"Why would you want to sweat so much,

and what's the big deal?"

Excerpts from the book, Sweat, by Mikkel Aaland

Sitting in a sweat bath could be the most vigorous activity you've had all day. The heat produces an artificial "fever" and urges every organ of the body into action. While outwardly relaxed, your inner organs are as active as though you were jogging or mowing the lawn. At the same time, you are being cleansed from inside out by the skin, your body's largest organ and it's excretion, sweat.

The oldest known medical document, the Ayurveda, appeared in Sanskrit in 568 BC, and considered sweating so important to health that it prescribed the sweat bath and thirteen other methods of inducing sweating. Throughout history, physicians have extolled the medicinal value of the sweat baths. Today, enthusiasts claim that beyond being relaxed, the sauna gives relief from the common cold, arthritis, headaches and hangovers. Medicinal evidence shows that bathing in temperatures of 90 degrees C (192 degrees F) has a profoundly beneficial effect on a healthy body.

Sweating is as essential to our health as eating and breathing. It accomplishes three important things: rids the body of wastes, regulates the critical temperature of the body at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F), and helps keep the skin clean and pliant.

Many people, simply don't sweat enough...

making sweat bathing particularly desirable during these times. Antiperspirants, artificial environments, smog, synthetic clothing, and a physically idle lifestyle all conspire to clog skin pores and inhibit the health flow of sweat. These detrimental effects can be reversed in a sweat bath.

The physiological effects of different sweat baths are not the same, due to variations in heat and humidity. The length of time spent in the sauna differs from time spent in other sweat baths. When you lounge in a sweat bath, heat sensitive nerve endings produce acetylcholine, a chemical which alerts the 2.3 million sweat glands embedded in the skin. But not all of them respond. The aprocine sweat glands, located in the pubic and arm pit areas, are activated only by emotional stimuli. The eccrine sweat glands, by far the most abundant, respond to heat.

During a 15 minute sauna, about 1 liter of sweat is excreted, depending on the individual. (Normal daily rate ranges from .5 to 1.5 liters.) Eccrine sweat is clear and odorless; any odor is only created by the presence of bacteria. One of its chief functions is to cool the body by evaporation, although there are also eccrine glands on the palms of your hands and soles of your feet which react to emotional stimuli.

Like the baseball batter

who wets his hands for a better grip,

it is believed these sweat glands were intended to provide us with a good grip on clubs, rocks, or vines when our survival often depended upon them.

A third kind of sweat, called insensible perspiration, originates inside and works its way though blood and other cells to the surface of the skin. Even without a sweat bath, approximately a liter of insensible perspiration evaporates each day. Sweat also has the function of being a judicious garbage collector. During a 15 minute sauna, sweating can perfomr the heavy metal excretion that would take the kidneys 24 working hours. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of what sweat brings to the surface of the skin is water, but the remaining one percent (1%) is mostly undesirable wastes. Excessive salt carried by sweat is generally believed to be beneficial for cases of mild hypertension. Some mental hospitals use saunas in their rehabilitation programs to pacify patients. A metabolic by-product, urea, if not disposed of regularly, can cause headaches, nausea and in extreme cases, vomiting, coma and even death. Sweating is such an effective de-toxifier that that it draws out lactic acid which causes stiff muscles and contributes to general fatigue. Sweat flushes out toxic metals such as copper, lead, zinc, and mercury, which the body absorbs in polluted environments.

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