It’s the hottest trend in health and fitness: 95°C! Sauna, an ancient Finnish tradition of rest, relaxation and perspiration – and public nudity, if that’s your jam – is suddenly the wellness hack to rule them all, credited with a voileipäpöytä (Finnish for smörgåsbord) of benefits: lowering blood pressure, reducing inflammation, burning calories, improving mood, promoting sleep and aiding recovery from injury. Sauna has been promoted as a treatment for heart disease, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, type 2 diabetes and dementia, among a long list of conditions.
The science on much of this is encouraging, if not always conclusive, as numerous studies have suggested. Dr Ash Kapoor, a “longevity and human optimisation physician”, is the medical director of the private healthcare provider The Levitas Group. Sauna is not, he tells me, “a silver bullet”, but it does have multiple therapeutic benefits because it gets to a “root cause of all disease: inflammation”.
Architect Juan D’Ornellas’s Finnish-style savusauna on the south coast of England © Lily Bertrand-Webb
“As the body heats up,” argues Dr Kapoor, “mitochondria in our cells release adenosine triphosphate (often described as the ‘energy currency’ of the cell). Toxins are released in sweat, and nitric oxide, which aids circulation, is produced. Heat enhances neuroplasticity (the brain’s way of learning, or relearning). You enter hormesis, where ‘good stress’ heightens the body’s defences.”
