by Ewan Macdougal

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: November 18, 2010

Why The Chinese Know More About Cold Feet Than My Grandma

So November is here and I think I might have to finally accept it’s winter, most people I know would probably have claimed it was winter several weeks ago, but I’m lucky, I don’t really feel the cold.  Sat at the computer today though I can defiantly feel the chill beginning to creep into my toes, it’s usually my toes that feel it first.

My Grandma would always tell me to put on a hat; it’s a solution I’ve been offered many times, I’m always hearing “heads lose more body heat than any thing else” or “wearing a hat will make you much warmer.”  I’ve tried it of course, you don’t say “No” to Grandma but I can’t say I’ve ever felt much benefit, honestly I’m not a ‘hat person’ they just make me look and feel silly.  So I’ve always been sceptical, is there something scientific backing up these hat claims? Could my vanity be subconsciously masking the benefits from me?   Or are we all victims of an evilly genius Granny lead marketing campaign designed to have the worlds Grandchildren all uniformed in there brightly coloured, slightly misshapen home knitted bobble hats that we are all given by our loving  Grandmothers each Christmas?   With slightly nippy toes my distraction from work today has been to find out the truth behind these claims, Should I don last Christmas’ woolly hat? (It’s a very fetching green and blue number) or is there a better solution?

The first thing I discovered was that these claims weren’t the invention of my Grandmother, but are first cited in the 1970 US army survival manual where it was apparently claimed that “40 – 45 % of all body heat is lost from the head,” so we can perhaps dismiss the evil genius granny marketing idea, (well unless they’re pulling strings in the army, in which case I can’t wait to see the khaki version of my Christmas ’07 ‘triple bobble’ bobble hat and mittens that army Grandmas must be creating!)

Other research I found, such as that by the Wildness medicine society suggests that the scalp may lose slightly more heat than the rest of the body during hypothermia if the patient is shivering but I don’t think my chilly feet put me at any risk of that just yet, so I continued searching and eventually found a 2008 article by

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