Infrared VS Traditional Sauna Research Studies (results are in)

📚 Resources & Studies

Waon Therapy (Japan):

Waon therapy improves cardiac function and clinical symptoms in patients with chronic heart failure

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25740582/

→ Clinical trial: Waon improved heart pumping function, lowered BNP, and improved exercise capacity/QOL in CHF patients.

Waon therapy reduces the incidence of fatal cardiac events in patients with chronic heart failure

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19304125/

→ 5-year follow-up: Waon patients had ~50% fewer cardiac deaths and hospitalizations vs. controls.

Blood pressure lowering effect of repeated Waon therapy in patients with hypertension

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34115020/

→ One-week daily Waon sessions significantly reduced systolic/diastolic BP, especially in non-smokers.

Waon therapy mobilizes endothelial progenitor (CD34+) cells and improves vascular function in patients with heart disease

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20843662/

→ Mechanistic study: Waon increased vascular repair stem cells (CD34+) and improved vessel function.

Finnish Sauna (Eastern Finland):

5. Sauna bathing is associated with reduced cardiovascular mortality and improves risk prediction in men and women

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29748111/

→ Large cohort: Adding sauna frequency improved prediction of cardiovascular risk and mortality.

Sauna bathing reduces the risk of sudden cardiac death, coronary heart disease, and all-cause mortality

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2130724

→ Landmark 20-year Finnish study: More frequent sauna use (4–7x/week) strongly reduced SCD, CHD, and all-cause death.

Joint associations of sauna bathing and cardiorespiratory fitness with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31554647/

→ Sauna + fitness produced the lowest mortality risk; benefits are additive.

Effects of repeated Finnish sauna treatments on brachial artery flow-mediated dilation and reactive hyperemia in patients with coronary risk factors

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17119163/

→ Short-term trial: Repeated sauna sessions improved endothelial function and vascular dilation in at-risk patients.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

So I’m going to do a couple follow-up videos just for the Facebook group members. Sun’s just coming up, it’s 38 degrees, and it’s a little too chilly for me to be out just yet. So, I have a cup of coffee, and I’ve been running analysis on the difference between infrared and traditional Finnish sauna research studies, just to find some of the differences.

And it just so happens that just yesterday, a group member, Steven, requested that we talk about this. So I’ve been doing it already. I’m not finished with it, so I’ll make a few follow-up videos that are like formal and everything else. But this is just to get our feet wet.

I want to read you. I’ve got, I’ll put this on YouTube, I’ve got YouTube screen over here, I’ve got the Facebook group, I have my notes if we need them. And then I’ll just run through the pros and cons, or the findings, rather, of each style. There are some differences.

A lot of times, people are really hell-bent on thinking that the temperature of the actual sauna session is what dictates whether you get benefit or not. But what I see, I mean, I’m going to show you the findings so that you can come to your own conclusion. But what I see being the common denominator is not the temperature of the sauna, it’s the duration that you’re staying in there and the temperature that you’re using it at combined to give you a core temperature increase and how long that sustains.

So from where I sit, what I see, let’s see if you think the same after we, you know, in the YouTube description, I will put all the links to the studies that are used in this analysis so that in the synopsis, you can see which study, you know, we got each piece of information from.

But what I think is the key common denominator is not the actual temperature of the cabin, but the one thing that’s left out that really needs to be a consistent.

metric from every single one of these studies is kind of like Dr. Ashley Mason did with the whole body hyperthermia. These patients need to either be wearing a rectal thermometer or they need to have some type of measurement device on their body so that you can see what’s happening inside their body during that duration of time, because that’s really what is providing these benefits of heat therapy.

It’s not that some of them are in cabins that are 212 degrees and some of them are in cabins that are 140 degrees because you’re not getting a picture of internally the risk, the, that set of stimuli or response like the response rate of the body itself. And this is going to differ from person to person.

That’s why you need to see it and it needs to be charted out. So if there was one thing that right off the bat that I could say, like it doesn’t render the results of these studies useless, but there are some key things that are really missing that would allow us to come to better conclusions and design protocols and pick, you know, specific equipment to give us the best benefit for our needs given our situation if we had that data.

