Today’s guest: Kenneth Kamler, M.D., author of ‘Surviving the Extremes’

Mike Carruthers:

The human body is amazingly adaptable.

Kenneth Kamler, M.D.:

Well, if you think about it, the body temperature has to stay around 98.6 degrees. If the body temperature varies by more than 10 degrees from that temperature, we die. And yet, we live on a planet where the temperature varies from sometimes 20 below zero to 140 degrees.

M.C.: Dr. Kamler says when your body starts to get too hot, it needs to get rid of some of that heat.

K.K.: And the way you get rid of it is by having blood flow past the organs that are developing the heat and bringing it out to the skin surface. And there it goes out into the atmosphere, provided that the atmosphere is cool enough to take the heat away.

M.C.: But, when the air is not cool enough and is higher than your body’s temperature …

K.K.: What your body does is turn on its sprinkler system, which is sweating. And your sweat glands put water on the surface of the skin. The water evaporates, and the evaporation process has a cooling effect, and that brings down your body temperature. It’s actually an amazing system.

M.C.: And when you’re in a cold environment …

K.K.: Your body then redirects the blood flow away from the surface of the skin into your deeper layers. And everyone has a layer of fat underneath their skin. So the blood is redirected underneath the fat layer, and fat is a good insulator, and that helps to keep it warm. That’s the first body mechanism. The second body mechanism is what we call shivering. Your body will start to shake, and the only purpose of that shaking is to generate heat.