about 48 hours i mean they're they're elevated for a while and um you know so constant when you're talking about someone that's doing it four to seven times a week you know we don't have empirical evidence looking at a person and measuring their heat shock proteins like each day but you know one could imagine that you would you would see that heat shock proteins are way act way elevated over what their normal baseline levels are and so what you're having is almost

this constitutive activation of this of this family of proteins that essentially help prevent plaques from forming um among other things so so i think that's a a really interesting angle as well uh with respect to to neurodegenerative disease and in fact one of my first experiments um when i was an early researcher at the salk institute for biological studies in la jolla i was doing some research on nematode worms c elegans where we were injecting them with amyloid beta 42 the peptide fragment that's known to be associated with alzheimer's disease causing these plaques in the brain we're injecting them into these worms and into their muscle tissue and it causes the worms to become paralyzed because they have all these protein aggregates in their muscle and they can't move anymore and there's it's a really distinct phenotype you look at them under a microscope and they're just they're still but they kind of just move their nose around and feed but they can't move

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and so um i did these experiments where i would boost up their heat shock proteins and like it totally corrected that like these worms even though they had even though we were giving them amyloid beta 42 it it totally corrected them from um the paralysis because the amyloid beta 42 wasn't forming these aggregates so i i've always kind of go back to that original study that i you know had done with my own hands and it kind of made this this aha moment i'm like wow these heat shock proteins are doing something cool is that how you actually got interested in sauna use in the first place from that um it's how i got interested in the molecular some of the molecular aspects of sauna use i would say that uh the real way i became interested in the sauna and this will take us into other brain function aspects if you're okay with that sure so when i was in graduate school i lived across the street from a ymca and i used to go use the sauna almost

every day before i would go into the lab and do my experiments and as any graduate student or budding young scientist or even senior scientist will tell you experiments fail they fail all the time and it's very stressful it's very hard so so graduate school can be very hard because um you're constantly being just bombarded down it's like you're being hit like well that didn't work well that didn't work well there goes six months of work you know and it's it's a very stressful time and um what i started to notice was that using the sauna before going into the lab my my ability to handle stress was is noticeable like i was much more capable of handling stress my anxiety was much lower i mean it was very very noticeable for me where to the point where i was like something's going on here um i don't know what it is but it's something and so i started diving into the literature you know way back then in like 2009 you know so um

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that's where i kind of got into the sauna um and the effects on the brain and actually in the publication that that um we published last year i kind of uh rift a little bit on some i would say it's still still more of a hypothesis than anything um in in terms of the reason for that you know when you're when you're in the sauna you're um you're dumping a bunch of endorphins much like exercise so it's sort of the same same effect so endorphins are those feel good opioids that your brain is producing the counter to that feel good endorphin is the it's called dinorphin the endogenous counter to it dinorphin is is that chemical in your brain that is responsible for making you feel dysphoria not so good um so the kind of feeling you get when you're really hot you're sitting in a sauna and you're like not feeling good like this is hot or you know or when you're going for your long distance run and it's that feeling of of you just

don't feel good but you have to push past it right you push past it so um dynorphin is something that's produced um during during that that period and dinorphan is actually involved in cooling the body so i think that's partly why uh your body your brain is making it when you're when you're elevating your core body temperature um and the interesting thing about dinorphin is that although it's responsible for the dysphoric feeling it binds to a receptor in our brain called the kappa opioid receptor um when it binds to that receptor it ends up doing this whole feedback loop and this is like the beauty of biology and the feedback loop is that those feel-good endorphins that we make bind to another type of receptor called the mu opioid receptor and this is the same type of receptor that morphine and opioids also bind to that help make people feel good they help with pain and stuff well kappa opioids when you when you bind to that receptor that dysphoric feeling it changes the mu opioid receptor it basically

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um makes them more sensitive to endorphins for a longer period of time and so uh you know i sort of have this hypothesis that like when you get in the sauna and you you you know you push past that like this feels terrible it's hot oh it's hard you know you push past it a little bit um you get done with it and and then the endorphins that you make a day later or two days later or five days later from laughing at a joke or forgiving giving your loved one a hug or whatever it is that's making you release endorphins you're gonna feel them better because they're more sensitive so um there's a bit of a tangent but that's sort of what got me interested in in using the sauna and um as as you mentioned and alluded to earlier there is there's actually a lot of empirical evidence that has now come out since that time looking at the effects of sauna use on mental health and specifically depression so um dr ashley mason right now who i am collaborating with is looking at

sauna use and um people people with depression um that have not been able to manage it with um different types of standard of care treatments and so um she's going off of work from her former mentor dr charles raizon who found that basically elevating a person's core body temperature about one to two degrees was able to give people an antidepressant effect that lasted like up to six weeks with a single use and this was compared to a sham control they used this device that basically made people feel like they were getting a little bit hot but it wasn't hot enough so it was a really great placebo control because people thought they were actually getting the treatment um placebo controls are very important particularly with depression studies because a placebo response is a very real response so um so that was that was a really uh a seminal study looking at you know just a single session of sauna use and how it had a very robust

