There are times when eating cold food is the easiest possible option. For instance, when you might be packing a lunch for work or school, it will often be far easier to prepare a cold sandwich and then eat it several hours later than it might be to prepare soup or stew, and eat that many hours later.
But, the question still stands – is it bad to eat cold food? Your diet can impact your health in a range of ways, so something as fundamental as temperature may well impact your health. Let’s talk about that in this article.
How does temperature affect your digestion?
Temperature can definitely impact your digestion. The main reason for this is that most of the digestion in your body is done by a range of enzymes that break down different types of molecules within the food that you eat. These enzymes work best at regular human body temperature – 37.5˚C. This is why it can be really bad for the human body to get a fever, or go into hypothermia.
Thankfully, the food that you’re eating won’t have quite so dramatic an impact as that. The main reason for that is that your body is exceptionally skilled at something called homeostasis – keeping everything at the right temperature, speed, and rate that it’s supposed to be at.
By the time food reaches your stomach, it will have warmed up (or cooled down) to approximately your body temperature. This means that the temperature of your food doesn’t tend to impact digestion too much. Instead, the ambient temperature impacts you.
When ambient temperature and food temperature work together
When a lizard eats a large piece of food, it goes to sun itself on a rock. It does this because the enzymes will get warmer as they sit in the sun, and they will then work better. In turn, the food will be broken down and digested more effectively.
In a human, however, when we’re too cold or too hot, our body burns calories making sure that we’re at the right temperature. It will either cause us to shiver and raise our body temperature, or cause us to sweat, and lower our body temperature.
The problem, in this case, comes when the food’s temperature makes the ambient temperature around you feel worse.
For instance, say you’re sitting in an extremely hot room, and sweating a lot to bring yourself back to a reasonable temperature. Eating a very spicy curry, for example, could likely lead to you feeling warmer than you are, and your body overworking itself to compensate for this heat.
While this happening once or twice won’t be too massive a problem. Having this problem sustain itself over the course of a longer period of time is quite likely to lead to your body overworking itself to some extent, and you potentially getting sick.
When is it bad to eat cold food?
The times that it would be bad to eat cold food would most likely be those times in which you’re already exceptionally cold. For instance, if you were standing in the rain at a spectator sport event, a cold salad or something similar to that will make you feel even colder than you are.
To prevent this from happening, a high-calorie, high-temperature food would be a great course of action.
This will also help to ensure that you’re as warm as possible by ensuring that you have the calories required to shiver and warm yourself up with time. Eating too few calories can result in you simply being too cold, to an unpleasant degree.
When is it good to eat cold food?
It may be good to eat cold food on a very hot day. This is because you may feel that you’re far too hot to face a large plate of hot food, and as such, opting for something a little cooler and more gentle will allow you to get the food that you need into you, while also preventing you from overheating.
A great way to make this happen is to deliberately opt for food with a high water content. For example, cucumber is known to be a very cooling food, and it has an exceptionally high water content – this will ensure that you can stay hydrated even in very hot conditions since you’ll be getting plenty of water from your food as well as in the water that you’re drinking.
It can also be good to eat cold food when you’re simply in a rush. All of the problems of eating cold food that we’ve discussed here are something that you might have trouble with when you’re been eating only cold food for a very long time. To prevent that from being an issue, keeping your diet as varied as possible is a great way to ensure your general health.
While, naturally, this does mean that you should eat a number of different things, it does also mean that you should eat different things that are hot, cold, and everything in between.
How to ensure cold food works for you
Ensuring that cold food works for you is all about making sure that you have foods that you enjoy while they’re cold. For example, a lot of people who eat olives say that green olives taste good when cold, but black olives taste good when they’re warm.
You can apply this to any food that you might like to eat in life – it’s all about ensuring that you find the tastiest way to eat the foods that you need to eat: ensuring that you get plenty of protein, fiber, and nutrients throughout your diet as a whole.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has helped to shed some light on the topic for you – the world of nutrition and food science can be a bit complex at the best of times, so trying to demystify it a little with this short article is the least we could do.
Remember, whether the food is hot or cold, eating a wide variety of fruit and veg is always good for you!
