Hormē

Fighting Greeks

Depending on the mix of compounds in foods and the sequence in which foods are eaten in a meal, any phytochemical can be nutritious or toxic.

— Fred Provenza, Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom

There is a word in Ancient Greek, ὁρμή hormē, which means a violent pressure or activating force; an eagerness, passion, or appetite. It brings to mind a rushing stream or geyser that bursts forth from the earth. This is the word which we get hormone from. Hormones are activators, catalysts, initiators: the driving chemical signaling forces within our bodies.

Hormones control everything that happens in our biological organisms. Hormones like leptin let us know we’re full, cortisol makes us alert, epinephrine wires us for action, melatonin gets us ready for sleep, oxytocin gives us the warm fuzzies of love, testosterone drives us to accomplish tasks, dopamine rewards us for success… Wikipedia lists 64 molecules classified as hormones¹ and I bet there are many that have been overlooked, not yet found, or not classified as such. We call this network of hormones “the endocrine system”.

But there’s another word that we get from hormē: Hormesis.

I’m going to quote the definition given by Wiktionary:

A phenomenon in which an environmental agent or stressor produces a stimulatory or beneficial effect at low doses and an inhibitory or harmful effect at higher doses, corresponding to a biphasic dose-response relationship.

Okay. Let’s translate that. Hormesis is when something comes into your body and the results of the panic response are beneficial when the amount is little but not so dandy when the amount is large. “The dose makes the poison”, and all that. What’s interesting is that so many things follow this “biphasic dose-response relationship”. Bell curves are very common in nature and there is too much of a good thing!²

In fact, I’m going to borrow a quote from Wikipedia:

In physiology and nutrition, hormesis can be visualized as a hormetic curve with regions of deficiency, homeostasis, and toxicity.

I really like this quote. It is applicable to almost everything in the body. As an example, consider testosterone: not enough testosterone makes a person (yes, women as well as men) lethargic, unmotivated, and submissive; just the right amount keeps one motivated, goal-focused, and determined; too much makes one illogical, easily frustrated, and rambunctious.

Mostly, though, hormesis is used to refer to exotic things entering the body. Like, say, caffeine.

Just a little bit of caffeine and… nothing happens. The body just cleans it up and dusts its hands. A moderate amount of caffeine and the body exhibits a “hormetic response”, becoming energized and active. But as the amount continues to increase, the benefits turn to detriments: the energy is frenetic, the hands shake, the heart works overtime, and the adrenals become fatigued. At the extremes… the body shuts down entirely.

It would not be untoward to call caffeine a poison. Yet, in small doses, it really is only purely beneficial.³

So. What can we learn from all this? What can hormē teach us?

I believe that “good” and “bad” are subjective. It depends entirely on context and perspective. Hormesis is an example of this. Take advantage of your body’s keen ability to make good things happen with small discomforts. No pain is pleasant; a little pain is a lesson; a lot of pain is dangerous; chronic pain is systemic. Your body can’t adapt if it has nothing to adapt to. The key is to utilize small “stressors” without becoming “stressed”.

I will never say “no pain, no gain” but if employed correctly, a little bit of “pain”⁴ can go a very long way.

1. A hormone is really just a chemical which acts as a signal, traveling from one part of the body where it is produced to another where it is received; it is a classification not a description of the chemical composition

2. I know that hormesis isn’t technically a bell curve (those are for distributions in statistics) but it is very close to one as a trailing-tail U-shaped dose-response curve

3. For a healthy person and in the correct dosage for their unique body

4. This is in scare quotes because hormesis is not an inherently painful thing. Your body chemistry may be “stressed” but that can be a very pleasant feeling indeed!