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antidepressant effect that lasted six weeks in these depression depressed patients compared to placebo control now ashley mason is now she's following up on this and she's using an infrared sauna and she's also she's also elevating the core body temperature you know one to two degrees and um and she's doing now instead of one session she's doing up to eight sessions and and uh we're looking at a variety of biomarkers to understand why that is like is there are there changes in the immune system um and and there's some preliminary evidence to suggest there are you know there there have been quite a few observational studies looking at sauna use and how sauna use is associated with lower biomarkers of like c-reactive protein so these are markers of inflammation inflammation plays a major role in depression as well sauna use also can increase il-10 which is an anti-inflammatory so that's also been shown in an intervention study so people that have used the sauna had

their blood drawn before and after there was some evidence that that il-10 was elevated after using the sauna so there's some suggestive evidence that you know the immune changes may be going on and changing it in a positive way much like exercise so exercise also um it increases il-6 which is another cytokine that's kind of it's called a myokine it's released from your muscle and it can cause inflammation but it's also this type of cytokine that can cause a very powerful anti-inflammatory response so if there's a we can talk about what this means hormesis there's a bit of a hermetic aspect to it um so so that's also very interesting as well yeah and with those depression studies and the hypothesis for why um sauna use wow this i mean it's amazing one sauna use can have potentially a six-week benefit for patients that are having depression

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could part of the hypothesis be that their because you mentioned our endorphins and our internal opiate system and how sauna use can sensitize those receptors so the opiates our own opiates inside of our body work better is that one of the hypotheses too of why this can help patients who are depressed it is it is and we're trying to figure out how to measure that like there's there's some tricks and stuff and so we're trying to find some collaborators and actually we do have some some collaborators that are um potentially going to help us kind of figure out how we can test whether or not that that is playing a role it's it's certainly something i think is playing a role for sure i think there's multiple things at play here and i think that one of them is is the the change in the opioid system in the brain for sure but you can't measure opioid receptors and and sensitivity and upregulation like you can in an animal right like in people like that's not you know we're not we're not we're not there yet um

with with our technology so that would that would be something that would be really cool but um but there are some other things that can be measured in plasma interesting so like what things are you guys currently measuring with regard to oh we're doing a whole host i mean just like like every kind of inflammatory panel you can imagine um is being done brain derived neurotrophic factor so that's another um really interesting we are also measuring endorphins but but uh the the brain-derived neurotrophic factor bdnf as it's called is something that's also elevated during exercise a lot of people think of brain derived neurotrophic factor as something that is very protective against brain aging and and i think there's a a good bit of evidence to suggest that that that's true you know so their brain drive neurotrophic factor for those of you that are not familiar with it is a growth factor that's produced in the brain that helps existing neurons survive

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and it also um and there's some debate about this but for the most part it plays a role in certain brain regions in actually growing new neurons in adults so there's kind of this hope that brain derived neurotrophic factors is a powerful anti-brain aging drug and i think it is but the other thing that it does is it plays a role in neuroplasticity and what that refers to like essentially what that refers to is you know having the connections in your brain kind of being able to rewire themselves with a changing environment and that's something that's really hard for older people to do but it also is a very important thing to happen when they're you know their stressful environment like for example pandemic hits you know everything changes like life is completely different like your ability to cope with that and your brain's ability to cope with that like there's some neuroplasticity like younger people they can adapt like they're adapting um and that's because

their brains are you know as people like to call they're more plastic you know so there's there's a lot more neuroplasticity involved in that and there's a bit there's a there's an angle for depression in there as well because if you can't adapt to the changing environment then you might become depressed uh you know because you're not able to um you know change your behaviors in a way that you know allows you to to to live and and you know do the same things that you were doing before whatever changed it so anyways big tangent there but neuroplasticity is also regulated by brain derived neurotrophic factor and and it plays an important role in depression so we're also looking at bdnf and there's been evidence that plasma b dnf correlates with with actual levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor um changing in the brain as well and then we're looking at a bunch of other um aging related telomeres senescence just all sorts of things we're trying to we're hoping to uncover some some novel

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mechanisms here very cool in addition to heat shock proteins are there any other cellular repair mechanisms that sauna use can kind of unlock within the body well i think you know like i mentioned the il-10 anti-inflammatory response but also nrf2 which is another major it's a major regulator of a variety of genes that are antioxidant involved in antioxidant involved in detoxifying things that you're exposed to in the environment anti-inflammatory as well but the underlying premise here is that when you're in the sauna you're stressing your body and nrf2 heat chug proteins these are il-6 you know these are these are part of um you know what's called a stress response pathway like like these are these are genes in our body that respond to stress and when they the way they respond to stress is that they basically activate

anti-stress pathways these are pathways that are anti-inflammatory these are pathways that are antioxidant these are pathways that are involved in autophagy so the cleaning out of all the gunk inside of our cells pathways that are involved in making new stem cells for example repairing damage to dna so these are all part of the the stress response pathway and um you know this this this whole stress response pathway kind of originates from this idea of hormesis where a little bit of stress can activate these beneficial cellular response pathways and that has just far-reaching effects so humans evolved we evolved in environments that we have been intermittently challenged with stress you know people when they hear the word stress i mean they usually think about psychosocial stress psychological stress you know financial stress i'm not sure people think about sitting in a sauna or um the other

