Saunas

Saunas or sweat lodges will cleanse your body of toxins

Sweat lodges have traditionally been used for religious purposes and purification ceremonies. People continue to go to sweat lodges for a spiritual experience or in an effort to detoxify their body. Saunas are often used for similar purposes; many people find them relaxing, but also hope that the heat and sweating will cleanse their bodies.

Sweating is not the way to release toxins from the body. The main role of sweating is to cool your body. The moisture produced by your sweat glands evaporates, and this evaporation process cools the body. The primary role of sweating is for cooling you off. Water, electrolytes, and some other chemicals are released through your sweat, but detoxifying is not the main role of sweating. Many people don’t realize that their sweat glands are not directly connected to other systems in their body, like their digestive track or their lymph nodes.

Sweat is mostly water, but it does contain some other chemicals dissolved in it—minerals (small amounts of sodium, lactate, urea, potassium, calcium, magnesium), trace elements (very small amounts of zinc, copper, nickel, iron, chromium), and some chemicals that smell (2-methylphenol and 4-methylphenol). Sodium (salt) is the most common mineral in sweat and the concentration of sodium in sweat varies based on how hot a person is and how much they are exercising.

Even though sweat has some chemicals in it, you should not rely on sweating to detoxify your body. Although small amounts of minerals and trace elements are eliminated from the body through sweating, this is not the main purpose of sweating. The purpose of sweating is to cool the body—not to cleanse the body. You mostly just lose water through sweat.

Saunas are not necessarily bad for the body. There is some evidence that saunas improve blood pressure and enhance blood flow and cardiac function. However, the medical literature does not provide very clear scientific evidence of health benefits to sweat lodges, steam rooms, or saunas.

A sweat lodge can be more of a danger than a benefit to your body if proper precautions are not taken. One of the biggest risks is getting overheated. Being overheated can lead to heat exhaustion or more severe problems such as heat stroke or hyperthermia. This is probably what happened recently when several people died after their experience in a sweat lodge in Arizona. Your body always works to try to balance how much heat it makes and how much it loses, but if you are in conditions that are too hot for too long, your body may not be able to cool you off well enough. In addition to feeling thirsty and hot, you may begin to feel dizzy, weak, clumsy, and sick to your stomach. These are signs that you need to move to a cool place, drink fluids, and seek medical care. People with heart conditions should always talk to their doctors before trying a sweat lodge or sauna.

To avoid other risks in sweat lodges, you should not take part in a ceremony where hot river rocks or other rocks with air pockets are used. These rocks can occasionally explode in the heat, injuring people around them. You should also make sure not to wear metal jewelry that could heat up and burn you in very hot conditions.

The body is great at detoxifying itself. Your liver specializes in breaking down substances within the body, including many of the chemicals that your body cannot use or that would be considered toxins. Your kidneys also do a lot of work to get rid of toxic substances like urea—much more work than your sweat glands do. Your entire digestive system, including your colon, is designed to get rid of what your body cannot use and to keep what it needs. Your body does not rely on sweating to keep itself healthy, and neither should you.