when 2 people are close will the warmest person transfer calories to the other through radiating heat?
In: Biology
Where the hell did you read that? If that happened it would be magic.
I’m guessing you probably misinterpreted an article, or the article itself misinterpreted something. The thing that was misinterpreted was probably the relationship between temperature and calorie expenditure. A big part of where our calories go is into producing heat. Someone who’s very cold will need to burn extra calories to generate more heat to warm themselves up, and someone who is in a cold place will need to burn extra calories to generate more heat to counteract heat loss to the environment. So if you got a very cold person and a very warm person and put them next to each other, the very warm person would lose heat a bit faster to the cold person next to them, meaning they burn slightly more calories to keep themselves warm, and the very cold person would need to burn slightly fewer calories themselves to reach a good temperature.
No calorie transfer has actually taken place here, but relatively speaking, one has burned more calories and the other less than they otherwise would have if they were alone in a room-temperature room.
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