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types of stress that are beneficial the so-called eu stress so that would be exercise or fasting food scarcity you know so people i mentioned we've evolved with these intermittent challenges well you know before the industrial revolution before we had instacart and we could order our groceries and have them delivered to us like we had to go out and hunt and find our food we had to go gather pick berries we're beholden to you know the the climate and or you know what what prey were available right or there um and so there were times when when people didn't eat because they didn't you know they didn't have any i think they hunted or they didn't you know gather any berries or whatever so uh so there was there were times of intermittent fasting that that occurred uh throughout human evolution as well as movement you know like we didn't have people delivering our groceries to us we didn't get in an auto automobile and drive to the store you know we were out running we were chasing

things we were walking and gathering we were moving so um you know we were stressing our bodies with these aerobic aerobic types of activities and also you know eating the plants eating these berries eating different types of of plants we were exposed to a variety of compounds in these plants that are called xenobiotics and xenobiotics you know things like polyphenols you know flavonols you have things like you know egcg and green tea or curcumin and that's found in tumeric root these types of compounds also activate stress response pathways so all these things activate genetic pathways in our body that not only help us deal with a little bit of stress of fasting or exercise or sauna but also they help us deal with the stress of just aging and they're activated for a much longer period of time and so you so

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so this idea of hormesis is that this little bit of stress um can be so beneficial because you're having this powerful antioxidant response and anti-inflammatory response and you're activating things like autophagy which is clearing out pieces of dna inside your cell and little protein aggregates and you know you're activating stem cells to like make more stem cells and replenish you know cells in your tissues so the idea of this this adaptive response these stress response pathways is that like humans we were meant to activate them we're meant to challenge ourselves with types of stress like exercise you know intermittent fasting sauna use eating plants um and and and the reality is is that in our modern world we stop doing that you know we don't we don't do that as much and and and so um you know people are getting these diseases of age they're getting type 2 diabetes metabolic disease and cardiovascular disease and alzheimer's disease so there's lots of these diseases that are happening

uh in in humans and um and so so this idea that you know there are these things that we can do in our lifestyle that can help prevent those from happening or at least delay them through constantly activating all these beneficial pathways like heat shock proteins heat shock proteins are activated by a variety of things like they're they're activated by exercise but they're activated by eating broccoli because broccoli has sulforaphane in it so you know heat is the most potent activator of it but the heat shock proteins themselves are part of that response pathway and we mentioned how they're beneficial for preventing neurodegenerative diseases they're they're beneficial preventing aggregates and plaques from forming in our arteries but they've also been shown to prevent muscle atrophy and this has been shown in a couple of human studies in a variety of animal studies where um humans that just have local heat applied to one of their limbs it basically prevented the the atrophy of

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muscle like like there's 40 decrease in in muscle atrophy from disuse of the moth of the muscle and this has been shown again in a lot of different animal studies um where it's basically helping helping you not you know degrade your muscle tissue and so that it has huge relevance for sarcopenia for people that are you know disabled that can't go out for a run perhaps can't you know exercise um they they might be able to use the sauna as well and the idea there just increased blood flow to that limb will help decrease atrophy over time no i think i think it has to do because at least in the animal studies they were trying to tease out the mechanism and um [Music] what what was shown was that it was activation of heat shock proteins like heat chuck protein 72 that was required for the preventing of muscle atrophy so and that is again i think has to do with

the fact of the protein folding and misfolding and how you know when you have that happening proteins are you know it's preventing proteins from being degraded so much because they're having their proper three-dimensional structure and so you're maintaining that muscle mass you're maintaining it um and i i i anecdotally i can tell you like over the years over the many years i've had many energy injuries and stuff and when i'm injured and i can't do my my normal workout routine like the sauna is like it is such a saving grace for me and i haven't actually measured you know empirically my muscle but like i can just feel like my muscles are not atrophying i mean like you kind of tell you know when you you don't work out and your muscles kind of start to get a little um flabby so um i i think it just has a lot of implications for um sarcopenia and just helping maintain muscle mass as well and you mentioned how in our modern world we are insulated from a lot of these

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intermittent stressors that we may have been exposed to you know 100 200 years ago or more and another thing with our modern world is we're exposed to more potential toxins than ever certain toxins like you know aluminum or lead heavy metals like that in your review paper you mentioned how sauna use can actually help excrete those um heavy metals at a higher rate can you talk about that a little bit it does it does um and it's interesting because you know a lot of these compounds like heavy metals or you know other other types of compounds like you know phthalates or bpa they can be excreted through sweat or they can be excreted through urine and some some are excreted more predominantly through sweat and others are more predominantly excreted through urine for example so the ones that are more predominantly excreted through sweat you can imagine the robust effect that that sauna use has on them so

cadmium being one where um there's been studies looking at sweating from from from sauna use where there's like a 122 fold increase in sweating out cadmium another one is aluminum aluminum's also excreted quite well from sweat and and you do excrete things like bpa and and stuff as well but you know the major pathway that bpa is eliminated is through through urine um but you know so so even just excreting some of these these heavy metal like cadmium is in like chocolate i mean it's just it's like it's it's like one of those little insidious types of things which is making its way into your into your body and you don't even know it right and if you never sweat if you never exercise you're not getting rid of that stuff well right so um that is another sort of potential benefit with with using the sauna as well is excreting some of that those those compounds and particularly some of those heavy metals that like aluminum and cadmium

