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Fueling The Furnace
Fri Jan 24, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Cold weather expert Dr. Murray Hamlet tells us
how to eat to keep warm in the winter.
MURRAY: First, sugar is the best way to do it fast. You eat other things, you convert those
to glycogen, but that takes a little while, metabolically, to do that. You only have so many
heartbeats in your life, you gotta use the ones you got. Well, (it's) the same thing with
glycogen, you only have so much. You really need to be able to shiver to defend against the
cold.
BRYAN: I think one of my favorite Murray Hamlet lines is, big greasy breakfast, a light lunch
and a big, greasy supper.
MURRAY: That's true because you need the long-term burning of the fats during the morning when
you first start working hard, and then you need the carbs at lunch so that you get that boost
during midday, and then you need, you know, the good, greasy supper in the evening.
BRYAN: So, it's not a place to worry about your diet.
MURRAY: Oh, no, no, no, no. Not here. You're gonna burn all the calories that you're taking
in, or most of them. You're really not going to store any of them.
BRYAN: How important is hydration in how quickly people get cold?
MURRAY: Well, again you have to keep juice in the tubes or you're in trouble.
Thirst is not a good mechanism for measuring hydration. You take -- you have to lose 2
percent of your body weight, really, before thirst is initiated, and it only lasts until
you've lost about 4.2 percent. If you can't remember the last time you peed you're behind the
power curve.
Murray Hamlet is retired from the U.S. Army's Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in
Natick, Massachusetts. The Weather Notebook is produced with funding from Subaru, and The
National Science Foundation. Special thanks today to Assistant Producer Doug Sanborn and
Executive Producer Peter Crane.
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