Is it Too Hot to Drink Hot Tea?

Believe it or not, on a very hot day, hot tea can cool you down. Am I nuts?

Not according to Peter McNaughton. He is a neuroscientist at the Univeristy of Cambridge. Obviously, a hot drink makes you hotter and a cold drink makes you colder. So why would you want to get hotter on a hot day? We have the answer.

Turns out there are nerves in our tongue and mouth that have special molecules in them called receptors. These receptors receive signals from the world outside the nerve and the nerves in the tongue have a lot of one particular receptor called TRPV1. Sounds pretty R2D2 to me. And the TRPV1 receptor responds to heat. When you eat or drink something hot, these receptors get that heat signal. and tells that nerve to let the brain know what's going on. When the brain gets the message that it is very hot in here, it turns on the mechanism we have to cool ourselves off. That mechanism is called sweat.

So there you have it. A hot drink makes you sweat and the sweat cools you off. Man, there is a lot of stuff going on in our mouths.