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i want to ask you about heart rate variability because it's become popular to measure this on smart jewelry you know watches and rings pretty much anything that can measure your pulse can probably measure your your heart rate variability as well so why is heart rate variability important and how can the sauna potentially benefit so you know i think heart rate variability is important because it it's a it's a it's a basically a marker of how well your heart can handle stress when you're talking about like measuring the the intervals between your heart beats if you have a higher heart rate variability your heart is going to be able to handle a stressful moment like a heart attack better that's kind of how i think about it in sort of simplistic terms and and heart rate variability is improved with exercise like that's pretty well known exercise is able to

improve heart rate variability and that's largely because um there's an effect on the auto autonomic nervous system so physical activity affects it you have increased parasympathetic activity and lower lower sympathetic activity and the sauna has been shown to do the same thing so um so sauna use also increases heart rate variability and um it it is it you know activates the parasympathetic nervous system as well like very again it's back to that the sauna mimics moderate aerobic moderate intensity aerobic exercise and it's just the easiest way to think about it and almost everything you measure that exercise does you're going to see that with with the sauna as well in many cases so speaking of that's a good segue into this question which is can sauna effectively replace exercise or is it best to get both exercise and

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sauna is there any synergy between the two well exercise is king for sure um you know when it comes to to the best possible thing you could do for your overall health and um when i'm what i'm going to speak to is a is a study that looked at cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiorespiratory fitness is essentially it's a marker of of in my opinion i think it's a good biomarker for biological you know age in a way you know because you can have someone who is in their 60s and they've been physically active and um just lead a ladder really healthy and physically active life and they could have a better cardiorespiratory fitness than someone who is you know yeah 40 who's sedentary overweight just never exercises you know so cardio respiratory fitness is a really good marker of of physical health and there's been some studies analyzing

cardio respiratory fitness in people that exercise do aerobic exercise and comparing it to people that do sauna and comparing them again to people that do aerobic exercise and sauna and so the ultimate outcome of what you know that that analysis showed was that people that did exercise and used asana had better cardio respiratory fitness than people that did exercise alone or did sauna alone um so you might say you might you might ask yourself well i'm i'm already physically active i exercise like why do i need sauna uh well the answer is do you want to be better do you want to have a better cardio respiratory fitness i know the answer that i have for myself yes i do and um and so so the those there is there does seem to be a synergy between sauna use and aerobic exercise where people that are are doing both seem to

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have a better cardio respiratory fitness if you just compared sauna and exercise only exercise was had you know people that exercise had a better cardio respiratory fitness than people that only did sauna and didn't exercise um but if you compare sauna to people that don't exercise people that people that do the sauna have a better cardio respiratory fitness than people that don't use the sauna so um i think i think you know the way i think about this is like there are people that cannot do physical activity they're disabled in some way shape or form and they just can't do it and so you know here's here here they have now a potential way to get some moderate intensity aerobic exercise and improve their cardiovascular health and improve other aspects of their brain you know health as well um and so i think that is really awesome but we also have people like me um and a lot of people out there who are physically active and want to do everything they can to improve you know every every biomarker of aging and every

you know way you know their health aspect of their health that they can and i think that the sauna on top of that is a way to go and you know you only have so much time in the day but ultimately you know for for people that have used the sauna they know like you get in the sauna and and i personally use it for a variety of different ways you know i like to do it right after my exercise i like to do it you know i have a peloton bike right next to my sauna and i like to get on get on my bike and then hop in the sauna but um i also only have so much time in the day and it's like well if i can only do exercise or the sauna mostly i'm going to choose exercise but you know here's the thing i also take science papers i take my work in the sauna and i do things i i recite presentations in my brain and interestingly something about the sauna also affects my memory where i remember things better after thinking about them

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in the sauna and um i have some theories as to why that is you know there's a lot of evidence that activating you know that you you get that you know emotional arousal and that helps kind of solidify a memory well dishonest kind of like stressing your body and there's like an arousal aspect to it so i'm sort of wondering if that has to do with it but um you know people can get in that sauna and meditate as well they can they can listen to a podcast listen to music you can you can get your creative juices floating that's another way way i um use the sauna i use it kind of like i use my runs where i get in the sauna and i hash through ideas i think about them and i you know i it it really works so i think that the saunas is great not only for you know your physical your physical health and cardio respiratory fitness but you can also you can also be efficient with it and you can use it you know to not only improve your physical health but also help you with your work you know like there's there's

there's things about it i think that um that are beneficial that aren't well known and well understood and i think it's a beautiful thing that phones don't work in asana you know it gets too hot for phones to work so it's a it's a built-in break for me to uh take a break from my phone which i love totally so important like and people like have such a hard time doing that you know exactly it makes a difference well before we get into more specifics about how we can potentially optimize our own sauna use or hot bath use could you briefly mention some of the countries or cultures or native americans in this country for example that have used saunas or hot therapy for uh many many years and and maybe some of the lessons that we can learn from them well certainly i talked about finland i mean i've visited finland and i've used their saunas there and almost everyone has a sauna in their home it's it's it's very ubiquitous so

