When It’s This Hot, What Should You Eat? As temperatures continue to climb in what could become the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer on record, the summer of 2023 is all about finding any way to stay cool. And that includes turning to foods that will hopefully provide a little relief. While not a panacea for the heat, body-cooling foods and no-cook diets could help to lower body temperature and make record-breaking heat waves a little more bearable..
Living safely in consistently hot climates means staying hydrated, especially with chilled drinks or fruits. But there are other, more physiologically based—and even surprising—ways to make your diet more heat friendly. While the science behind diets, nutrition, and climate is still growing, changing global temperatures makes understanding the link between food and metabolism increasingly critical.
The contradictory cooling effect of spicy foods
One place to start is to explore how heat influences diets in warmer parts of the world. Why, for example, do the spiciest foods come from the hottest places on the planet? Think southeast Asian curries and peppers, and South American chilis. If spicy foods make you sweat and feel even hotter, why are they such a staple in warmer regions?
There’s a biological reason for that, says Dr. William Li, a former Harvard Medical School faculty member who has written a book about finding the right diet for your metabolism. What happens when you dig into a spicy dish? Your heart beats a little faster, you breathe a little harder, you start to perspire, and not just your mouth but your whole body can feel as if it’s on fire. And if you’re eating this dish and it’s above 90F outside, you’re really feeling the heat.
But sweating is the body’s physiological response to being too hot. “Our sole means of cooling is to sweat,” says Dr. Linda Shiue, an internist and chef who is director of culinary and lifestyle medicine at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco. Once you sweat, the perspiration evaporating moisture cools the skin. We’re not talking tens of degrees here—it’s fractions of single digits of change in temperature, but it’s still something. If the body’s core temperature starts climbing—which it does if you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long—sweating cools off the skin in an attempt to bring that core temperature down. Eating spicy foods jumpstarts that process, which is why they’re so popular in hotter regions of the world.
