How does the body thermo regulate itself?
In: Biology
Well, the body constantly is generating heat internally.
This heat gets dissipated (Dumped into) to the air around us. So a comfortable air temperature is the temperature where your body is generating heat and dissipating heat the the air at the same rate, keeping us at roughly 98 degrees F.
If our bodies start generating too much heat, and can’t dissipate it fast enough, we start sweating, the evaporation of water off our skin increases the speed that heat dissipates of the body.
If we’re losing heat too quickly, we will start shivering. The extra muscle contractions and motion that comes with shivering increases the amount of heat the body is generating.
Heat generated in the mitochondria provides most of the baseline. If you drop a certain amount below that, your muscle generate a bit of extra heat through shivering. If you go over, you start sweating.
Certain animals (and human babies!) also have specialized brown fat tissue that can burn energy at will to generate more heat. This is a lot like the normal mitochondrial heat generation, except it’s uncoupled from the cell’s metabolism and can therefore be much more freely used.
If you get too hot, you sweat. Evaporation of the water in your sweat carries heat away and cools you down. You also tend to slow down your activity, reducing the heat produced by burning calories in your body.
If you get too cold, you start working your muscles (voluntary = working harder, involuntary = shivering). This increases your calorie burn and adds heat. Depending on circumstance, we may also curl up to minimize heat loss to the environment.
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