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um it's certainly a big cultural thing in in finland um russian banyas but um as you mentioned native americans they have their sweat lodges i think that anyone that's any culture that's used it has like tapped into something and realized there's something here there's something beneficial here and that's why it's kind of stayed in the united states you know saunas are like thought about like oh yeah my gym has a sauna like that's kind of the way it is in the united states i think things are starting to change um there are there are a lot of saunas that are affordable now and um you know that even people can just plug into our regular normal outlet and then again there's there's other modalities to to raise your your core body temperature like you mentioned the hot baths so um [Music] it i think i think things are changing in the united states and as as more people are becoming aware of the benefits of using asana we're going to start to see it it become

more and more accessible where people are going to start having them in their houses you know i used to live i used to live in a really small apartment and um i had a sauna that was like four by four feet and it was in the bedroom and um you know this was like a one bedroom apartment and it was fine you know it was right right there in the bedroom next to the bed um you know this was a queen-size bed and a small room and so you know i think you kind of just you kind of just make you make room for it when it when it comes to your health so i mean what else do we have on a traditional sauna or was it infrared it was a traditional sauna yeah so uh for people listening you know there's there a lot most all of the studies that i've been talking about up until this point have come out of finland for the most part um and they've used traditional saunas so these are saunas that are that have a heater in them that heats the ambient air around you

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and that in turn then sort heats you up and elevates your core body temperature um in finland they also uh have hot rocks in the heater and and they pour water over these hot rocks so they create humidity a lot of a lot of um the studies that i refer to also had a humidity between 10 to 20 percent so um which also makes it feel hotter than it is um and so um so that's so that's a a a conventional or regular sauna then there's infrared saunas and then you can get the far near infrared saunas but the biggest difference between the infrared saunas and the in the traditional saunas is that the infrared saunas are using thermal radiation to heat you up directly basically and so those types of saunas only get to around 140 or so degrees fahrenheit whereas the traditional sun as i was just talking about most of them ones that people get in their home can go up

to like almost 200 degrees some some can go higher but mostly around 200 degrees fahrenheit so so that's the major difference between the infrared and the traditional sauna a lot of traditional saunas typically you have to have an electrician come out and special things you know have to be done but now there are so there are traditional saunas coming out where you can just plug it into any outlet and do you think that the infrared saunas are likely as beneficial as the traditional saunas well there's certainly not as much evidence to say with confidence whether or not they are i think a lot of studies that have come out of japan they call it way on therapy they're they're using infrared saunas they have a very specific protocol these people are heated up to about 140 degrees fahrenheit and um they're in that saw infrared sauna for a duration of time that's anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes and then they're heated

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at their i mean they're wrapped in a hot blanket and then they're kept in that hot blanket for an additional 15 to 30 minutes and um there's been some some evidence using that type of infrared sauna the way on therapy protocol show you know showing that it helps treat certain heart conditions so it seems to be beneficial for for cardiovascular health as well um you know to some degree you know i mentioned heat shock proteins were activated you know 50 over baseline but this was at 163 degrees fahrenheit for 30 minutes so perhaps you know my like my in-laws have an infrared sauna and i've used it many many times when i've gone to visit them and for me i have to stay in the sauna in the infrared sauna for like an hour and it has to be like totally maxed out before i can get in it it just because i'm so heat adapted too so there might be some changes and we can talk a little bit about the protocols that were used in the studies um by comparison there but um so i do think there are some benefits

i personally think traditional traditional traditional saunas are um are really great but you know again maybe we'll just get more evidence coming out that infrared saunas are you know quite quite beneficial as well and the infrareds tend to be less expensive from what what i'm seeing too a little bit more affordable have you seen any um downsides to the infrared as far as um i don't know i mean infrared sounds it's kind of like a scary word to some people like what's going on with this there's radiation right have you heard of any uh potential downsides to skin or no yes okay no i haven't well if you're comfortable sharing i would love to get into details about your specific sauna protocol that you've adapted in your life how often do you use the sauna what temperature what humidity um you know how long you stay in there so let's get into some of those details and

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i'll preface this by saying this is not medical advice anyone that is considering using the sauna good idea to check it out with your medical professional first in case you have a health condition that may make sauna use dangerous but with that said yeah let's hear about what what you've uh uh incorporated into your life sure well let's start with the studies um and the data that i referred to and and what the temperature duration etc i talked a lot about frequency four to seven times a week but i didn't talk much about temperature or how long people were in the sauna so in almost all of those studies the temperature of the sauna um these were these were saunas in finland and they were 174 degrees fahrenheit around and the humidity was between between 10 to 20 percent humidity i think something like that and so um what was very interesting to me when i was looking at the data coming out of dr

yari lakinen's lab is that duration in the sauna seemed to matter with respect to robustness of um of the results so i mentioned for example you know people that use the sauna four to seven times a week were fifty percent less likely to to die from like you know cardiovascular disease related death well that number was referring to people that stayed in the sauna greater than 19 minutes so this was about 20 minutes so 20 minutes is this is the sweet spot at about 174 degrees fahrenheit you know humidity 10 to 20 um people that sat in the sauna for like 11 minutes on average their their reduction in cardiovascular disease related um death from cardiovascular disease was like 8 percent eight percent versus fifty percent big difference there so um

