This can also include the mechanisms for causing or body to warm up
In: Biology
This a rather general statement because the nitty gritty of biochemistry is a pain to explain.
When feeling cold, the brain’s thermoregulator, the hypothalamus will signal muscle groups to start shivering to create body heat. This process entails consuming energy and calories.
Conversely, upon feeling warmer than usual, the sweat glands will start secreting sweat to wick away body heat.
Basically burning calories, atp created by cellular respiration. We are warm blooded animals meaning we have to maintain a constant body temp to stay alive. We use most of the food we eat to give us calories for this energy. To do this we have to eat every day multiple times a day. Compared to a cold blooded animal like a snake or a fish their food intake is much lower relatively speaking.
So, there are 2 main ways your body regulates temperature, or in this case “warm up”.
They are:
* Shivering thermogenesis
* Eli5: Your body rapidly contracts it’s muscles in order for some of the stored chemical energy in your body, to become Kinetic energy (Movement), and for some of that chemical energy that is being converted, to be released as heat. This uses a LOT of our “energy molecules” which could either be Glucose (sugar) or triglycerides (fat). Essentially we literally burn fat or stored sugar it like we would burn any fuel, such as gasoline, in order to get heat as a by product.
* Brown Adipose thermogenesis
* This is what we call “Brown Fat”. This type of tissue is different from other types of fat as it is abundant in mitochondria (the power house of the cell). And the principal is the same as before. We increase our lisis (rupture, in order to be used) of the “energy molecules” we talked about before, how ever, not all of that energy is used to create ATP(basically fuel for energy our body can use, like diesel or gasoline for a car), and instead that stored chemical energy is simply released as heat.
Cooling mechanisms are much different!
I can give a much more complicated and in depth explanation if you’d like, but I tried to keep it simple.
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