The Fountain of Youth!

 

By Kim Marquardt, RN MSN

This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.

*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.

They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.

I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!

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Let’s get “sciency” right out of the gate today and talk about hormesis, something you may have never heard of (I certainly hadn’t). Knowing what and how to achieve hormesis can inform our health habits, improving our life span and more importantly, our health span.

What's Hormesis?

According to PubMed, hormesis is defined as a dose-response phenomenon characterized by low-dose stimulation and high-dose inhibition, and has been recognized as representing an overcompensation for mild environmental stress.

Okay in “regular” terms, what that’s saying is that a little bit of intermittent stress on the body (as opposed to chronic stress) is GOOD for our cells and makes them stronger. Think of lifting weights. In the weightlifting process, we actually break down muscle fibers with the stress of the activity, but when the body repairs those fibers, it “overcompensates” and makes them stronger and larger and this builds lean muscle mass, a very good thing!

But beyond things like muscle building, let’s talk about what goes on inside a cell that may be even more important. Flash back to middle school science and let’s talk about mitochondria. Everyone say it together, “the powerhouse of the cell.”

Mitochondria

Mitochondria are the very basis of life. Burning and supplying energy to our whole body. Mitochondria are also, indirectly you could say, the reason we age. As our mitochondria get older and less efficient, so do we.

So...

If we can slow the aging of our mitochondria, we can slow our aging altogether. Back to hormesis.

How does hormesis slow aging and improve health span? By making our mitochondria work harder, get heartier, and in some cases, even multiply! So how do we achieve hormesis?

Great question, but first let's talk about how NOT to achieve it.  

What Not to Do:

Sitting down staring at a screen is exactly how not to achieve hormesis. And that is what a huge percentage of our population does all day, every day (including yours truly!). Our modern sedentary, temperature controlled world does NOT lend itself to hormesis. So just like exercise (which back in the day was just called “living life” with the need to hunt, gather, collect water, tend animals, build things, etc.) we now have to artificially practice it. And unfortunately, as with exercise, it’s about getting just a little uncomfortable.

Have you ever watched the very interesting people that do “polar bear plunges” in freezing cold water and wonder why in the world anyone would do that? Truth be told, some may just be thrill seekers or peer pressured into it and not actually understand the benefits of such an activity. But polar plunging is a perfect example of a hormetic activity.

Now most of us, myself included, have no desire to do something quite so extreme, but ending your shower with a burst of cold water for a minute or two each day can achieve the exact same results. In fact, it can be straight up life changing (try it!).

Heat and cold exposure in general are great options for hormesis. With that, let’s get down to it and talk about some practical and FREE ways to achieve hormesis in our everyday lives.

What To Do:

• Cold exposure: In addition to the cold shower idea mentioned above, cold exposure can be as simple as wearing a short sleeve shirt when you know it’s going to be chilly and not putting on a sweater. BONKERS! I know! I encourage you to challenge the mindset of “constant comfort” which is not really an ancestrally appropriate human experience and does not produce hearty bodies.

• Heat exposure: We certainly live in a part of the country where this is a realistic option. It gets nice and warm outside, especially in direct sunlight, many months out of the year. Go outside and stand in direct sun until you start perspiring a little and then spend some time there. If your skin is exposed, this is also a great way to synthesize Vit D and Nitric Oxide, hugely important factors for health.

• Time restricted eating or fasting: Fasting triggers a process in the body called autophagy (a whole post of its own). In simple terms, autophagy is when the body breaks down old, used equipment and gets rid of it. This includes broken down mitochondria. Elimination of damaged mitochondria protects against cell death. Kind of important. This is why constant eating and constant digestion is not good for the body. Since digestion is an all consuming process, the body does not get to work on other things while doing so. Humans were not built for that. We are meant to feast, and then fast. 

• Consider adjusting your eating window to 6-8 hours (say, 10am-6pm), eat 2 or 3 meals (at 10, 2, and 6, or at 12 and 6) -- prioritize protein, eat one ingredient whole foods, and eat until you are full. Wallah!

• Exercise: Last on the list for a reason 😕 I know I am always less than enthusiastic when talking about exercise. I apologize to exercise enthusiasts. To be honest, I am more so annoyed that my regular life as a human does not lend itself to natural, vigorous activity so I have to think about it, find time to do it, and actually go do it. Way too complicated.

But I have an even “sciencier” (now I am really making up words) explanation for why I (we) don’t want to exercise:

You see, our survival mechanism is to do as little activity as possible. That is why we generally hate the idea of exercise (well, except for “those” people… you know the ones 😉). But if you think about our ancestral human life, we were not running around just for the sake of getting our heart rate up. We were doing vigorous activity out of absolute necessity… hunting, harvesting, climbing, pulling pushing, building, carrying, etc. And when we didn’t NEED to do it, we sat down or laid down, and expelled as little energy as possible.

Again, like many others, that survival instinct is mismatched with our modern environment (in the US) which is not as physically taxing. But in case you've ever wondered why it is SO HARD to get yourself to exercise, that is why.

It’s not your “will power,” (whatever that is)… it’s your genes. You’re welcome. But it still achieves hormesis, so try to find a fun activity that gets your body moving.

There are many other more “sophisticated” (and expensive) ways to achieve hormesis, but I am most interested in practical and free. So, start here, get a little uncomfortable, juice up those mitochondria, and age backwards!!!

Until next week!