Drinking tea outside (image from smallhomeinthecountry.blogspot.com)
But most avid tea-drinkers will tell you it’s the best way to cool yourself down, because it makes you sweat. It really does seems like backward logic to me that a hot drink leaves you cooler after drinking it. So after years of not knowing the facts, I decided to finally investigate the ‘tea cools you down’ statement.
It didn’t take long for me to track down the scientific inconsistencies of the ‘hot drinks make you cool’ belief. According to About.com, drinking hot tea in an attempt to cool down is really just an old wive’s tale:
The problem in the logic lies with the laws of thermodynamics. The amount of heat lost by sweating and evaporation will never exceed the amount of heat gained by the hot drink you’ve consumed. Another problem is that the extra heat makes your blood vessels near the skin dilate to help cool your blood faster. The nerves in your skin can sense this, causing you to feel flushed and warm. Not exactly the result you are looking for.
That seems like a fairly conclusive statement to me. Myth busted.
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But the true tea-lover will do it anyway! Viva the nutcasery of the tea-drinker!
That’s true Imelda. Nothing will stop us tea-lovers from consuming the lovely stuff!
Now that is interesting – I was always taught by my homeopathic mother that you treat like with like so hot drink a hot drink, if cold drink a cold one. Have to say I’ve never been entirely convinced about this either, as I always crave cold drinks when I’m hot and hot when I’m cold, so I think you are definitely onto something
Well it seems to work for some, personally I prefer drinking ice tea or cold drinks when it’s as hot as it has been in the past week or so. I guess it’s sort of down to the psychology of the individual!