Someone info-dumped on one of my favorite topics! About how generations are developing significantly cooler resting body temperatures (/lower metabolisms) and we don't actually know why. (I would love to look at this across the globe, too!)
@pamela op has got one fact flipped in their summary—cooler body temps are generally *more* hospitable to viral infections than warmer ones (this is why your body will give itself a fever when trying to kill viruses!) if we’re getting cooler bc of changing immune conditions it would mean our bodies were getting sick less often (eg sanitation has gone up dramatically) rather than our ability to treat going down (which is not necessarily true when you’re talking about a timescale that started during the American Civil War—well pre-penicillin let alone even dreaming of antivirals
anyway, text article on the same topic for anyone who does worse with audiovisual things: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-body-temperatures-cooling-down/
@pamela yeah the skipped generation bit was super fascinating—no idea what couldve caused it tho (early childhood exposures leading to certain things getting passed down with switches flipped?)
@Satsuma oh yep I meant to mention that and the fact that we've dropped below the thermal barrier for systemic fungal infection and that which had limited certain growths to keratinized tissues, and also they transposed numbers on the last average
But the bit about skipped-generation parenting leading to a higher temp than expected was new to me, interesting nod to potential epigenetic factors but ones which I can't imagine are easy to track down (dietary preference by age during pregnancy?)