Yet Wim is not a genetic freak or Tibetan monk. He is a 52 year old Dutch man without much body fat. He believes that anyone can adapt to the cold and learn to control body temperature.

In this article, I will try to answer two questions:

• How does he do it, and can anyone really do the same?
• Is this basically an impressive stunt, or is there any benefit to learning Wim’s methods?

No stunts.  First, just to be clear about what Wim has been able to accomplish,  take a look at these two short videos:

1. Wim running a half marathon in the north of Finland:

2. Wim swimming 50 meters under arctic ice:

An enjoyable account of Wim’s remarkable adventures and methods is detailed in the book Becoming the Iceman, co-authored by Wim Hof and Justin Rosales.  Rosales is a college student who became so intrigued with Wim’s abilities that he managed to earn enough money washing dishes–while still attending classes–to travel to Europe and learn Wim’s methods.  The chapters alternate between those written by Wim and those by Justin. While their account suffers from a lack of editing and is sprinkled with grammatical errors, the excitement of Wim’s remarkable sense of fearless adventure and Justin’s learning process make this book a real page-turner.

Changing how body temperature is regulated.  How does Wim Hof manage to keep his core body temperature elevated, maintain peripheral circulation, and avoid frostbite and hypothermia?  Nobody knows for sure, but there is no doubt that he does it.  Dr. Kenneth Kamler, an expert on hypothermia, frostbite and high-altitude medicine, who has himself climbed up Everest, has observed that Wim’s trained body responds differently than yours or mine.

The normal response to extreme cold exposure starts in the peripheral blood vessels in the extremities  – the ears, nose, fingers and toes.  Blood flow in the extremities at first increases, in order to stimulate warming.  If the cold exposure is prolonged more than a few minutes, goosebumps and shivering kick in to induce warming of muscles and skin.  But if the exposure continues beyond that, a process of biological “triage” takes place.  To preserve the high priority  organs – brain, heart, digestive tract — the body shuts down blood flow to the extremities to prevent further heat loss. The peripheral veins snap shut to segregate warm interior blood from cold peripheral blood. After all, these extremities have a lot exposed surface area, so cutting them off greatly conserves heat.  But the cost of doing this is frostbite and the irreversible tissue damage that often results if the cold exposure is sustained for more than a brief time.  Finally, when the core temperature falls below 95 F, the various stages of hypothermia set in, ultimately leading to death if sufficiently prolonged.

But Wim, and Tibetan practioners of the ancient art of Tummo, are able to significantly alter this normal process.  As Kamler explains, the key adaptation occurs within the brain during meditation–specifically the yoga and controlled breathing exercises that Wim and the tumo practitioners follow.  Of these exercises, breath retention exercises are key.  As a result, there is a significant activation of blood flow and electrical activity in his frontal cortex and hypothalamus — areas that regulate peripheral nerves and veins involved in the regulation of body temperature.   Normally, the circuit between the hypothalamus and these temperature control circuits is involuntary, governed by the autonomic nervous system. Kamler reasonably speculates that,  through meditation, Wim is able to override the normal function of the hypothalamus, allowing the peripheral veins to remain open and heat the extremities, preventing injury.  He points out that Wim must be generating heat and distributing it more efficiently, but he admits having no idea mechanistically how Wim’s meditative techniques accomplish this.

The monks who practice Tummo are able to tolerate cold, but they do so in a meditative pose, while sitting. They speak of being able to generate an “inner fire”.  Wim Hof’s method has diverged from that of classical Tummo. He has innovated significantly, since he is able to control his body temperature while moving about, in fact while exerting himself under conditions of running, swimming, or high altitude climbing which would be challenging for most people even at ambient temperatures! Yet, while Wim is certainly a one-of-a-kind personality, he is insistent that anyone can apply his techniques. His success in teaching Justin Rosales and others seems to bear that out. More recently, Wim  has devoted himself to training others through seminars and training expeditions.

Other abilities.  Wim’s ability to voluntarily control what what we consider to be automatic, involuntary responses does not stop at tolerance of extreme cold.  He has also learned to tolerate extreme heat, consciously overcome pain and cramping, and even moderate his immune response to endotoxin.  A fuller discussion of these abilities is given in Becoming the Iceman.

Possible benefits.  I’m particularly interested in Wim Hof, because of my own positive experience taking daily cold showers.  As I discussed in my post, Cold Showers, making a daily habit of cold showering results in a remarkable degree of adaptation.  The initial intense discomfort of cold shock rapidly shrinks in both intensity and duration, and the self-heating process of thermogenesis becomes more prominent after only a few weeks of the daily habit.  I’ve found benefits in weight control, mood enhancement, and generalized stress resistance.  I’ve not had any colds since starting cold showers. When my family was suffering with a stomach flu that lasted several days, the net effect on me was a 12 hours of achiness which I slept off on a single night, with none of the nausea that they had.

