Burning calories in bath
If we are to believe this study (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2017.1288688?scroll=top&needAccess=true) taking a hot bath increases the amount of calories you burn per hour by about 60 kcal (compared to rest). This would be very beneficial to the health of many people. But is there any believable explanation for why your body burns more calories in a hot bath?
Thermodynamically I would expect the opposite, cold might slightly increase calorie burn as the body expends energy in order to maintain its temperature.
Of course for an engine the lack of a cold reservoir would make it less efficient (or not operate at all). Which might mean more energy needs to be expended to achieve the same effect. As far as I know however, there is no important 'heat to work' engine in the human metabolism (see physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59316/human-as-a-heat-engine for instance).
I don't want a hot debate and I will agree with whatever the powers that be on this StackExchange decide (I am grateful that people spend time moderating here), but I think I should at least say that clearly the issue of burning extra calories is a health issue. The majority of westerners would greatly increase their health and life expectancy if they could manage to burn more calories a day. The next issue might be that I'm not asking about a treatment but about why a treatment might work. Well if you are not allowed to ask why a treatment works because you believe these are biology questions then there is not much point to asking about the treatment itself either. Without asking asking why you can't judge the credibility of a treatment.
So I think the question is on topic. Indeed the on topic page seems to agree with me (https://health.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) (although that is a matter of interpretation):
Environmental or nutritional factors that affect health
are on topic.
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