Turns Out We Should All Be Eating Soup During A Heatwave

Everybody knows that fall is soup season. When the leaves turn orange and the air gets nippy, you want to warm up with a bowl of something hot, rich, and comforting. In the summertime, when you want to cool yourself down, people tend toward dishes that are nice and cold: ice cream, fresh fruit, things of that nature. Who wants to bother eating hot soup in hot weather? Counterintuitively, hot soups are actually great at helping you cool down.

You see, perspiration is the body's way of keeping itself at a reasonable temperature. The sweat produced by your pores evaporates when exposed to heat, which helps cool you down a little. (This is why humid days are so miserable: Because the air is already so saturated with moisture, your sweat can't evaporate quickly enough.) When you eat or drink something hot on a warm day, it encourages your body to sweat more, which cools you down with great efficiency.

If it's so helpful, how come we never think to eat something hot during a heat wave? Well, it's partly a matter of culture. In America, many of us associate summertime with ice pops and watermelon (seedless or otherwise). It certainly feels like these treats do the job when you eat some in the dog days of August. (Indeed, while eating hot food helps you sweat which does cool you down, cold foods also cool you down by lowering your internal temperature.) Chinese people often drink plain hot water throughout year, even in the summer. (If you're going to try it yourself, do it like the Brits and heat the water with a kettle.)

A lot of this is splitting hairs, really. Chances are that a bowl of Martha Stewart's balsamic vinegar beef stew in the summer won't be the difference between making it through the day and dying of heatstroke, just as eating a bowl of ice cream in December won't make you die of hypothermia. Still, it's always interesting to notice solutions many often overlook just because they don't necessarily make intuitive sense.