Could more aggressive exposure to the cold provide benefits that go beyond that of daily cold showers?  Hof and Kamler have suggested that the ability to open up peripheral veins and capillaries may help to enhance more than just temperature regulation.  It likely improves blood circulation overall, particularly in the smaller peripheral vessels. Because there are so few individuals that do what Wim Hof does, there is not yet any body of clinical science regarding the benefits to circulation.  But it is not hard to speculate that cold exposure could be a great way to fend of a wide range of cardiovascular and circulatory maladies.  So it intrigues me.

Total cold water submersion.   Cold showers are great, but what Wim Hof does is far more extreme.  Not only is the temperature of the water significantly colder — 32 F vs. the 55-60 F of my showers — but the total body immersion involves much more extensive skin surface area contact, meaning more rapid heat loss. A few times a year, I go for a brisk 10 minute swim in the ocean.  Here where I live in northern California, the ocean temperatures range between 53 and 60 F, similar to my shower water, and ocean swims are definitely more bracing than the cold showers.

My first experiments.  I want to see if I can up the game beyond cold showers. I first read Tim Ferriss’s account of cold water exposure in his book, The 4-Hour Body.  In his chapter “Ice Age”, he recounts the method of Ray Cronis, a NASA scientist who was able to lose almost 30 pounds of fat — fat, not weight — in 6 weeks, by taking cold walks, cold swims, and by drinking cold water.  Ferris himself tried immersing himself in cold baths — with added ice — for 20 minutes.  But he first heated himself to the point of sweating by consuming a thermogenic cocktail of ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin.  So what Conise and Ferris did doesn’t really approach the level of unmediated cold exposure undertaken by Wim Hof.

I want to see how much I can directly adapt to the cold.  My first effort will be to attempt this without any special meditative technique or breathing method, and certainly without taking any thermogenic medications or supplements, as Ferriss did.  So I did my first experiment today, and here is what I did and what I experienced:

I filled a bath with cold water, which I measured at 58 F (14 C).  I first submerged my legs.  It was painful, so I decided to allow myself to adjust before filling the tub with more water. Fortunately, after about 2.5 minutes, my legs no longer hurt and by 4 minutes they felt a kind of paradoxical warmth and I could wiggle my toes again. So I filled the cold water up to my chest when laying back. I was completely submerged at 9 minutes.  At first, this was very uncomfortable, and I started shivering. I felt some numbness, but that went away and I was comfortable again at  14 minutes. I could easily flex my toes and fingers. I continued laying in the tub, submerged up to my neck. The sensation alternated between shivering and coolness. I stayed in until 20 minutes had passed from the initial plunge.

After I got out of the bath, I felt warmer and tingly at first. But 5 minutes after getting out and drying off, I started feeling very cold and shivering uncontrollably. I was not really expecting that; I thought I would instantly feel warmer, just as I always do after stepping out of a cold shower. But in the book Becoming the Iceman, Justin Rosales and Wim Hof describe a phenomenon they refer to as “the afterdrop”, an experience of getting colder after you emerge from cold water. This is exactly what was happening to me. I needed to  put on warm clothes and move around to fight off the shakes. I was still cold and shivering 30 minutes after emerging from the cold bath, and my fingers were stiff, making it hard to type up my notes.

However, a full hour after finishing the bath I started to feel great. I became warmer throughout the evening, even though it has been a chilly evening. Psychologically, I have been quite alert all evening long. So there is some evidence of adaptation, even though the experience has been quite different than what I would have predicted from my familiar habit of cold showers.

I plan to continue experimenting with cold baths over the coming weeks, varying both the duration and the water temperature.  I’m interested to see how readily I adapt, and what other benefits or problems occur along with the adaptation.

Our drives are largely governed by two small primitive brain structures, the hypothalamus and the amygdala – shown in red in the drawing at right.  Remarkably, these two tiny structures are respectively the size of a pea and an almond — representing less than 1% of the brain’s three pounds of neural matter. Together, they constitute the control center of the paleomammalian brain–the “limbic” brain that governs our basic urges and desires as well as our homeostatic “set points” for temperature, sleep, body fat and behavioral urges like sex drive and aggression.

