How Sweat Is Made

You will notice that you are sweating the most at certain times as opposed to other times. This is because of the effect of specific, yet various stimuli upon the sympathetic nervous system. However, it has brought the question to many minds: why and how can so many different kinds of stimuli create the same biological response? Though the human body is always producing at least a little bit of sweat, we notice the increase in fluid expelled when are bodies undergo certain physical strain, exercises experiences, and / or emotions.

There are so many more reasons that a body’s core temperature may rise – one of them is blood pressure. When you are nervous about something, exited, or even under stress – you blood pressure can be elevated and your core temperature will rise. Therefore, your body will respond as it is designed to when this happens – it will produce sweat to cool the body’s outer temperature as well as your core temperature.

The secretion of sweat through the por es above the eccrine sweat glands has a lot of sodium chloride, but contains no fats, no proteins and in addition it has a low concentration of potassium. The apocrine glands are smaller, but excrete a sweat containing more fatty acids. This sweat does not appear, or rather, the apocrine glands do not become active until a person begins to go through puberty – after that we can’t shut them off. But because of the nature of the stinky secretions of these glands, sweating from the apocrine glands can help you loose weight significantly. The acids secreted will work in your body to attack fat as you strengthen your muscles the more active your body becomes (I am referring here specifically to exercise.)

The primary secretion of the eccrine glands is so similar to plasma that it is much distinguished from the sweat produced in the apocrine glands. The fluid that s produced in and expelled by the eccrine glands comes from the spaces in between the cells. The tiny spaces (between the skin’s cells) fro m which eccrine gland produces sweat are called interstitial spaces. The fluid in our skins interstitial spaces come from the capillaries or blood vessels in the dermis.

In case you are unfamiliar with the general structure of this, the largest organ in the human body, the dermis is the layer . . . Fluid will travel upwards through the coil shaped portion of the sweat glands, then up through the straight duct which leads to the opening through which the sweat is excreted. This “hole” to which I refer, of course, is what we call the pore. Our skin is covered with pores, which of course means that we can (and do) produce sweat all over our bodies. The secretion produced, as well as how much sweat is produced, depends on the kind of stimuli the body encounters.