Support me on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/knowledgeofliving A short explaination of why are body temperatures are always around 98°F. What is a fever? I explain that as well! Subscribe for weekly videos! 🙂 http://bit.ly/1sjPdf2 Check out my website full of other great stuff!: http://www.knowledgeofliving.com/ I’m also on FB and Twitter: Link to article: http://mbio.asm.org/content/1/5/e00212-10.full?sid=3927b57a-d112-452b-bbce-e1e1f4743e1d Why 98.6? According to the American Council on Exercise, you may burn about 400 calories an hour from shivering. The range of temperatures in humans over the age of 10 years is 97.6-99.6. The average, of course, being 98.6. But why such a specific temperature for all human life on the planet? Even more so the range of body temperatures across all warm blooded animals is 97-105 with birds being the highest. Most bacterial and fungal species that like to infest our body and use it as a breeding ground enjoy temperatures around 95-96. That’s why when you’re outside in the cold for a long time you can get sick easily. Your body temperature has been lowered by the outside air! And with a low body temperature, you are inviting more and more ravenous fungal infections to spread in your body. In order to get rid of any invading infections, your Hypothalamus (located in the brain) will raise your body temperature to kill the spreading infection. AKA a fever. Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers showed that every one degree Celsius rise in body temperature wards off about 6 percent more fungal species. So tens of thousands of fungi can infect reptiles and amphibians: the cold blooded creatures, but us warm-blooded folk can only be invaded by a few hundred fungi. Since this is true, why don’t we have an even higher body temperature to ward off ALL fungal infections? http://mbio.asm.org/content/1/5/e00212-10.full?sid=3927b57a-d112-452b-bbce-e1e1f4743e1d Well, the same researches at the same university continued to experiment with metabolism and fungal infections to find out why 98 is such a great temperature. Keep in mind, In order to keep a high body temperature; we have to burn calories every minute. A calorie is a unit of energy, it measures heat — specifically it’s a measurement of the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree C. This calorie is equal to 4.2 Joules, whereas a food calorie is equal to 4.2 kilojoules. That’s 1000 times bigger than a normal gram or ‘small’ calorie. The food calorie is what you will find on the back of food labels and when your trainer talks about ‘burning calories’. These are the calories I’ll be talking about for the rest of this article. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute notes that a woman needs a minimum of 1,200 calories and a man needs at least 1,500 calories each day to maintain basic metabolic function. This involves your body temperature, circulation of blood, beating heart, and the many other involuntary chemical processes that happen in your body every second. However, 20% of those calories are used for activities such as walking, talking, and breathing. If you exercise or expend even more energy, you will obviously need more calories for your body to burn. This is why the typical FDA approved calorie intake is around 2,000 per day. But what do calories and metabolism have to do with 98.6? Like I already said, In order to keep a high body temperature, we have to burn calories every minute. And the more calories you burn, the more calories you have to eat. There is an optimal point where the number of calories burned to maintain a certain temperature and the number of possible fungal infections are both low. That is, a point where we won’t have to eat constantly just to ward of infections. That point, discovered by the researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine is 98.1 F or 36.7 C. This lines up nearly perfectly with what the typical human body temperature is!