How much of this is actually proven?

COLD, HEAT and CONTRAST THERAPY

If you saw my post this week, this is the longer version of what I meant.

Cold and heat are everywhere right now. A billion views, endless videos, a new claim every week. I want to say plainly where I stand, because I have always tried to tell you both halves of the truth at once.

Photo by Evan Clark on Unsplash

There is a real core here. The mechanisms are established. Cold sets off a clear stress response in the body. Cold and heat measurably change how we handle energy over time. Part of that work came out of my own research, published in Cell Reports Medicine, including the weekly protocol you may have heard me talk about, eleven minutes of cold and fifty seven minutes of heat. That core is solid. I stand on it every day, and I am proud of it.

What I cannot tell you honestly is that the enormous tower of claims built on top of that core has been proven. Claims about hormones, immunity, fat loss, longevity. Most of it has barely been tested in real people, and some of it not at all. The confidence around these claims is enormous. The evidence under most of them is thin.

This matters because of a difference almost nobody talks about. Reading a study is not the same as proving something. A great many people now call themselves science backed because they have read a paper or two. Having read the literature and understanding where that literature stops are two very different things, and the second one takes years. The certainty you see online is mostly borrowed from abstracts, not earned from the whole picture.

We have been here before, and that is the part that should give us all pause. A little over a century ago there was an enormous movement built on cold and water. Hundreds of clinics across Europe and America. Huge belief. Then it almost entirely vanished, because when the moment came to prove itself, it could not, and it had promised far too much. The strand that survived was the one that worked with the science and wanted to be tested.

So here is what I am going to do. I am going to spend this next chapter holding what we genuinely know apart from what we only assume, and then going and measuring the difference, properly, in real people, over real time. That is the only honest way forward, and it is the work I care about most.

I would love your help shaping it. So before you close this, tell me one thing. What question about cold, heat, or contrast therapy would you most like to see answered with real research? Reply in comments below. I read them.

More soon,

Susanna