Whole Body Cryotherapy: Metabolic + Blood Sugar + Immune Effects

Excellent research below on the effects of different forms of cryotherapy.

1. The beneficial effects of cold exposure as related to the activation of BAT (Brown Adipose Tissue). Metabolic effects that lead to weight loss.
2. Adiponectin is a hormone that is released during cold exposure and breaks down fat and shuttles glucose into muscle (which lowers blood glucose levels). Low levels of adiponectin have been associated with heart disease and Diabetes.
3. Enhanced immune system
4. Increased Cell Longevity
5. Higher Metabolism and Lower Blood Sugar

Additionally, it is revealed why, during whole-body cryotherapy, our areas of weakness and injury feel the cold the most: areas of inflammation experience “reactive vasodilation,” whereby inflammatory and metabolic byproducts are pumped out while healing macrophages and white blood cells mobilize into the area. Aha! Cold therapy is actually even smarter than we thought!

Thank you, Ben Greenfield, for these incredible insights below!

Later today, following my afternoon workout, I’ll go shut down post-workout inflammation and rapidly cool my core by jumping in the nearby 56-degree Spokane River for a 15-20 minute soak while I catch up on my daily dose of NPR’s “Science Friday” podcast. So why do I expose my body to this kind of treatment, and what are the benefits? You’re about to find out!! I will discuss 3 cold therapies I’ve been using to enhance cold thermogenesis, and also get a glimpse into why the argument that “icing doesn’t work” is complete bunk. If you listened to my interview with Jack Kruse about cold thermogenesis, then you know that we discussed a host of benefits from frequent cold exposure done the right way, such as:

1. Lowering body fat, increasing hormone levels
2. Improving sexual performance and fertility
3. Lowering blood sugar, cutting food cravings, and improving adrenal function
4. Fixing thyroid issues
5. Enhancing immune function, improving deep sleep quality
6. Increasing pain tolerance
7. Reducing inflammation

So why does cold exposure achieve some of these benefits? Some Benefits of Cold Exposure

1. BAT Activation Brown adipose tissue, or BAT, is primarily found around your collar bones, sternum, neck, and upper back. It is a unique kind of fat that can generate heat by burning the regular white fat (adipose tissue) found on your stomach, butt, hips, and legs. In most cases, you’d need to exercise or engage in caloric restriction to first burn glucose (blood sugar) and then move on to glycogen (stored liver and muscle sugar) before finally beginning to utilize fat as a fuel source. But BAT can burn white fat immediately and directly. Although BAT is found in all mammals, babies or individuals exposed to frequent bouts of cold temperature tend to have higher levels of brown fat to generate heat and help to keep them warm. And while exercise and fasting can both increase BAT, neither holds a candle to cold. Before we move on from BAT, there’s two important thing you should know: 1) via a process called “mitochondrial uncoupling”, cold exposure can also cause an metabolic upregulation and production of heat in not just fat, but also skeletal muscle… 2) just recently the journal Nature Medicine discovered that a protein called sarcolipin, that, similar to BAT, can burn storage fat to maintain temperature. But research on this protein is limited… The idea is to keep your primary BAT areas activated through repeated but brief exposures to cold (e.g., whole-body cryotherapy).
2. Adinopectin Activation Adinopectin is a hormone released during cold exposure that breaks down fat and shuttles glucose into muscles (which can lower blood sugar). This not only has an anabolic, muscle-repair effect but can also enhance recovery. Interestingly, low adiponectin levels have been associated with obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Adinopectin chalks one point up for getting exposed to some cold post-workout (more on that later).
3. Enhanced Immune System: Cold therapy has been shown to enhance the immune system, primarily by increasing the number of immune cells that help fight disease and infection. Specifically, cold exposure – likely due to its ability to stimulate norepinephrine release – can induce leukocytosis and granulocytosis, an increase in natural killer cell count and activity, and a rise in circulating levels of interleukin-6, all of which can massively improve your immune system integrity.
4. Increased Cell Longevity. mTOR is a protein found in humans. Perhaps you’ve heard that worms, fruit flies, and mice live longer when exposed to caloric restriction, and it is hypothesized that this is caused by downregulation of the mTOR pathway. Inhibition of the mTOR pathway can bring about cell autophagy, which is basically how your body cleans out metabolic “junk” within the cells – and this is the method via which cells may live longer and healthier lives. Cold exposure affects cellular longevity through mTOR pathways similar to those of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting. Basically, you can think of it as a combination of simultaneously increasing your cell’s hardiness and health.
5. Higher Metabolism & Lower Blood Sugar. Cold exposure can cause blood glucose to be burned rapidly as fuel to help heat the body, or stored in muscles to enhance recovery or performance. Before that, blood sugar can potentially be converted to fat via the liver. So while I’m not trying to give you an excuse to cheat on your diet and then use cold thermogenesis, it can come in handy should you slip up and eat too much ice cream. When the metabolism of human BAT is studied using a combination of positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT), glucose uptake in BAT increases 12-fold upon cold exposure, accompanied by significant increases in metabolism and energy expenditure.

