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Raheel's Blog

Hypothermic Pizza

/ 3 min read

science

The Question

Would a hypothermic person feel the same way about a slightly colder pizza as a properly heated pizza would feel to a normal person?

pizza-temperature

Hypothesis

Yes, because the pizza reflects your ambient temperature. If you are colder, it means that everything around you feels warmer.

Assumptions Made

  1. Our average body temperature is 37°C. This includes oral temperature
  2. Hypothermia occurs when our body temperature drops to 35°C
  3. The ambient temperature is usually 25°C, or room temperature

We’ll ignore the effects of light and humidity for my arguments, because they don’t matter. Unless the pizza you’re eating is glowing or something.

The Proof

We feel most comfortable at room temperature, even though it is not our body temperature. Why is that? Because our metabolic processes constantly generate heat. The heat transfer that occurs between our skin and the environment is about 12°C, bridging the gap between room and body temperature.

Our bodies cannot burn enough calories fast enough to generate more than 14°C of heat, which is why we go into a hypothermic state at just 2°C below our normal temperature.

Heat generation is important for the next point, which is our response to water temperature. The average temperature of the water when we feel comfortable stepping into a shower is 37°C, not 25°C.

I would assume that a pizza should be heated to our body temperature of 37°C. However, this is not the case because of USDA bacteria regulations that say food should be heated to a minimum of 60-70°C. Also, food tastes better (think browning meat), digests better, and smells better (think steam) when heated.1 So that number starts to make more sense.

Also, think about when we burn our tongue on food. The first thing we do? Breathe quickly to try to circulate the ambient air in our overheated mouths, thereby facilitating/accelerating heat transfer. The air gets hotter, the food gets cooler, and our mouths get cooler.

As the food enters our digestive tract, it begins to cool to our body temperature of 37°C. So we understand that a pizza is consumed at 37°C, even though it was initially heated well above that temperature. Food can match our body temperature, so this reorients us; the temperature of our shower water can match the temperature of our food.

Going back to my point that food tastes better when heated, it will taste bland when cooled, for obvious reasons. This also works for hypothermic people! Our sense of smell and taste is diminished when our body temperature is too low.

Conjecture

We cannot ethically replicate this experiment by handing a cold pizza to a hypothermic person. I can only leave you with speculation.

From our understanding of hypothermia and thermodynamics, we can theoretically claim that a pizza heated to 35°C will feel the same to the hypothermic body as a 37°C pizza feels to the normal body.

Assuming their senses are still in check. Which they won’t be. Hence my use of the word “theoretically”.

But! (Plot Twist)

In severe cases of hypothermia, some people experience a phenomenon called “paradoxical undressing,” where they feel warm when they are dangerously cold.2

In such a state, the cold pizza might paradoxically feel warm to the touch. However, from what is known about the nature of paradoxical undressing, the state of warmth only affects the skin, not the tongue.

Footnotes

  1. Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Military Nutrition Research; Marriott BM, editor. Nutritional Needs in Hot Environments: Applications for Military Personnel in Field Operations. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1993. 9, Heat as a Factor in the Perception of Taste, Smell, and Oral Sensation. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236241/ ↩

  2. Wedin, B et al. ““Paradoxical undressing” in fatal hypothermia.” Journal of forensic sciences vol. 24,3 (1979): 543-53. ↩