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duration definitely matters uh with respect to the sauna so that's kind of where i started out with my my sort of okay what am i what am i gonna do and then i also mentioned earlier about heat shock proteins i'm also very interested in activating my heat shock proteins um and so the the 163 degree fahrenheit for 30 minutes activated them by 50 over baseline levels and so um typically what i do my protocol is i do um typically when i go for my long runs i don't i don't do sauna after but i'll but i do do a jacuzzi at night so um when i'm doing my peloton bike i do a lot of high intensity interval training you know uh pelotons and i crank the sauna up you know about an hour an hour and a half before i'm gonna get on that peloton and i get on the peloton and then i go into the sauna immediately after and i'm i'm in the sauna for and the sauna is typically around 186 degrees fahrenheit for me

when i get in there and i stay in there anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes depending on prop mostly depending on how intense my workout was because i've already elevated my core body temperature from my my high intensity workout um and then there are times when i don't work out i just get in the sauna i end up staying there longer for sure i'm in there for 30 minutes about 186 fahrenheit but i'm heat adapted like i i can't tell you like when i first started doing this i certainly um did not start out doing that uh so so um definitely uh keep that in mind i also like to to put hot water so i have um i have my little bucket and um i do i do put some hot water on the rocks my hygrometer like broke um when i when i was measuring it i was getting about 20 to 30 humidity and then once i got 30 i was like i couldn't handle it so i went back down to 10 to 20 humidity because it just

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feels so hot so uh that's typically those are my settings that i do and um i like it frequency how how often i do it it really depends on what i have going on so there are times when i'm like you know i'm doing it five days a week um but then there's other times when i'm like twice a week you know so um i i do try to my my my you know my baseline i try to keep is four i try to do about four times a week but i have been um doing a lot of jacuzzi so i've been doing jacuzzi at night time um it's it's like the only time my husband and i have to ourselves um you know once once our son goes to bed and so we like to go out in the jacuzzi look at the stars and it's very relaxing and time spent together but um our jacuzzi is about 104 degrees fahrenheit and there have been a lot of people have asked me you know can you get the same benefits from the sauna as you do from a hot bath

and we don't have all the empirical evidence to say that yes for sure but we have quite a bit that seems to be accumulating so a lot of the you know heat shock proteins have been shown to be elevated with hot baths brain derived neurotrophic factors increased with hot baths um there's been some effects on depression as well and cardiovascular health and so you know i i i might be going out on a limb here but i would say i really think that hot baths and jacuzzis um can have a similar effect now staying in there saying the jacuzzi for 20 minutes with your shoulders submerged down is kind of key and some of the hot bath studies were the same the hot bath studies used 104 degree fahrenheit water and they were people were submerged from their shoulders down as well but that's kind of my protocol that i've that i follow so you're typically using it to extend your workout you're getting your heart rate up on the bike or going for a run and then your heart rate remains elevated once you get into the sauna i do yeah that is that's that's kind of my

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jam i do but there are times when i i get in there without without working out but like yeah that's so you know sometimes it's like okay if i'm gonna get in the sauna for 20 to 30 minutes like i can i can hop on my peloton and just push it for 10 minutes do a 10 minute high intensity workout um and and just and take you know so basically what i'm doing is i'm taking my workout to the next level you know that's that's what i feel like the sauna is doing where it's like all right i did my workout and boom i'm gonna go to the next level so um and i always go back to that cardio respiratory fitness study where it's like better you know better better than exercise alone yeah and you mentioned the hot bath could potentially be a replacement for the sauna how about just a long extended hot shower for people that don't have a bath yeah that's interesting question you do i mean you get a lot of steam from showers as well so um you know i do think steam showers um can have some beneficial effects i don't think it's gonna be nearly anywhere near like the the data that i

mentioned you know just because you're just not getting as hot when you're taking a hot shower like even like when you're in a hot bath like you can get really hot um you're just not getting quite as hot with with a hot shower but i do think there can be some some some benefits perhaps um i i would i would tend to go for the hot bath though if you have most people do have a bathtub i know not everyone does but if you do have a bathtub i would go for the hot bath over the hot shower got it and how about hydration how do you what's your kind of hydration protocol before and after the sauna yeah that's a good point um you know you do lose a lot of sweat in the sauna and with sweat you also can lose a lot of sodium uh and sodium is the main one but you can also lose you know some other electrolytes like magnesium potassium so um i definitely try i definitely stay hydrated and i switch between um sometimes i'll have like a green a green

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juice that i make with like some kale a little bit of lemon some cucumber um or so i'm getting some of the magnesium and potassium and stuff or i'll do um the noon the electrolyte supplement noon they have like a sugar-free version of it or sometimes i do um some keto it's a it's a ketone salt and it's called ketostart and um it has a lot of it has like magnesium it has potassium it has a lot of electrolytes in it and so i i'll i'll use that in fact i'm drinking that right now but so that's that's typically what i do cool after after the sauna and speaking of after the sauna i know this is a whole another discussion but um cold therapy you know do you ever get in the cold shower or do a cold plunge jump in a frozen lake after the sauna i definitely don't jump on a frozen lake um unless i'm visiting another country like finland um but uh yeah i do so um i

i do have a cold plunge and i also do like cold showers as well i don't do it as frequently as i should um you know there's a lot of benefits to to the cold as well and and in fact a lot of these cultures that we talked about earlier like finland and russia like they they a large percentage of them go from hot and then into cold um i don't go immediately into it um i because when you're when you're under when you're in this in the heat in this like a sauna or a hot bath vasodilation is occurring um you're increasing your blood flow um you know you're you're getting vasodilation and then the complete opposite happens when you go into a cold plunge or cold water or cold water immersion to in some shape or form you're getting your vasoconstriction is happening and so um i've had i've had some scary incidents where going from one extreme directly into the other without waiting like five minutes or a

