NO, NOT like that. They had Woodstock while we had the 2008 Financial Crisis, it's a no-contest. But what about in terms of our body temperature?
Thanks to Covid-19, every single human being in the world has probably had their temperature taken countless times.
Everywhere we went, we were greeted with a thermometer to scan our body temperature before being allowed entry.
And we all knew the magic number that would grant us access to our favourite restaurants, supermarkets or cafes - 37.5 degrees Celsius.
Everyone knows the "normal" human body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius but have you ever noticed, during all those temperature checks, that you’re usually a little bit below that number if all is well health-wise??
And since the "normal" temperature of 37 degrees Celsius was established in the 1800s, does that mean we humans are cooling down in terms of body temperature?
Verdict:
TRUE
The "normal" human body temperature was established by German physician and researcher Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich in 1868.
He had taken over a million readings from 25,000 patients and found that the average temperature of a healthy adult was - you guessed it - 37 degrees Celsius.
He also noticed that men tend to run a bit cooler than women and that younger people tend to have slightly higher temperatures than older folks.
However, a study in 2020 by Dr Julie Parsonnet, a professor of medicine as well as health research and policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, showed that human beings, as a species, were cooling down.
Parsonnet looked at data from 1862 through 1930, 1971 through 1975, and 2007 through 2017 including 677,423 temperature measurements and determined that the human race was cooling down by roughly 0.03 degrees Celsius every decade since Wunderlich's findings.
Currently the "normal" human temperature is closer to 36.4 degrees Celsius. The reasons behind this cooling down are not scientifically established yet but Dr Parsonnet suggests several possible factors.
One of them could simply be that modern thermometers provide more accurate readings but it would not single-handedly explain the difference in temperature.
Other reasons for the decline in body temperature over time could be that we are also expending less energy and have a lower metabolic rate than people in the past. The reduction may also be due to advancements in public health which leads to a decline in inflammation due to infection.
Inflammation generally increases our metabolism and raises our body temperature.
So while they may have had Woodstock, scientifically speaking, millennials are cooler than boomers.
References
1. https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555
3. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/average-body-temperature-takes-a-dip
