Extreme fitness and health or DEATH.

These were the only options for thousands of years.

How micro-dosing that, which gave our ancestors extreme fitness and health and at the same time a high probability of  death, can be an effective strategy for anti-aging, health restoration and fitness.

I woke up this morning and the previous 2 mornings in a bedroom that was 37 degrees.  Here in the northeast we had a snow storm that was wet and heavy, resulting in trees falling and destroying power lines, hence 37 degrees in the morning.  With all the preparation and gear I have for winter sports, I was dressed for an ice age and yet I still woke up feeling a bit frozen.  So uncomfortable.  It made me think that our hunter gatherer ancestors would laugh at me.

What was interesting about this experience was how refreshed I felt getting out of bed.  Absolutely no feeling like I needed to lay around for a while before getting the day started.  I quite literally jumped out of bed.  No aches or pains to speak of, considering I shoveled for nearly 4 hours, the wetest and heaviest snow possible.  We know cold is an anti-inflammatory, but I think there are other mechanisms in play.  I had very little need for a cup of coffee to get my brain started. I wasn’t even sore, I felt little need to ‘warm up’ before my workout.  Even though I did warm up first, it seemed my limbs were more flexible than usual.  To put it simply, 3 nights of cold exposure provided an impressive amount of energy, flexibility and cognitive boost.

There is no doubt that the world of 10,000 years ago would seem pretty harsh to our modern sensibilities, while at the same time would make our genes (our DNA), perfectly comfortable.  Its true, our genes or genome, has not changed in 10,000 years therefore our genes expect the harsh environment.   The environment in which our genes adapted to for eons has dramatically changed in just a couple hundred years and most dramatically in the last 50 years. Therefore, the comfortable, well lit, heated or air conditioned, super clean, germ free place you call home; is completely foreign to what your genes would expect.

Give a pro-inflammatory to reduce inflammation.

There is a principal in science called hormesis that I’ve written about before.  It says that a little bit of toxicity, yields a bodily protection against that toxicity.  Another example of hormesis is the slight inflammation caused by the toxic effect of a plant spice called turmeric.  Cellular exposure to turmeric results in a response by that cell to dramatically reduce inflammation, thus it takes an ‘inflammatory‘ agent like turmeric to provide an anti-inflammatory effect.  That is why we take turmeric for inflammation.

Hormesis can be applied to botanicals, nutrients, heat, cold, exercise and many more interventions.  If the nervous system and the environment can communicate without interference, then the nervous system will give the proper commands to adapt.  The job of a clinician is to identify where you may have interference with communication and remove that interference.  Either physically, biochemically or otherwise.

I have experienced the hormetic effect of cold exposure (cryotherapy) in the past by engaging in brief cold plunges into 57 degree water, standing outside nearly naked in the winter for a few minutes, having a cold end to my morning shower, etc.  However this was the first time I slept 3 consecutive nights in such low temperature.  My morning  heart rate variability reading was unusually high and consistent , according to my sleep app, I woke up 1/2 as many times as other nights and I have no recollection of waking at all.  I slept really well and felt rested.

Harsh Environmentalism:

Now I am not advocating for turning off your heat and risking burst pipes and frost bite.  However our ancestors had no choice, and I’d like to think that the human race at any point in history were able to live quite comfortably in their particular harsh environments in which they learned to adapt to.

Here is what some of the science has to say about cold exposure.  Cold exposure can positively impact immune health, inflammation, fat storage and can shift our fat from white fat, which burns no energy, to brown fat that is very metabolically active, muscle and bone physiology is positively impacted as well.

The mechanism for positive change in our DNA, cells and body, is due to the fact that the environment is responsible for activating certain genes that would otherwise not be activated in our comfortable modern homes.  If the genes are not activated, then the expression of specific proteins in our cells would not be created (gene expression results in protein cellular formation).  It just so happens that when the body is in a harsh environment, the response is one of survival (hormesis), these ‘survival’ proteins that are created, happen to not only be good at adapting to harsh environments but they are also proteins that have anticancer properties, anti- cardiovascular disease properties, very neuro-protective & anti-inflammatory properties, and a whole lot more.

We can now live in our modern comfortable world, and use this knowledge and research to provide a micro-dose of a harsh environmental stimulus in order to benefit from the adaptive response and improve, health, performance, aging and more.

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