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few minutes you know where my blood pressure or something just goes really low and i just like i get super dizzy and it's a little scary so so um i do think that exercising caution when going from extremes like that is important so but i do especially in the summertime i like to to run i run out into the the cold plunge like you know a couple minutes after i do the sauna after i like rest for a few minutes two to five minutes you mentioned that you're really well heat adapted to the sauna because of all your regular use for someone that's kind of building their heat tolerance up is there a way that they can kind of tell how long is too long in the sauna are there any kind of signs they should be looking for like ooh i should probably take a break and not push it yeah i think you know your heart starts to really your heart rate starts to get elevated and you know you you definitely want to to push past that point um once

you're heat adapted but you know and you start to feel uncomfortable but you reach a point where your heart's going really fast and you just feel you just feel really really uncomfortable and i think that's that's that's the time i usually like to get out i think people people should definitely listen to their bodies i mean getting out when you just experience the most slight bit of uncomfortableness maybe not the way to go but like you know when you're in there you know like you're feeling like this is i've i'm getting really hot and again like once you hit the 20 minute mark that's really all that's needed you know 20 minutes 174 degree fahrenheit um that's what all these studies have shown have been beneficial for reducing cardiovascular disease mortality and all-cause mortality and alzheimer's and dementia risk so so that's i think a pretty good rule of thumb as well i'm you know 20 minutes and you can also have a timer outside of your sauna i used to do that i used to have a timer clock and it's like okay i reached my time um so so that's also another option

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i think it's good to have an alarm because sometimes you know you can fall asleep in there it's it can be pretty comfortable especially after your heat adapted so i'm a big fan of of the alarm how to let me know that like 25 minutes are up yeah if you're prone to falling asleep in the sauna you should always have someone with you in the sauna for sure i would i would because that could be dangerous yeah they're you know and i know you wanted to cover this kyle the the contraindications of sonny yes yeah let's talk about that i mean as you mentioned like this is not medical advice and um people absolutely should talk to their physician before doing any sort sort of type of extreme thermal stress but the sauna has generally it's generally speaking it's safe for most people it's well tolerated most healthy people even people that have stable cardiac disease can be and if you have cardiac disease you have to talk to your physician but i'm just i'm speaking to the literature here um you know again it's easier for people that can't perform

physical activity i found it easier for like my mom who's sort of been a sedentary person most of her life i can more easily get her in the sauna than i can on the peloton so i think there's a you know a use for that but there are people um there are some some things and people that that should not get into the sauna or should definitely run everything by their physician um alcohol should never be used in the sauna or before going in the sauna and um you know that that can lead to like that that can be deadly it can be very very dangerous so so alcohol is a big no-no people that are elderly that are prone to like really low blood pressure it could be dangerous for them to get in the sauna as well people that have had a recent heart attack or have some cardiac diseases like unstable angina pectoris or severe aortic stenosis um that can be contraindicated so that sauna would not be good for them now people that have had a heart attack that have it's been you know a while and i've

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been stable like talk to your physician because there have been studies showing that sauna use can help with that but um again it's like after time has passed so um that would be something to talk about with uh your primary care physician how about kids or pregnant people oh great question yeah and i i think we also cover this a little bit in our in our review article um kit children children don't have the same type of thermal regulation mechanisms in play that adults do so like kids aren't sweating to cool themselves like adults do like the same i'm not saying kids don't ever sweat they just they're not profusely sweating to cool themselves down and so um sauna sauna can you know anything that's more than five minutes can be can be dangerous for for a child so um and and certainly like really young children you know i like i think that's that's in in places like finland i know like

some children are using the sauna but um you know they have these cultural sort of guidelines there where you know there's a certain age and it's like only a couple of minutes um you know so so i i've i'm not putting i'm not getting my son in the sauna i'd rather have him go for a hike with me or you know get get exercise another way um just just because i don't want to take any risk and then pregnant women again i certainly stayed out of the sauna the entire time that i was pregnant and um i think it's it's probably best because you know there's been a lot of studies that that have come out over the last few decades with jacuzzi bathing you know women that are doing jacuzzi bathing that are pregnant and it and it can lead to um fetal abnormalities so i think it's i think that's a high risk thing for pregnant women and you know i'm sure you'll find pregnant women in finland who who said they use the sauna but um why take the risk you

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know just just take take that nine months off at what age will you allow your son to go in the sauna uh that's a good question um you know he's four years old right now and you know maybe maybe maybe i could think about it in another four years about you know eight or nine and and and at that point it's still going to just be a little exposure yeah build build it up slow yeah what about uh continuous glucose monitors these are really popular with some people right now and i've talked to a few people that say that when they use the sauna their glucose levels will rise sometimes significantly in the sauna have you noticed this as well and what do you think is going on here um i have noticed it i do i also wear continuous glucose monitor a lot of the time

i think i think there's a few possibilities here so for one it like goes back to normal um you know shortly after cooling down you know i think because you're sweating so much you could possibly be changing you know you're you're basically changing the the concentration of the sugar in in your blood could just be sort of temporary transiently seems like it's higher because you're sweating you're sweating out more water from your plasma um that's one one possibility um you know the other possibility is i've seen some studies where that seems to only happen uh when you go into the sauna in a fed state rather than fasted state so and i don't exactly know you know because because the long-term sauna use is associated with improved fasting glucose and improved insulin sensitivity to me at the end of the day that's

