642: The science of sweat, saunas & stress | best-selling author Bill Gifford
The mindbodygreen Podcast
mindbodygreen
4.5 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mind Buddy Green podcast. I'm Jason Wachab, founder and co-CEO of My Buddy Green, and your host. |
| 0:10.4 | What if one of the most powerful tools for your health has been hiding in plain sight? And most of us have been actually avoiding it. |
| 0:18.3 | Today's guest is Bill Gifford, a veteran science journalist, author of |
| 0:22.0 | Spring Chicken, a New York Times best-selling author on longevity and co-author of Outlive. His latest book, |
| 0:29.1 | Hotwired, How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, Dives Deep into the Emerging Science of |
| 0:36.5 | Heat, Sweating, and what happens when we stop running from |
| 0:40.5 | discomfort. Phil spent his career translating cutting-edge science for real people, writing for |
| 0:46.7 | WIRE, Bloomberg, Business Week, Scientific American, Outside, and more. In this episode, we get into |
| 0:52.5 | why sweating is one of humanity's greatest evolutionary |
| 0:55.4 | superpowers and what we lose when we live in perfectly climate-controlled comfort 24-7. We discuss |
| 1:02.6 | the Finnish sauna tradition, what the science says about minimum effective dose, and why heat |
| 1:07.7 | exposure may be one of the most underrated tools for cardiovascular and |
| 1:12.5 | mental health. We also tackle the cold punch debate. Bill makes a compelling case for why the |
| 1:17.8 | cold side of the equation is far less settled than what one would believe. This one challenged |
| 1:23.6 | some of my own assumptions and I think it will challenge yours too. Let's dive it. |
| 1:30.7 | Heat challenge some of my own assumptions and I think it will challenge yours too. Let's dive it. Heat, sweating. You argue that sweating, which many people do not like, is a superpower. |
| 1:39.1 | Let's talk about that. What did we lose when we moved into this world of constant climate control? |
| 1:45.7 | And how do we get it back when we reintroduce heat? |
| 1:49.8 | Yeah, so our ability to sweat is this evolutionary anomaly. |
| 1:56.4 | And it kind of happened by accident, they think, more than a million years ago the series of genetic |
| 2:03.8 | mutations that took these existing sweat glands that our ancestors had in their feet and their |
| 2:11.2 | I guess pause spread them all over their body these are our prehuman like ape-like ancestors right so they had these all of a sudden they had these sweat glands all over their body. These are our pre-human, like, ape-like ancestors, right? |
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