What doesn't kill me makes me stronger

What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger Josh Mitteldorf, translated by Evgenia Ryabtseva

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Most people over the age of 50 suffer from some form of joint or back pain. It is believed that with an increase in body weight, pressure on the joints increases with each step and tension in the joints increases, which exacerbates the symptoms of arthritis. However, this does not correspond to reality. In fact, physical exercise helps to prevent and alleviate the manifestations of arthritis. (The only exception is excessively heavy physical exertion, which affects, for example, the elbow of a Major League baseball pitcher or the knees of strikers in American football.) Walking with a 20-kilogram backpack has the opposite effect of moving with an extra 20 kilograms of belly fat. The reason why overweight aggravates arthritis is that each fat cell is a hormone-producing factory that releases molecular signals to the development of inflammation. In combination, these signals (known as cytokines) cause blood cells to intensify inflammatory processes that gradually destroy the cartilage tissue of our joints.

Perhaps the fact that overeating is the enemy of longevity is so well known that it no longer seems strange. However, according to the author, in reality he is strange. The strange thing is that the more you strain your body, the longer it retains vitality. It is also strange that the life expectancy of laboratory animals can be slightly increased not by taking care of them, but on the contrary, by the influence of one or another unfavorable factor. Below is a list of factors whose ability to increase life expectancy has been proven in animal experiments:

• low doses of radioactive radiation;
• toxins;
• pathogens and infections;
• heat and
• cold;
• hypoxia (oxygen starvation).

Paraquat is a powerful herbicide highly toxic to humans. It is the opposite of antioxidants. When spraying paraquat from the air to destroy marijuana fields in Chiapas, Mexico, 16 people died.

However, McGill University researchers working in Siegfried Hekimi's laboratory have demonstrated that adding paraquat to the nutrient medium can increase the lifespan of roundworms. At the same time, small doses had virtually no effect, large doses killed worms, and a properly selected dosage increased their life expectancy by 70%.

When exposed to an adverse factor, the body adapts and becomes stronger, which is not surprising. It turns out that under the influence of adverse factors, we maintain better health and live longer than in ideal, stress-free conditions.

This phenomenon, first described in the 19th century, is called hormesis. However, the term "hormesis" itself appeared only in 1943, and only during the last two decades has the underlying idea gained some weight in scientific circles, which resisted its adoption for three reasons:

• The relationship with the problematic science of homeopathy. At the beginning of the XX century, people who promoted homeopathic medicine were zealous supporters of the concept of hormesis.
• The owners of chemical plants and other polluting enterprises seized on the idea that allowed them, if necessary, to assert that in reality pollution is a boon to public health! In fact, the owners of nuclear power plants claim that radiation leakage is not a problem as long as it does not exceed the threshold dose.*
• The strangeness of the idea itself. According to the concept of hormesis, the body cannot be completely healthy if it receives the necessary amount of food and is not exposed to toxins and other stressful factors.

Examples of hormesis

• The most impressive and obvious examples of hormesis are that both a decrease in the amount of food consumed and an increase in physical activity increase life expectancy.
• Chloroform is a residual contaminant in toothpaste. Manufacturers tested the safety of their product on dogs that were fed toothpaste containing and not containing chloroform. To their surprise, it turned out that mortality was lower in the group receiving chloroform.
• Repeated moderate burns slow down the development of age-related damage to skin cells. Worms exposed to heat shock also live longer.
• An Australian study has shown that people who are exposed to sunlight more often have less UV-induced DNA damage.
• Rats that were placed in cold water for 4 hours daily lived longer and less cancer-free than animals kept warm.
• Mice exposed to radiation, the level of which was 25-50 times higher than the background, lived 20% longer than mice exposed only to background exposure.
• Fruit flies that carried various diseases lived longer and left more descendants.

