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Do you ever think about your sweat? You probably don’t want to, right?
Well, it’s best to know what’s going on in those sweaty spots, so take a look at some of these fun facts.
- Humans are one of very few animals to use sweating for cooling off. Lots of animals sweat, but only some primates and a few four-legged animals do it for cooling. If other animals sweat, it’s for traction, toxin removal, or pheromone spreading.
- There are three kinds of sweating. Thermal sweating (sweating to cool off), emotional sweating (sweating in response to emotional or sexual cues), and gustatory sweating (sweating from eating food).
- Sweat feeds your bacteria. Sweat can taste great to bacteria like Staphylococcus, Corynebacterium, and Propionibacterium.
- When your sweat stinks, that’s the bacteria. When they’re done eating all your sweat, these bacteria turns the chemicals they’ve gotten from them into volatile fatty acids, which smell, and are airborne.
- There are different kinds of sweat glands. Eccrine glands are the main glands, which you have from birth and which sweat for most of your body. Apocrine glands don’t pop up until puberty, in areas with body hair, like the armpits and genitals.
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- You have the highest concentration of sweat glands in your hands and feet. Some scientists believe this is evolutionary, and that we needed it for traction to escape from predators. This fight or flight sweating reaction could be why emotional sweating happens there so often.
- Sweat cools through evaporation. It’s not the sweating itself that cools our body, it’s the evaporation on our skin. It’s the same effect that happens when you step out of a hot shower. The water, or sweat, removes heat from the air around the skin, meaning the air around you feels hotter.
