Okay, so let’s file this one under: Some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. I grew up in Honolulu Hawaii, so I didn’t hear this one too often until I came out east:
Wear a hat!
You lose most of your body heat
out of the top of your head!
I don’t know what’s more remarkable – the persistence of this myth, or its abject stupidity.
Yes, heat rises.
Yes, the scalp is highly vascularized to maximize blood flow around the skull.
And yes, you DO lose most of your body heat out of your head, but not out of the top.
We are, on a certain level, caloric furnaces, chugging along converting doughnuts, beer, quesadillas, and the occasional vegetable into energy, the byproduct of which is heat (OK, and a few other things, but that’s beyond the scope of this rant).
We do not discharge that heat, however, out of some invisible smokestack on the top of our heads. Rather, the body furnace discharges a tremendous amount of heat through respiration, the exhaust of which comes pouring out of the nose and mouth by the cubic meter.
Put another way, I have yet to see someone with cold hands attempt to warm them by holding them a couple of inches over their head, but I do see a lot of people on a day like today blowing on their hands to get warm.
The preceding is not intended to discourage,
disparage, or otherwise besmirch the
noble practice of hat-wearing. The author
concedes, also, that wearing a hat
is warmer than not wearing one.