Are Saunas Good for You?

I'm a Finn so I'm biased.

From general systems biology perspective everything that moves body metabolism away from it's normal state for short time seems to give benefits, exercise, cold, heat, hunger, ... allostatic load that is not chronic is generally good.

	▲	pcthrowaway a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> everything that moves body metabolism away from it's normal state for short time seems to give benefits Sleep deprivation? Extreme stress?
	▲	djmips a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That's rationalization.
	▲	xkcd-sucks 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My hot take hopeful guess is that heat shock causes upregulation of protein degradation / chaperone activity, thereby disrupting protein aggregation involved in AD, PD, et all. One can hope

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zonkerdonker 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed that more studies are required. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25705824/ This and some others studies correlate a 40% reduction in all cause mortality (that is, 40% reduction in risk of dying from anything) with sauna use. Even if the correlation is proven to be weak, still seems worth it to get a shvitz whenever you can.

	▲	rendx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> "We performed a prospective cohort study of a population-based sample of 2315 middle-aged (age range, 42-60 years) […] During a median follow-up of 20.7 years […] A total of 601, 1513, and 201 participants reported having a sauna bathing session 1 time per week, 2 to 3 times per week, and 4 to 7 times per week, respectively." They are comparing the health differences of the number of sessions, using only people who claim to do sauna at least once a week over 20 years. They have nothing to say about lower frequency or no sauna at all.

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Anon84 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.md/aRRVl

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metalman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

saunas feel good, especialy in the winter, and the local indiginious population swear by the use of traditional sweat lodges, the inuit also build sauna shacks , but forget what they call them, but up there you would only need to step outside to get your pores to snap shut, no need for a pool the migimach people have two types of "sweats" one is just a sauna, the other is for cerimonial purposes