On a hot summer day, one of the most effective ways to cool your body is to drink a slushy.
“You actually want to ingest little bits of ice,” said Matt Maley, an assistant professor at Loughborough University in England who tested the slushy cooldown method as part of a study he published in 2020.
Drinking a big cup of crushed ice can drop your internal body temperature by about 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 minutes, according to Maley. “That’s quite a substantial reduction,” he said — especially when you consider that the difference between an average, healthy body temperature (98.6 degrees) and getting dangerously hot (100.4 degrees or more) is less than 2 degrees.
A separate 2014 study on Australian firefighters found that drinking a big slushy was just as effective at lowering core body temperature as sitting in a tub of cool water up to your bellybutton. Other papers have confirmed the slushy’s cooling power in cyclists and triathletes and suggested using it for soldiers.
“There is a lot of research showing that drinking cold beverages, especially ice slurries, cools the body’s core temperature,” said Larry Kenney, a physiology professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Here’s what to know if you want to cool off with a slushy this summer.
Can I just have an iced drink instead?
It’s a good idea to drink anything that will hydrate you on a hot day. But if you want to cool down as fast as possible, you don’t just want a drink that’s cooled with ice — you want to drink ice.
(Note: Don’t choke! Drink ice crushed into pieces that are easy to swallow.)
