#8 Hormesis and Antifragility - Why Hormetic Adaptation is the Key to Longevity and Health

Siim Land (0:00)

The early living conditions on Earth were quite hazardous.

At first, there was just the vast ocean with no oxygen or land. The initial life forms were just microbes and marine animals. After the formation and oxygenation of the atmosphere occurred, the earliest multicellular organisms could evolve. Over the last 500 million years, land vertebrates and plants have spread across the globe. Despite that, there have been several massive extinction events that have wiped out the dominant species of the planet, like dinosaurs or mammoths. How on Earth has life managed to survive at all in the midst of volcanoes, ice ages and asteroids? Charles Darwin said in The Origin of the Species, It is not the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that survives. It's the one that's most adaptable to change. That's what we'll be talking about in today's Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and the topics I'm going to cover right now include physical as well as psychological adaptation in the form of hormesis.

So let's get to it.

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Us humans have managed to build our civilization, not because we could fight a gorilla in hand-to-hand combat, and definitely not because we could outthink dolphins, but because we've adapted to almost any condition on this planet, no other species lives in the Arctic, in deserts, in jungles, at sea, or in barren wastelands. No other species has the ability to eat and digest such a wide variety of foods, starting from meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and ending with fish, eggs and grains. No other species is able to reconstruct their living environment to such a degree and build cities. Of course, our ingenuity, language, social cooperation and communal living have played the biggest part in our evolutionary development. However, our adaptability has a physiological basis as well. The biological phenomenon to this is called hormesis, which comes from the Greek word, and it means rapid motion, eagerness or to set in motion.

Basically, hormesis is a biphasic response to a toxin or a stressor. First, there's the initial contact that causes injury to the body. Secondly, the following reaction leads to adaptation, which leaves the body in a better condition than it was before. This is exactly what the concept of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's antifragility is about. Fragile things break under pressure and they get destroyed. Resilient things resist a shock, but they stay the same. Antifragile things adapt to the change and become better.

Hormesis was first described by a German pharmacologist named Hugo Schulz in the year 1888

He discovered that a very small dose of lethal poison didn't kill off the yeast he was experimenting with, but actually made them grow. The term Hormesis itself was coined and first used in a scientific paper by Chester Sodom and Jay Ehrlich in 1943 in the journal Phytopathology, vol. 33 In 2012, Mark Mattson explained that cells respond to bio-energetic stressors by increasing DNA repair proteins, antioxidant enzymes, and the production of neurotrophic factors such as BDNF. It is also believed that this is the reason why eating vegetables, drinking tea or coffee can improve your brain's health. Plants contain noxious chemicals that are supposed to protect them from being eaten by insects and other organisms. However, thanks to the constant evolutionary arms race between us and animals, we've developed counter-adaptations in the form of hormesis, and we trigger a beneficial response when eating these foods. Yep, hell yeah. Friedrich Nietzsche said, That which does not kill us makes us stronger. He was a philosopher, not a biologist. But this quote fits hormesis perfectly. So here are some examples of hormesis. Physical exercise is a clear example of hormesis. People with low levels of physical activity are said to be more prone to oxidative stress. Not working out makes you more susceptible to a variety of diseases. I mean, how crazy is that? Regular exercise at both low intensities and high intensities lower your body's level of oxidative stress that improve longevity and brain health. Exercise itself causes oxidative stress, especially at high intensities like lifting weights or HIIT cardio. However, it triggers adaptations that increase mitochondrial density and biogenesis through mitochondrial hormesis.

Alcohol is another hypothetical form of hormesis, as it's believed to prevent heart disease and stroke. However, there's evidence to show that these benefits... However, there's evidence to show... I would say that maybe a shot of vodka or a glass of wine once a week can be good for you, but when you start drinking anything beyond that, then you're probably just lying to yourself. You go like, Ah, got to get my hormesis in, and you end up drinking every day. Beer, ciders, long drinks, cocktails, they're all anti-hormetic with zero advantages, like zero. You're just killing your brain cells and getting fatty liver disease.