You can attempt to change your behavior by conscious determination and cognitive therapies.  But most attempts at intentional change are temporary and are doomed to fail in the long term because they are strongly resisted by powerful homeostatic processes encoded in our limbic brain.  Modern medicine recognizes the importance of homeostatic drives, and has developed pharmaceuticals to override them with diet pills, sleeping pills and antidepressants.  In fact, these medications do shift the balance of neurotransmitters and neural activity — at least in the short term.  But such chemical interventions are short-sighted “crutches” that promote dependency and come with side effects.  Often they exhibit  a “tolerance” effect: the brain’s control system fights back and weakens the impact of the medication.  To maintain the benefit, doses are increased, but this strategy may not always work.

This article will explain how the hypothalamus and amygdala contribute to the regulation of basic drives like eating, sleeping and sexuality, and how the amygdala can actually override the hypothalamus by enhancing the reward value of foods and other stimuli. (As I will explain, however, my take on “food reward” is different from that of Stephan Guyenet and other advocates of the Food Reward Hypothesis). This dual-control model can help explain anomalies such as obesity, addiction, and disordered sleep.

Finally,  I will provide suggestions on effective and natural ways to re-program the hypothalamus and amygdala and change your homeostatic set points, using the principle of hormesis.

Hormesis. Readers of this blog are familiar with hormesis:  a biological process whereby a beneficial effect (improved health, stress tolerance, growth or longevity) results from exposure to judicious doses of an agent that is otherwise detrimental at higher doses.  The many examples of homesis we’ve discussed on this blog involve adaptations that roughly fall into three categories.  The first two categories are quite well-known:

Structural adaptations to organs and tissues:

• Muscular growth, from weight lifting
• Adaptations of the foot and leg, from barefoot running
• Reversal of myopia, from use of anti-corrective lenses
• Other examples: calluses, suntanning

Defensive adaptations against foreign subtances:

• Immunotherapy to overcome allergies
• Endogenous defenses against oxidants and “xenobiotic” toxins

The third category is perhaps a less well recognized form of hormesis:

 ”Psycho-metabolic” adaptations:

• Hormonal and enzymatic adaptations to caloric restriction and fasting
• Psychological and weight loss benefits of cold showers
• Cue exposure therapy to overcome addictions
• Sleep restriction therapy to counteract insomnia

Psycho-metabolic adaptations. Let’s now expand upon this third category of adaptations, focusing on how certain types of stimulus or “stress” can bring about long term changes within the brain’s control system — the hypothalamus and amygdala.  These adaptations can induce broad sets of changes to your metabolism and psychological functioning.   These changes are long term adaptations — to be distinguished from short term or “artificial” changes that can temporarily induce weight loss, boost metabolism, energy level, wakefulness, or sex drive.   A true change in “set point” requires a sustainable physiological change that is reflected in real alterations in neuron density or receptor sensitivity within the brain.  In turn, these changes to the brain result in systemic changes elsewhere in the body.

In previous posts, I’ve touched upon a few topics that relate to the general thesis of psycho-metabolic adaptations that involve changes to the brain:

1. In “Change your receptors, change your set point“, I presented evidence that individuals suffering from obesity, addiction and depression have in common a down-regulation (reduction in the number or sensitivity) of dopamine receptors. In depression, receptors for other neurotransmitters such as serotonin are also down-regulated, a problem that can actually be made worse by chronic use of SSRI antidepressants.  The article also summarized research indicating that intense exercise, caloric restriction and intermittent fasting can up-regulate dopamine receptors and thereby provide a sustainable treatment for certain types of obesity, addiction and depression.
2. In  ”Obesity starts in the brain“, I outlined the Hypothalamic Hypothesis, a brain-centric analysis of obesity.  I argued that there are two different types of obesity–intra-abdominal and subcutaneous obesity–and that these conditions respectively result from  impairments to the insulin sensitivity or leptin sensitivity of a specific part of the hypothalamus — the arcuate nucleus.  Furthermore, it is the hypothalamic impairments that are primary; for example, insulin resistance starts in the brain and later spreads to the liver and muscles.  The article pointed to specific dietary and inflammatory factors that can improve hypothalamic sensitivity to these hormones and reverse obesity.

I will now build upon the Hypothalamic Hypothesis to account for the influence of the amygdala, to consider how the limbic system governs for drives other than eating, and to propose more generally how we can influence the brain’s control system.