So let’s begin. We’re going to talk about way on therapy from Japan today, which is specifically infrared sauna therapy. And we’re going to talk about finish sauna bathing from Eastern Finland, which is specifically traditional sauna. So number one, some data suggests from the JAMA network and these links are in the description and I’ll just continue to remind you if you want to check them out yourself.

I encourage you to do that because I want to hear from you in the comments. What do you think? What other data sets do you think are missing? Cause there are a couple other things that would be useful for this, but way on therapy in their clinical protocol is far infrared dry sauna at 100 and 40 degrees for 15 minutes and then 30 minutes of warm rest wrapped in blankets.

This is usually repeated frequently in cardiac patients under medical supervision. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this before, but

One of the cancer protocols from Europe does require, it basically mimics, or I’m sorry, Dr. Ashley Mason’s whole body hyperthermia treatments basically mimic that protocol. And there’s a key thing in there where wrapping the patients in hot blankets to retain internal core temp, even though they’ve been removed from the heat source, is a key distinction.

Because while they’re not superheating the body for long durations of time, what they are doing is they’re sustaining the drop in temperature. So they’re keeping that core temperature high for a much longer period of time. Now, I don’t think all weigh-on therapy is taking it to that degree, especially not from these studies, from what I can tell, but it is something to be aware of.

Now, compare that to finish sauna as like a cultural habit, societal community practice. I don’t think anybody talks about that part either, which is the community aspect. We all get together. I don’t care if you’re drinking vodka and you’re in the sauna or whatever, but we’re all getting together.

And this is like a social thing where we do it together. There’s something to be said about stress relief from that aspect alone that I think should be talked about because I think it’s very important. Also, whole body hyperthermia therapy or weigh-on therapy with a medical supervised sessions, you have somebody that’s guiding you through this thing.

So if you get too hot, if you have issues or this, that, and the other, there’s some sort of social aspect to these, which I think is largely not even thought about from people who dissect this data. But finish sauna in habitual practice is traditional hot air convection sauna, which is typically 80 to 100 degrees Celsius, which is 162 to 212 Fahrenheit.

Short stints, right? One to three rounds of 10 to 20 minutes typically based on this study. That’s not how-

that I know use this, but in these studies, it’s often like a lifelong habit in the community. And so the research largely follows general population cohorts in Eastern Finland. And so study designs for weigh-on therapy, which are a little different, they are interventional clinical studies in patients with chronic heart failure and hypertension, plus mechanistic work on autonomic and endothelial function.

Outcomes include cardiac biomarkers, functional capacity, hemodynamics, and event rates. So they’re measuring key specific things with patients with heart trouble, and they’re getting great results. So that’s something to really dive into and pay attention to. Finished sauna, perspective cohort studies, tracking middle-aged results for decades.

Outcomes include sudden cardiac death, CHD, CVD, all-cause mortality, and incident hypertension. Some acute interventional physiological studies, FMD, heat acclimation, exist, but the flagship evidence is epidemiology. So the big thing there is reduction in all-cause mortality, but whereas weigh-on therapy isn’t really like, I don’t interpret these results as weigh-on therapy being a lifestyle, whereas I do interpret the results of finished sauna being a lifestyle.

So that’s two different types of data from the studies. Who’s to say if you incorporated both as a lifestyle, it’s pretty clear to me that there would be benefits. Is there differentiation in benefits? I’m not exactly sure, but what I gather from all of this is that be doing some form of heat therapy.

Be doing heat therapy, whatever that looks like. If it’s hot bath, if it’s jacuzzi, if it’s infrared sauna, if it’s traditional sauna, it doesn’t really matter. The body thrives on some forms of heat therapy. That’s what I pull out from, rather than arguing about is one better than the other, because these data sets.

are a little bit different, excuse me, I’m getting raspy. Let’s talk about key cardiovascular outcomes. In weigh-on therapy patients with heart disease, improved cardiac function, reduced BNP, and better six-minute walk distance improved overall quality of life. That’s in the first PubMed study.

