98.6°F

Shivering parents with their thermostats set to 80°F, imploring their children to wear their jackets outside. To clothe a bonfire!

The average body temperature has decreased by 0.04°C per decade since the Industrial Revolution, or roughly for the last 150 years. This totals to an approximate decrease of 0.59°C, bringing the average from 37°C or 98.6°F, to 36.6°C or 98°F (Protsiv et al., 2020). I suspect the average is much, much lower, especially in the older demographic. The significance of such a drastic decline is that body temperature is a surrogate marker for metabolism, meaning that the changes brought on by technological inventiveness of the last century and a half have been slowly causing mammals to lose the ability to thermoregulate, something that is a characteristic feature of reptilian life. I want to make it clear that when people talk of the “reptilian elite” ruling things, they are not mere exaggerations, but descriptive observations of something much deeper and biological. I digress. The biochemical significance of 98.6°F is that it’s the temperature at which enzymatic activity across the entire human body is best facilitated. In mammals, the loss of the ability to generate heat is now being observed as far north as Alaska and the Arctic, where polar bears have been discovered to suffer from hair loss, the alopecia being driven by the adaptive stress of plastic pollution and habitat loss (Atwood et al., 2015). If trapping body heat is the main function of hair and fur, why allocate resources to grow and maintain it in the absence of heat?

Below is one of my absolute favorite graphs on the internet, solely because it encompasses important biological truths despite its simplicity. It is from 1910, showing man’s body temperature variations throughout the day. As morning cortisol and adrenalin lower, the temperature rises from 97.6°F to its peak around 99.6°F, maintained by red light, thyroid, sugar, and the youth-associated hormones, and as the sun starts to set, prolactin, serotonin, adrenaline, and cortisol rise, and bring the temperature down to its lowest point at 4 am, 97.2°F. If you paid a little attention to the patterns of thoughts/feelings/actions that arise throughout the day, you’d notice their variation tends to correspond exactly to the graph below. It’s a rollercoaster of death and rebirth, of anxiety and creativity, of labor and leisure, of melatonin-induced hallucinations, and a world drowned in color. If we are so lucky as to escape the horrors of disease and natural disasters and make it to old age, the night is sure to take us. A prayer before bed allows one to ask for the strength to bear the stress of darkness.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”

Thyroid blood tests mean nothing in diagnosing euthyroidism if the absolute most basic diagnostic tool, the underarm temperature (and pulse) do not fit within the abovementioned variation, ranging from 97.8°F upon waking to 98.6°F-99°F around noon. The absurdity surrounding this century-long decline in temperature isn’t that it is happening (since even mainstream medicine admits it), it is that it is seen as a positive marker of health, a happy offshoot of industrial progress, and of better thermometer manufacturing standards (kek, Stanford is a joke).

Moreover, as society gets sicker, standards lower to cater to the population at hand. As the upper “healthy” limit of TSH has increased over the previous decades as a result of the nationwide decline in thyroid function, so is there now an open discussion amongst academics about LOWERING WHAT IS AN ACCEPTABLE AND HEALTHY AVERAGE BODY TEMPERATURE. The below quote demonstrates just how delusional conclusions tend to form, how lies are built on shaky foundations of assumptions grounded in fundamentally asinine theories about complex biological organisms.

“The authors hypothesize that this reduction [in temperature] may be due to a population-wide decline in inflammation: ‘Inflammation produces all sorts of proteins and cytokines that rev up your metabolism and raise your temperature…public health has improved dramatically in the past 200 years due to advances in medical treatments, better hygiene, greater availability of food and improved standards of living…comfortable lives at constant ambient temperature contribute to a lower metabolic rate. Homes in the 19th century had irregular heating and no cooling; today, central heating and air conditioning are commonplace. A more constant environment removes a need to expend energy to maintain a constant body temperature…Modern studies have called the ‘normal’ human temperature of 37°C (or 98.6°F) into question, suggesting that it’s too high.“

Because “The Rate of Living” theory predominates the lens through which physiological processes are judged, the slower a candle burns, and the lower the metabolic rate, the longer it lasts and the longer we live. Brian Johnson’s race to youthfulness with his 94.9°F core temperature is a testament to this delusion. Such low temperature was known to be a characteristic “feature” of cretinism (as well as general hypothyroidism) more than a hundred years ago, those who had been congenitally deficient in thyroid hormones grew to be short, deformed, slow, cold, and intellectually disabled. Supplementing thyroid hormones in the form of animal gland preparations restored heat production quite quickly.

There is a rather interesting graph that I came across a few months ago that cleared some of the confusion about Ray’s insistence that hyperthyroidism (and thus excess heat production) is protective. It seems to me that what is considered hyperthyroidism in adults (measured by the Achilles tendon reflex) is simply euthyroidism in children, and so having a temperature a little bit over 98.6°F as an adult is “true euthyroidism”. I tend to keep mine around 99°F. Hyperthyroidism should not be confused with Grave’s disease. The latter is hypothyroidism in disguise.

As early as the 1930s, it was discovered that injecting estrogens into rats would suppress thyroid activity. Later on, it was found to be an effective treatment for hyperthyroidism (Shute et al., 1942). During the menstrual cycle, there is an inverse correlation between estrogen levels and body temperature. Progesterone facilitates thyroid secretion from the gland and is powerfully thermogenic.

Something amusing that I’ve noticed for quite some time now is when I am sitting in my car and lost in deep thought/reading, the front windshield starts to fog up very quickly. The temperature difference between the outside and inside is heightened with the increased energy expenditure as it leaves the body as heat. Ray had a similar experience while painting.

Relating to love, I think there is something deeper to the idea of touch being a positive for healthy development; the exchange and feeling of warmth that accompanies the sensation of touch. Heavy and electric blankets, oversized pillows, cashmere sweaters, etc. are all substitutes for the real thing, a person who’s warm to the touch, whose fingers aren’t frigid, who’s a fireplace within the darkest of abandoned mansions. Warmth characterizes everything about being human, it kindles around the heart and spreads outwards to the limbs; from the hands, nose, and mouth towards those closest to us, towards the tasks set before us. It speaks kindness and patience into existence and allows us to feel the wind without shivering, thus redefining its meaning. It’s not a mere biochemical “happening” “hardwired” for survival, but an inseparable aspect of higher living, of a more nuanced way of communication. In its absence, man loses himself, his shell becomes smaller to protect the little heat that he does produce - he can no longer afford to share himself, to give away. You owe it to those around you to burn a little warmer.

References

Atwood, T., Peacock, E., Burek-Huntington, K., Shearn-Bochsler, V., Bodenstein, B., Beckmen, K., & Durner, G. (2015). PREVALENCE AND SPATIO-TEMPORAL VARIATION OF AN ALOPECIA SYNDROME IN POLAR BEARS (URSUS MARITIMUS) OF THE SOUTHERN BEAUFORT SEA. Journal of Wildlife Diseases, 51(1), 48–59. doi:10.7589/2013-11-301 

News Center. (2020, January 7). Human body temperature has decreased in United States, study finds. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-temperature-has-decreased-in-united-states.html

Protsiv M, Ley C, Lankester J, Hastie T, Parsonnet J. Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the industrial revolution. Elife. 2020 Jan 7;9:e49555. doi: 10.7554/eLife.49555.

Shute WE, Shute EV. Hyperthyroidism Treated by OEstrogens. Can Med Assoc J. 1942 May;46(5):441-4. PMID: 20322446; PMCID: PMC1827304.