No, drinking alcohol doesn’t help you stay warm in cold weather

Have you ever left your jacket at home before a night of drinking out on the town, hoping instead that your “alcohol coat” would keep you warm?

It’s a widely held belief that drinking an alcoholic beverage can make you feel warmer, but does it actually help your body stay warm when you’re outside on a cold night?

THE QUESTION

Does drinking alcohol help you stay warm in cold weather?

THE SOURCES

• California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control
• Banyan Treatment Centers
• National Gallery of Art
• Novant Health
• Cleveland Clinic
• Covenant Health
• Reliant Medical Group

THE ANSWER

No, drinking alcohol doesn’t help you stay warm in cold weather — it actually cools you down.

WHAT WE FOUND

Contrary to popular belief, drinking an alcoholic beverage does not help you stay warm when it’s cold outside, according to our sources. It actually cools you down instead.

“Just one alcoholic drink can make you feel as if you’re warmer, but it actually lowers your core body temperature and increases your risk of hypothermia. That’s because drinking alcohol reverses the normal process and reflexes that control our body temperature,” says Harriet Davis, M.D., a family medicine physician at Novant Health Blakeney Family Physicians in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Drinking alcohol makes you feel hot because it increases your heart rate and widens the blood vessels, which allows more blood to flow and causes the skin to feel warm and flushed, Banyan Treatment Centers says on its website. But the alcohol is just giving your body a false sense of warmth because “you’re actually losing your body heat to the outside environment faster,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.

“When you drink alcohol, your blood vessels dilate to get rid of the excess heat. When the vessels expand, you might even feel warmer because of the increased blood flow in the vessels under your skin,” Banyan Treatment Centers explains.

“While this process makes the skin feel warmer, the widening of blood vessels is actually the body’s way of cooling itself down after alcohol consumption,” Banyan Treatment Centers says. “For this reason, your skin might feel warm after drinking alcohol because your body is simply trying to push the heat out.”

So, where exactly did this myth originate?

The National Gallery of Art and Reliant Medical Group blame the origin of this myth on artist Sir Edwin Landseer. In 1820, he created a famous painting called “Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler.”

The painting depicts two Alpine mastiff dogs rescuing an unconscious hiker partially buried by snow in the Alps. One of the dogs is carrying a small keg of brandy around its neck. But the National Gallery of Art says dogs never actually carried alcohol during rescue missions.

This story is also available in Spanish / Lee este artículo también en español: No, el beber alcohol no ayuda a mantenerte caliente en el clima frío