The second PubMed study has lower cardiac events and mortality in CHF over the course of five years, which is a 50% lower rate of cardiac deaths or events versus the controls. That’s nothing to sneeze at, you know. That’s a relatively gentle therapy, in my opinion, except for the blanket part.

I don’t do the blanket part, but I do everything else. Blood pressure reduction after one week of daily sessions in hypertensive patients. The effects are especially notable in non-smokers. My own life experience, especially post-leukemia treatment for me personally, that was evident from day one.

I’ve kind of screamed from the rooftops. I don’t like to say too, too much because we don’t position sauna as like some medical treatment device or this, that, and the other, but it’s basically like body maintenance for the longterm. I mean, I was going to the hospital five days a week, getting arsenic infusion treatments and taking drugs that are known to increase blood pressure, right?

They pretty much put everyone on high blood pressure medication, but I was able to keep my blood pressure under a threshold and also keep my stress and anxiety down from going to this. This was a lifestyle. Like I literally go to the hospital five days a week, right?

And they won’t treat you. Like I say in other videos, they won’t treat you until you have vitals from all the nurses. You’re getting weekly EKGs. You’re getting blood labs twice a week on the daily in real time.

So I noticed that just from walking, I don’t think, I think if you’re able to, I think you should include walking with your heat therapy.

because, and this is something for me, this is just a personal opinion, it’s not in any of the studies, there’s no scientific data that I see out there to support this, but you’re doing a couple things and I call it priming, right? You’re priming your body for this heat therapy session.

Doesn’t matter if you’re in a traditional sauna, you know, an infrared sauna, if you’re doing jacuzzi, it doesn’t matter. The benefits of walking are documented on their own and so when you’re able to prime the body, pre-heat or pre-sauna session, heat therapy session, you’re able to get movement that’s also going to ramp up lymphatic fluid exchange, which is gonna happen anyway with your vasodilation and increased circulation when you start your heat therapy, right?

But rather than just sitting there and waiting for your body to slowly heat up, if you can do some type of brisk exercise to prime or to pre-heat the body rather and get all the other benefits associated with the movement, it’s kind of like the people that left out the part of what yoga was for, right?

If you wanted to sit in meditation for a very long time and you know that you were gonna need to be still, wouldn’t it be beneficial if you were, you know, stretched out, removed all tension from your muscles, ligaments, you know, all this stuff? This is kind of very similar.

You know that you’re going to be sitting in this hotbox regardless of what type it is. Why wouldn’t you go and walk and do a few things that have other benefits, but also prime the body for this time period? That’s my take on it. I’d highly recommend that you incorporate that.

In my own personal life, I saw benefit from just walking and sauna sessions, not even every single day, every other day. Kept my blood pressure in check while I was, you know, doing all this hospital stuff. So let’s talk about weigh-on therapy again, because the blood pressure section is, you know, pretty easy for you to see.

Autonomic and endothelial benefits.

Improved parasympathetic tone, decreased sympathetic activity, mobilization of endothelial progenitors, CD34 plus cells. That part’s beyond me, but I experience this swap, and I talk about this, between sympathetic, parasympathetic. I think this is why a lot of people just say that they, like if you ask people what their specific health benefits are from using infrared sauna, and this is from the way on therapy studies, they’ll just say, oh, well, I just feel better when I do it, right?

Well, that could mean a lot of different things, but largely, if you’re able to just decrease stress, what’s gonna improve? Your sleep, your wellbeing, your state of mind, your cognition, right? You’re basically like, you know, offloading some of that ongoing, consistent, you know, stressors, and everything, you’re gonna get an uptick downstream in everything from that, when that takes place.

Conversely, compared to Finnish sauna, which is on the general population, and it doesn’t say, you know, whether these people are health-challenged, and I’d like to point that out, because way on therapy infrared is specifically dealing with people who are health-challenged. I should’ve done a medical disclaimer, I’m not a doctor, none of this is medical advice.

If you’re looking for that, please see a licensed medical physician. Finnish sauna, dose-response association, more frequent sauna use, four to seven times a week, so societal, social, correlates with lower SCD, CHD, CVD, and all-cause mortality, versus one time a week. Observational, not a treatment trial, they do note that from the JAMA Network.