Don Luckey has devoted the last decade of his professional career to documenting the positive effects of radioactive radiation on health and argued with skeptics, arguing that we should all receive more total radiation exposure than cosmic rays and the low background level created by the elements contained in the soil provide. However, the US National Research Council does not agree with this.

Edward Calabrese from the University of Massachusetts studies the epidemiology of toxins contained in the environment. For 25 years, he described his findings with simple linear models: if one particle per million has a negative effect, then we can expect that half a particle per million will have half as much influence. However, as the data accumulated, the moment came when he was forced to retreat from these models. Since that time, he has been an ardent defender of the theory of hormesis. In one of his articles, he writes: "When conducting a comprehensive analysis of the literature, the existence of the phenomenon of hormesis has been demonstrated for a wide range of chemical compounds, taxonomic groups and parameters... hormesis is a reproducible generalizable biological phenomenon and is a fundamental component of many, if not most, dose-effect dependencies."

According to the increasingly confirmed "hygienic hypothesis", the widespread use of disinfectants has reduced the impact of bacteria on a person in childhood to an unhealthy level. As a result, this has led to an increase in the incidence of asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease and various autoimmune diseases.

Hormesis also holds an unusual place in the history of cinema. In the 1950s, publications about the ability of ionizing radiation to stimulate growth gave rise to the genre of films about so-called "nuclear monsters", such as "Godzilla" (1954) and "Attack of the Giant Woman" (1958). Typical of this genre is the film "They!" (1954), in which ants exposed to radiation during test explosions grew to gigantic sizes and terrorized the population of New Mexico.

How to understand the biological meaning of hormesis

The reason why hormesis seems to us a very strange phenomenon is that we like to think that nature has done everything possible to make us as strong and healthy as possible as a result of evolution. This phenomenon does not make sense to us as individuals relying on our own strength and health, just because we are not dying of hunger or poisoning at the moment. However, if you look at it not from the point of view of the individual, but from the point of view of the collective, it begins to make sense…

The main contribution of the author to the evolutionary theory is the emergence of the demographic theory of degeneration, which is based on the premise that excessive population growth is a danger to most animal species. If animals eat all the food available to them and reproduce as quickly as their physiological capabilities allow, this will lead to impoverishment of the environment, starvation of the next generation and the threat of extinction. The evolution of all animal species has been aimed at avoiding this.

This situation can be described in other words: the main causes of death in nature kill everyone at once. With a lack of food, everyone dies of hunger. In an epidemic, everyone gets sick almost simultaneously. Storms, cataclysms or environmental toxins simultaneously affect the entire population.

Aging is a natural mechanism for maintaining an equilibrium mortality rate, thanks to which the entire population does not die overnight. Aging builds deaths into an individualized schedule, which allows individuals to die at different times from different causes.

Since aging is an evolutionary addition to natural-caused mortality, it can be expected that in more severe conditions there is practically no need for additional deaths as a result of aging. Therefore, during hunger or other adversities, aging takes a time-out. And on the contrary, when life is easy and stress-free, when no one dies from external causes, aging gains full force, helping to "thin out" the population in order to avoid its excessive growth.

Thus, demographic theory provides a natural context for understanding hormesis. In fact, demographic theory is the only theory of aging that predicted hormesis.

What does all this mean for lifestyle and longevity

To begin with, you should eat less and exercise more. If we proceed only from the available data, it is advisable to install a gamma radiation source in the dwelling with a power 25 times higher than the background. However, this idea, to put it mildly, raises doubts. We don't know how to do it right. Perhaps it can be useful in one age period and disastrous in others. On the other hand, people living in homes with elevated natural levels of radioactive radon gas have a high risk of developing lung cancer.

The author notes that the concept of hormesis allowed him to relax in relation to the fear of environmental pollution that has been tormenting him for many years and refuse to participate in a program to reduce the effects of natural and artificial toxins. At the same time, he emphasizes that he is not ready for active actions that would increase his exposure to toxins or radiation.

For links to publications in scientific journals, see the original article.

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13.02.2015