On the rare occasions I can face visiting London these days, I always make sure to stop in at Banya No.1 in Hoxton. From the outside, it’s unprepossessing — just another modern block with a buzzer door — but when you get inside and go downstairs, it’s like you’ve been transported beyond the new Iron Curtain to Moscow or St. Petersburg or Novgorod.
It’s a proper Russian spa — a banya — complete with sauna, huge wooden-barrel plunge pool, freezing showers, treatment rooms with tables, and even a little cafe where you can sit and gobble pelmeni (delicious little stuffed dumplings) or have a hearty bowl of borscht (beetroot stew with meat).
Sauna treatment has been used, with great success, to treat police officers suffering chronic health issues as a result of repeated exposure to methamphetamine, for example.
And, of course, there are the staff, all of whom are authentic Russki, from the charming girls on the desk to the sullen myrmidons who patrol the saunas and abuse you with various implements for an extra fee — although you get the feeling they’d happily abuse you without payment too.
It’s a shame, but also a blessing, that I don’t live close to London. I’d be at Banya No. 1 all the time. If money were no object, I’d recreate it at home. I’d have a fragrant cedar-clad sauna with a big brick oven in it, and I’d pay a couple of former goons from the vory v zakone called Andrei and Pavel to keep the wood burning and beat me with birch twigs and scour me with Siberian pine tar to my heart’s content. Heaven.
I’d do this not just because it’s fun and a potent way to reduce stress — and we could all do with a bit less of that right now — but also because going to the spa is good for you in other ways.
Toxic baste
You’ve probably heard talk of the detoxification benefits of sauna before. They’re very real, and as I try to impress on my readers as much as I can, we all need to be detoxing our bodies. We’re constantly exposed to harmful chemicals in our daily lives, and anything we can do to reduce the amounts that get into and accumulate in our bodies is a good thing.
Sweating is one of the principal routes for harmful chemicals to leave our bodies, as well as in our urine and feces and when we lose (or give) blood. Particular chemicals, such as bisphenol A (BPA), a plasticizer with endocrine-disrupting effects, are generally found in greater quantities in our sweat than in our urine or blood, which is a clear sign that sweating is the main way our bodies dispose of them.
Sauna treatment has been used, with great success, to treat police officers suffering chronic health issues as a result of repeated exposure to methamphetamine, for example. It’s being trialed as a treatment for a range of other health conditions.
Fat chance
Sweating appears to be particularly effective for detoxification when combined with fasting or a calorie-restricted diet. Rodent studies show that being in a fasted or dieting state pushes harmful chemicals out of the body’s diminishing fat stores and toward the skin, where they can then be sweated off.
Many harmful chemicals are lipophilic, and as a result, when they get into our bodies, they end up in our fat stores. That’s actually one of the many important functions of fat — as a kind of vault for harmful chemicals, to seal them away and keep them out of other tissues — and it’s probably why a reliable effect of regular exposure to harmful chemicals is to put on fat. It’s a protection mechanism.
(This is also probably one of the reasons why celebrities who go on drugs like Ozempic end up looking so terrible, even when they lose loads of weight — search for before-and-after pictures of podcaster Ethan Klein if you don’t want to sleep tonight. Because of their terrible diets and lifestyles, fat people have enormous stores of toxic chemicals in their bodies, and if they suddenly lose weight with Ozempic or Mounjaro or whatever, their tissues are flooded with them. This could actually be quite dangerous, and it’s one of the many reasons you should prefer traditional methods of weight loss — exercise and changes to diet — over these new drugs when possible.)
Hot air
If you want to sauna regularly, you have various options. Of course, you can join a gym or health club with a sauna. That’s easy enough. If you want to sauna at home and you’ve got space in your garden, you can get a wooden barrel sauna for a few thousand dollars or convert a shed or outbuilding. You’ll find plenty of good guides online for building your own sauna.
If you don’t want to build a permanent structure, you could go the Native American route and build a little sweat lodge in your garden with a tent and some rocks. Dig a hole, put a tent (preferably canvas) over it, fill the tent with hot rocks heated on a fire, sit inside the tent, and pour water on the rocks. Voila: steam in a confined space. A sauna. Again, you’ll find helpful tutorials all over the internet.
There are also infrared sauna kits that can be used indoors and folded away and stored easily if you don’t have a great deal of space. They’re pretty reasonable.
But there may also be an even simpler and cheaper option. Just have a hot bath.
Tub-thumping
Yes: A hot bath probably confers all the benefits of a sauna. In fact, it may even be more effective at boosting your health than a sauna, according to a new study I wrote about recently on my Substack. It’s worth noting that the study didn’t compare the detoxification effects of baths and saunas due to sweating, but if you’ve ever sat in a hot bath, you’ll know you sweat plenty. Sweating takes place underwater, too, but you just don’t feel it.
What the new study does show is that hot baths offer superior metabolic, cardiac, and immune benefits to saunas, in large part because the heating effect of being immersed in hot water is much, much greater than sitting in a heated enclosure. Water conducts heat 24 times more efficiently than air, and your whole body — or most of it — is in direct contact with the water the entire time.
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Save our swimmers
I have one caution about hot baths, though, and it’s for my male readers. Protect the family jewels. Boiling them is even worse than toasting them (see my note about testicular tanning in a previous installment).
Why? Heating the testicles is associated with reduced fertility, whether as a result of working in a furnace or as a welder, or through taking regular hot baths or saunas. The effects can be long-lasting, even after just a single session.
One study from the 1960s showed that it takes between 10 and 12 weeks for sperm counts to return to normal after just 30 minutes of intense scrotal heating. If you’re going to take regular hot baths as a man, I’d recommend keeping your testicles out of the water, however you see fit. You can arch your back a little bit, or you can put some ice on your balls in a flannel or use a proper ice pack.
Sauna, Hot bath, Health, Men’s health, Detoxification, Ozempic, Lifestyle, Maha, Make america healthy again