Study link is in the description if you wanna take a look and see what you think. Risk prediction improves when sauna habits are added to standard CVD risk models, men and women. Acute physiology, single sessions can translate, or transiently improve brachial artery, FMD, and reactive hyperemia. Longer, supervised eight-week programs and stable CAD showed heat accumulation, but no significant FMD improvement.

Mechanism nuisance. So, you have to think about.

about that and take that into account as well. Synergy with fitness, high-frequency sauna plus good cardio-respiratory fitness associates the lowest SCD risk with the cohort data. Kind of the same thing that we’re talking about with just walking and sauna. This is a lot more high-intensity, it’s high heat and everything else, but the data set is different based on the population that are participating in the study.

So take from that what you will. Now, there is some overlap here. Both lines of evidence have overlapping mechanisms. You got vasodilation and hemodynamic unloading.

I don’t talk about the second one very often, but vasodilation is like number one. You get improved vascular function, lower afterload, preload, and just the body loves to be supported in this way. That’s kind of how I describe it in all the other videos. Heat-induced hermesis.

You’re getting cellular stress responses, which are gonna make heat shock proteins, autonomic rebalancing, and also an uptick in parasympathetic. That by itself has tons and tons of benefits, and you can get that even with a jacuzzi or a hot bath. So this argument that, like one of the things that’s left out of these comparisons is the actual temperature, and the temperature is what everyone is latching onto, which I think is a mistake because there is no metric in here that’s telling you what’s happening inside these people’s bodies.

They’re just putting them in a specified air temperature in a room. Well, that doesn’t really tell you what you need to know in order to decipher, or mimic, or replicate, or even extract the most meaningful parts of this so that you could have a protocol or a piece of equipment for yourself to do either the bare minimum and get the all-cause mortality reduction, or if you are held challenged and you’re looking to target something specific, you would need to know these things so that you could mimic them and achieve the same result.

So I think that’s most people’s gripe is that there’s not a lot of studies on a lot of these things. If you go look at red light therapy on PubMed, if you look at photobiomodulation.

there are so many more methods to decipher, you know, oh, it’s this wavelength, it was this intensity, it’s this amount of time, like it’s a piece of cake. If you have a TBI or if your child is suffering from X and there’s a study on it, you can just go look at it, buy a piece of equipment that has the same wavelength, use it at the set treatment distance and only do it for the specified amount of times that you would want to replicate from the study.

It’s like so much easier. Cardiovascular conditioning, passive cardio, modest heart rate elevation, improved circulation akin to light exercise. I talk about this a lot for the last five years. If you can’t exercise and you’re health challenged, I think one of the biggest benefits is that you’re increasing your heart rate without moving.

So if you have some type of injury, if you are whatever the excuse, not excuse, but whatever the situational limitation is, you can still get the benefit just by incorporating this into your life. I think that’s very powerful for most people, whether you’re an athlete or whether you’re disabled, it doesn’t really matter, right?

So for people with diagnosed heart disease, especially CHF, use the structured low temperature weigh-on protocol, which is 60 degrees Celsius or 140 degrees, 150 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 minutes, plus the 30 minute warm rest. Ideally under clinician guidance if you’re actually having some type of heart trouble, but the clinical studies show the improved cardiac function, BP, autonomic balance, and fewer cardiac events just by doing this.

So it’s interesting to see in the United States where some cardiologists will say, oh, you have a heart condition, you shouldn’t do sauna therapy anymore. But is there a distinction there between, oh, you shouldn’t do finish sauna at 212 degrees anymore?

