We do mention the idea that the hot tea causes the body’s temperature controls to kick in and because these are not perfect, they could overshoot the mark. But, I just ran up the stairs to my office and am not drinking a hot cup of tea, which has left me feeling slightly flushed, and certainly warmer inside than before.

Seeing as you’re such a stickler for the science, why not provide us with a reference or two for this legendary experiment? If it was carried out on a statistically significant cohort and shows actual temperatures of the subjects before and after hot and cold drinks…then we might be closer to being convinced.

The assertion that they tested was the one that stated that drinking a hot tea after exercising would cool you off faster than drinking a cold drink. So what they did was have a test subject exercise for some minutes and then drink a hot or cold drink and then record the results with a relatively new invention, the thermal imaging camera.

The thermal images clearly showed that the person who drank a hot tea after being hot from exercise was lowering his body temperatures faster than someone that drank a cold liquid after exercising. The principle that causes this is know as “Like cures like.” Where a specific condition is changed by administration of a similar condition. The heat of the tea informs the body that it is hot and the body response is to cool itself off.

Sweating has done it’s job, as have other physiological functions to expose the body’s heat to the environment where it will radiate away more efficiently and continue to do so – because it’s not a closed system.

The same conclusions are to be drawn from experiments in extreme cold. Those with wet skin (either from sweat or falling into icy water for example) will lose body heat, far faster than the same person with dry skin.

This is one of the reasons why it is better to take off wet clothes in extreme cold. You’ll survive longer with no clothes!