If you do not wear a hat, but are otherwise bundled up when in cold weather, half the heat you lose is from your head.
The trick is not to let non-experts summarize technical papers for you I think, lest they leave out the critical context.
This myth is like the precursor to buzzfeed.
Yeah and I don’t think OP’s labelling this as a “myth” is really clarifying anything. It’s not “true” or “false”: it’s an overly vague and broad generalization from one study. It’s like if someone told you “You eat half of your fat at breakfast”. Is that true or false? Well, it depends a lot on which “you” you’re talking about and which day you’re talking about, but in any case it doesn’t make much sense to generalize it into some sort of bizarre universal truth or falsehood.
To be fair this article isn’t accurate either.
If you click the British Medical Journal link, it states that you’ll lose about 50% through the head when clothed in -4C weather. This article would only be accurate if you qualify it by saying “nude in -4C weather, you’ll only lose 7-10% of body heat through the head”
I think in that study they had a bunch of dudes all dressed up in winter gear but no hats. Then they got all shocked when they saw heat dumping out of their heads. Then they put hats on all of them, and shocker, less heat loss.
I always heard this in scouting. Might be incorrect but it still does a great job getting the point across. You’ll be a lot warmer with a beanie vs no beanie.
But Hal Johnson and Joanne Mcloed assured me this was true