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what's important um and and so i think there's there may just be some kind of funny thing going on honestly i might have a lot to do with the sweating when you're in there um but it's just it's not something i'm really concerned about it is something i've noticed though yeah and that makes sense that if you're sweating out volume that the concentration of sugar is going to appear higher right but that's not it's not a real thing it's just concentration yeah yeah um what are some limit you've already talked about some um but what are some of the limitations of the current sauna research that's available and what research do you hope is completed in the coming years about sauna use i think so with any observational study you know there's the the limitation of you can never really establish causality i will say this you know all of all of the work coming out of um dr yari laukanin's lab they they correct for so many confounding factors i mean we're talking

they're looking at cholesterol levels they're looking at exercise cardio you know exercise and physical activity they're looking at all the usual suspects you know where you have socioeconomic status education they're looking at gender they look at heart disease pre-existing heart disease they look i mean hypertension all those things so after all those things are corrected for sauna use is still associated with a lower you know cardiovascular death you know mortality associated with cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality etc and again the dose-dependent nature of it also really i think speaks to it being more causal because you're seeing the more frequent it happens the more robust the effect and even at the level of the amount of time in the sauna and that's what really convinced me when i when i saw that data i like looked through one of the graphs and i was like oh so not only is it four to seven times a week but the people that did it four

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to seven times a week and only stayed in their 11 minutes only had a fraction of the robust effects that people that did it four to seven times a week and stayed in there 20 minutes so the limitations are what they are with any observational study however i feel like this data with the dose dependent nature of the frequency and duration really strengthen the data in my opinion in addition to correcting for some very important confounding factors i would like to see more research on saunas i'd like to see like you know randomized controlled trials with more people where they're doing more sauna research um not only in finland but in the united states you know i i'm so excited that dr ashley mason is doing this study with sauna use and depression but um we need more of it we need more people looking at that like imagine if we have an alternative treatment for depression um in many cases these people have um major

depressive disorder that you know they're basically not able to be treated by you know ssris or other pharmacological treatments it's not working for them so um you can imagine a world where people can have saunas in their home or they can go to some kind of center where they can use the sauna and it helps treat their depression and the side effects are like reduced death from cardiovascular disease and reduced alzheimer's disease risk i mean we're talking beneficial side effects right so um i i just i really want to see this this area of research explode like it's it's it's really been you know there's been more and more research coming out but there's you know nih isn't funding this research um mostly i think i think ashley's now just landed one of her and first nih grants for the sauna but um she had to do a whole pilot study to get there and um so i'd like to see

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i'd like to see you know more research done in more randomized controlled trials and um and i think that totally can be done it just it just hasn't been and of course there's tons of limitations with what i'm about to say because it's a population-based uh effect but it's interesting i just saw an article that finland was rated as the happiest country overall and i know there's almost as many saunas as people in finland so interesting association there that may or may not be related to saunas there's a lot of other characters at play but i think i think the finns have some good things going on with their uh their sauna use definitely yeah anything this has been so informative any other um things that we didn't cover that you want to cover or or speak about um you know i think i think we covered most of it you know the the the awesomeness of the heat shock proteins as well you know heat check proteins also

people that have a genetic what's called a polymorphism so this is like a mutation that happens in a certain percentage of the population that's like more than one percent um in their heat shock protein 70 that makes them have a more active heat shock protein there they on average live um one year longer if if they have one copy of that they live one year longer than people that don't have any copies and if people have two copies in other words they got one from their mom and one from their dad making it even more robust they live on average two years longer than people that don't have an overactive heat shock protein 70. so um i i just think it's it's i like understanding the molecular mechanisms and um you know i know that sauna robustly activates heat shock proteins so um i think we covered a lot of really important stuff in there as far as i could think about it that was that was great i learned a ton and for people that want to hear more

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from you where can they find you besides your youtube channel and website foundmyfitness yeah we have um a podcast on apple podcast and spotify as well for people that like to listen to podcasts we interview experts in the field of aging or sauna research or you know nutrition so um we put those podcasts on apple podcast on itunes and also on youtube we have a lot of slides and graphics much like you guys do at medcram where we try to to cite information and put extra information on there so it's found myfitness all one word um and that's our youtube channel so that's that's probably our main our main one is the youtube channel i also do short videos i just put one out on the metabolic and brain effects and benefits of cold exposure so i know we didn't get into that today we sort of touched on it but there's also a lot of metabolic and brain benefits of cold exposure as well

so we just we just put out a video on that like yesterday i think or two days ago so um that's where you can find me well dr patrick thanks so much for all the information um really appreciate it and hope to chat again sometime soon absolutely my pleasure kyle thank you so much for having me on i'm a big fan of medgram [Music] you

The Science of Sauna: How Heat Builds Resilience

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