"I can only hope you won't be haunted by guilt in your later years over the fad for young people who aspire to be models filling their cheeks with ice balls you may have kicked off here, Blasdelb"Here let me google image search that for you, I'm not to concerned, but for super clarity, cold panniculitis is not a good idea to induce at home.
"...not to mention the occasional death from hypothermia that could result from desperately obese people filling their tubs with ice cubes in an attempt to replicate what the spas may well refer to as the 'Blasdelb cure.'"Artificially inducing cold panniculitis using lasers is already an FDA approved therapy for selectively reducing fat tissue, the googlable term is cryolipolysis. It has been demonstrated as safe and effective at what it claims to do, which isn't to say that it is a good idea, but that it is safe and will work if performed under the supervision of medical professionals.
"Do you suppose the fat cells are killed by the fat droplet freezing? I remember that the liquid over a wide range of temperatures Neatsfoot Oil everyone used to slather their baseball glove with supposedly came from the feet of cows."The only difference between a fat and an oil is whether the lipid is a solid or a liquid at room temperature. Many things affect the melting point of lipids, but the fat deposits in our bodies are already frozen as a result of their high melting temperature, that is what makes them fats and not oils. If the OP has kilograms of Neatsfoot Oil deposits throughout their body then they have bigger problems than AskMe can address. The reason why adipocytes (The cells that create, consume, and manage fat deposits) are more cold sensitive than other cells is not currently understood, but it is experimentally clear that they are. The mechanism of cold panniculitis has been pretty clearly demonstrated as fatty tissue that is cooled below body temperature but above freezing that undergoes localized cell death followed by a local inflammatory response.
"Ice cubes are often inveighed against in travel guides, because tourists who take care only to drink bottled water and eat cooked food so often fail to think about the water in their ice cubes, which may point to another hazard of eating ice: stomach acid is a very important defense against pathogens in food (parents are advised not to give babies honey in their first year because they don't have the stomach acid to protect themselves from the botulism spores occasionally found in honey) and eating ice could interfere with acid secretion in the stomach, allowing pathogens to get through into the intestines that would otherwise have been killed by the acid."This is also bizarrely and demonstrably wrong, but in a way that is important to the question itself. Consuming ice has never been demonstrated to have any effect on the production of stomach acid, and billions of dollars have gone into researching those pathways. However, it is important to bring up the potential non-intuitive microbiological dangers of consuming ice produced from non-potable water. The reason travel guides recommend strongly against consuming ice outside of industrialized nations with strong public health infrastructure is that freezing is a very ineffective means of water sanitation. Most water-borne pathogens will do just fine being suspended in ice and so, when the ice melts in your drink or in you, any pathogens in it will reanimate and cause disease. This is indeed another non-intuitive way in which consuming ice can hurt you.
A traditional Finnish sauna ends with a dip in a cool lake or 'avanto' (a hole made in the ice in wintertime) or with rolling in the snow. The idea is to cool off after the sauna (this must be done carefully, to minimize the risk of fainting). Cool-off time can end the sauna experience or it can be followed by another round or two. After showering, it is conventional to have a beverage, most commonly a beer or non-alcoholic drink, or traditionally a shot of Koskenkorva (vodka-like traditional Finnish spirit).posted by jamjam at 10:35 AM on May 22, 2012
White fat cells or monovacuolar cells contain a large lipid droplet surrounded by a layer of cytoplasm. The nucleus is flattened and located on the periphery. A typical fat cell is 0.1mm in diameter with some being twice that size and others half that size. The fat stored is in a semi-liquid state, and is composed primarily of triglycerides and cholesteryl ester.[my emphasis]
"Chilling slows the metabolism of human cells as far as I know, and if the parietal cells of the stomach, which produce the acid, are somehow an exception to this, it would be very interesting to know that and have some idea of the mechanism. Perhaps no one has demonstrated that cooling parietal cells slows their production of acid, assuming that no one has, because the matter seems clear on its face."It is probably true, but only in a trivial way. If you were able to cool your stomach significantly enough, and for long enough, to meaningfully affect its ability to regulate pH then you would likely have much larger problems than high pH.
"This is a very interesting assertion, and seems to contradict what I've read to the effect that humans do not alter the saturation or chain length of the fats they consume, unlike cows, before storing them in adipocytes. If this is and true one's diet were very rich in the oils of arctic fish, for example, not to mention all the plant oils liquid at room temperature, it would be remarkable if those were frozen in adipocytes at body temperature."Every cell in the human body must be able to carefully regulate the liquidity of their membranes, I'm more familiar with grm+ve and grm-ve bacterial and archaeal regulation* than the mammalian systems, but they get complex and subtle very fast. If you mix a little bit of olive oil with a lot of lard at a high temperature and let it cool, you will end up with a solid block of fat. The balance lipids in each of our tissues is carefully regulated so as to have the right mix of fats to have exactly the right level of liquidity. I imagine that adipocytes have to regulate their fat globules to keep them in their proper almost-but-not-quite-solid states at body temperature in similar ways.
In hospitals, people who are debilitated enough that they can't eat or drink anything else are often put on a "sips and chips" diet, which is just ice chips and sips of fluid, usually as a supplement to IV hydration. If very sick people can eat ice without issue, so can you.
posted by killdevil at 8:11 PM on May 21, 2012 [3 favorites]