or you shouldn’t do any heat therapy and why so I think the other thing we need to do is get a little better get a little better grasp on some of this data and ask better questions when we go and see these doctors for ourselves for the general public focused on longevity and prevention the finished data suggests that clear dose response four to seven sessions a week associates with large relative risk reductions in all cause mortality cvd chd scd or scd emphasize consistency and standard precautions hydration time temperature tolerances that’s pretty much all from the jama network and the pub med studies also linked below you can check those out why the results you know look different this is what i think we should really talk about i kind of already touched on it i jumped the gun but the design way on is interventional clinical therapy in sick patients finishes observational lifestyle data in community cohorts interventions can cash report casual changes in cardiac metrics and events within months to years but cohorts show associations over decades also the usage difference heat dose and control way out of standardized you know there’s an exact time temp warm-up rest my opinion is largely that’s because they’re targeting specific folks with um you know heart trouble if they weren’t who’s to say you know you couldn’t do multiple rounds or not do the blanket and just do a 45 minute session or something like that but you also probably don’t want to tax their system too hard and then wait for their heat tolerance to increase it’s kind of like training in the gym you don’t just go out and you know become a power lifter it takes years to develop that in the body whereas finish uses um it you know it varies from temperature rounds timing standardization likely contributes to consistent clinical effects in frail or patients and the endpoints are way on focuses on clinical mechanism endpoints or mechanistic i should say b and p lvf autonomic incidies eventually

rates finish cohort center on long-term mortality and incident disease so two totally different things but you can tell like the bottom line is if you need medically guided therapeutic protocol for heart disease obviously something like weigh-on therapy has interventional you know evidence for improved function and outcomes in chf and bp control if your goal is longevity and prevention in the general population the finished sauna habit shows strong dose dependent associations with lower cbd and all-cause mortality consistency of four to seven times a week though supposedly matters according to this um now what do we take away from that i already told you you know midway through what i take away from it but it’s that there the overlap here is the rise in core temperature the vasodilation the you know nervous system benefits that you’re going to get from heat therapy and whether or not you want to do you know high heat short sessions multiple rounds or you want to do something that’s you know a little less intense you know i don’t know as if it really is going to matter that much i think you’re going to get the all-cause mortality uh like it’s difficult because the intention of each study was going after a different you know result and the data set and the the participants right are in drastically different health condition so if you normalize those and you told us what the core temperature metrics were throughout every single session and whether those changed as the folks because as somebody’s heat tolerance improves you’re not going to get the exact same four temp measurements even if they’re doing the same frequency the same duration the same blah blah blah i noticed this in myself especially if i take a couple of months off from sauna therapy and then i go back to it it’s kind of like if you stop working out in the gym you’re only going to maintain your strength for so long you’re only going to maintain your cardiac ability for so long like you’re going to lose your cardio and so for me

heat therapy is much the same. There is a little bit, it’s a little bit more forgiving, but I noticed when I go back to it that, you know, it doesn’t, I don’t maintain forever, basically. So that’s a pretty good synopsis to start. I’m gonna go into some deeper points of each individual study in the subsequent videos.

Just wanted to throw this together. I’ll put it in the group for you and get us talking about it because I think this is really valuable. It’s gonna help, you know, a lot of people. I don’t mean the actual studies.

I mean, just, you know, us communicating about this and dissecting and talking about these studies, I pull them up here and then basically, you know, we chop it up. You can kind of see how if you just did the bare minimum with heat therapy, your longevity is going to improve.

How could it not, right? You’re gonna see that even if you don’t mimic the study participants exactly, you’re going to get some of the benefits by incorporating this into your lifestyle. And so just reinforcing that all the time is very helpful for all of us because I’m no different.

I do this all the time, but I fall off too. You know, I’m human. I get off my weekly schedule. I travel or I, you know, I’m back and forth.

Right now I’m in the mountains. It’s 38 degrees. You know, the last thing that I want to do is go out and do my workout this morning. So I’m sandbagging a little bit.

I’m making this video with you rather than, you know, doing that because I don’t want to shiver to death. So until next time, see you in the next one. Let me know what questions you have. And also please comment below.

Take a look at these resources and the links. Look at the studies and tell me what you think. Do you agree? Do you disagree?

I think it’s constructive. You know, we have a discussion about it either way. And what takeaways do you get from the studies? Do you think there’s more overlap than I’m suggesting?

Do you think there’s less? You know, what’s your opinion? Have you tried both, right? So we’ll see you in the next portion.