Getting the idea that cold exposure might be helpful? The benefits don’t stop with what I’ve listed above, but I thought I’d at least give you a taste of just a few of the upsides to cold exposure.

So Should You Ice After A Workout? In the meantime, however, despite the benefits of cold exposure, there seems to be a sudden doubt about icing’s efficacy across the internet and in several magazines. The argument goes something like this: when an injury occurs, your body triggers inflammation as part of the healing response. So if inflammation is the body’s natural way to heal an injury, why would you want to block this inflammatory process with ice? Although I have a more comprehensive response to this argument against ice, forthcoming in Lava Magazine, I’ll give you 4 good reasons why, in addition to the cold thermogenesis benefits listed above, you actually should ice after a long or especially hard workout (and why I wear my tight, stretchy geeky pants post hard run or bike ride, filled with ice):

1. Ice does not completely reduce inflammation-based swelling. But ice can prevent excessive swelling for a long time after the initial injury. While some swelling certainly does important healing components such as white blood cells and other chemicals involved in the healing process to migrate into damaged tissues through increased vascular permeability, and also physically protects an injured area through decreasing it’s potential range of motion, there is no physiological reason to allow swelling to freely progress for hours or days after an injury occurs, especially if you’re smart enough to have ice around. In fact, preventing excessive swelling is important because fluid that has escaped into the tissues can create a low-oxygen (hypoxic) environment that leads to additional tissue damage and delays healing. In addition, swelling can cause distention of joint capsules and other tissues, as well as excitation of mechanoreceptors in the nervous system, which can increase pain. Ice simply reduces this effect by causing vasoconstriction (shrinking blood vessels) around the vasculature surrounding an injury.
2. The cold temperature of ice can slow down nerve conduction velocity and shut down the activation of your muscle spindles, making it a highly effective pain reliever and muscle relaxant. If a muscle is less painful and more relaxed, mobilization and movement become possible, and a return to functional training status can occur much more quickly, thereby limiting muscle atrophy or loss of fitness.
3. Ice also reduces metabolic activity in the tissues you ice, making them better able to resist the damaging effects of impending oxygen loss from inflammatory swelling pressure. In other words, lower tissue temperatures from icing mean less oxygen is required by your muscles to sustain their integrity.
4. Finally, as you learned in point 1, ice causes vasoconstriction, or the shrinking of blood vessels. But unless you’re in extreme conditions where you must shuttle blood to your brain and vital organs to survive, your body will avoid tissue death by not allowing the body part you’re icing to cool excessively. Through a process called “reactive vasodilation” (also known as the Hunting reflex or Lewis reflex), your vessels, while being exposed to cold, create a negative pressure in the capillary system, which causes a pumping of inflammatory and metabolic byproducts out of an injured area, while allowing additional healing components such as macrophages and white blood cells to mobilize into the area. When combined with pressure and elevation, this “pumping” action of ice can be an extremely effective rehabilitation tool (and you can observe this in nature by simply jumping into a cold lake for about 20 minutes and watching your skin slowly turn red as reactive vasodilation occurs).