The limbic system. Think about this:  By weight, about 85% of the human brain is the elaborate cerebral cortex, devoted to complex perceptual and conceptual processing and executive function.  In contrast, only a tiny piece of the brain is responsible for the full gamut of motivational drives and emotions, and for maintaining the balance of homeostatic functions like metabolism, body temperature, sleep and energy level.  The simultaneous management of all of these diverse functions is tightly packed into two nut-sized structures–evidently without getting signals crossed! When you think about it, this fact is quite astonishing.  It baffles me that, despite great popular interest in neuroscience, there has been so little commentary about this striking fact.

You can think of the the massive cortex as merely an elaborate pattern recognition system wrapped around the limbic brain.  The cortex’s pattern recognition system has evolved to improve the quality of information being fed to the tiny thermostatic hypothalamus and amygdala.  While the cortex gives us a huge advantage over other animals in analyzing our environment, we seem not to much real control over basic drives like eating and sleeping.  Despite the evolutionary achievement of “rationality”, we humans remain to a large extent at the mercy of our basic animal drives and emotions.

Things are not so bleak, however, once we recognize what makes the limbic brain tick.  While we may not have direct volitional control over the limbic system, there are actions we can take to influence the balance of neural forces within the hypothalamus and amygdala. Over time, we can literally reprogram our psycho-metabolic control systems.

But first a little anatomy.   And I’ll try to keep things simple.  The point of this interlude is not to teach anatomy, but rather to highlight a few key parts of the limbic control system and how they function. I’ve borrowed much of the following discussion from the excellent and incisive monograph, The Limbic System, by Rhawn Joseph, much of which is also contained in Chapter 4 of his online Brain e-book.

The figure below provides a “macro” view of the major parts of the limbic system.  Located at the center of the brain, perched atop the brainstem, the limbic system includes not only the hypothalamus and amygdala, but other structures such as the hippocampus, cingulate gyrus, pituitary gland.  But particularly note that the amygdala is connected tightly by numerous nerve bundles to the hypothalamus.  The amygdala acts directly on the hypothalamus to control hypothalamic drives, and conversely, the hypothalamus “uses” the amygdala (and to some extent the septum) as a window on the world to satisfy its drives by selectively searching out appropriate foods, potential mates, and sleep and exercise opportunities.

Furthermore, notice that the amygdala is closely connected to the olfactory bulb, and mediates its connections to the hypothalamus.  As Joseph notes, “The hypothalamus is exceedingly responsive to olfactory (and pheromonal) input. Perhaps reflecting this partial and putative olfactory origin is the fact that this structure utilizes chemical (hormonal, humoral) molecules to communicate with other areas of the brain, and reacts to these same molecules as well as olfactory cues, including those directly related to sexual status.”  We will come back to the under appreciated importance of olfactory cues in the limbic system’s control of basic drives, particularly appetite and sexual/social attraction.

For present purposes, there are four important points to understand about the actions of the hypothalamus and the amygdala:

1. The hypothalamus is purely reactive. The hypothalamus regulates drives, but is almost totally “blind” to the outside world.  It is inwardly focused and responds reflexively.  It has no memory and acts “in the moment”.   According to Joseph, the hypothalamus is the physical embodiment of the Freudian id:

Emotional functioning at the level of the hypothalamus is not only quite limited and primitive, it is also largely reflexive… Emotions elicited by the hypothalamus are largely undirected, short-lived, being triggered reflexively and without concern or understanding regarding consequences; that is, unless chronically stressed or aroused. Nevertheless, direct contact with the real world is quite limited and almost entirely indirect as the hypothalamus is largely concerned with the internal environment of the organism. Although it receives and responds to light, it cannot “see”. It has no sense of morals, danger, values, logic, etc., and cannot feel or express love or hate. Although quite powerful, hypothalamic emotions are largely undifferentiated, consisting of feelings of pleasure, unpleasure, rage, hunger, thirst, etc….it tends to serve what Freud (1911) has described as the pleasure principle. Functionally isolated, the hypothalamus at birth has no way of reducing tension of mobilizing the organism for any form of effective action. It is helpless. When tensions associated with immediate needs (e.g. hunger or thirst) become unpleasant the only response available to the hypothalamus is to cry and make rage-like vocalization. When satiated, the hypothalamus can only respond with a feeling state suggesting pleasure or at least quiescence.

2. The hypothalamus operates through a hierarchy of channels.  The hypothalamus receives information about the state of the organism, and in turn sends “commands”,  through three main channels:

• The bloodstream. Many signals are exchanged through the relatively porous blood-brain barrier.  For example, as discussed in my previous post on obesity, the hypothalamus receives and integrates a range of signals about short term nutrient status (glucose and fatty acids), gut signals (ghrelin, PYY and CCK) and longer term energy storage  (hormones like insulin, glucagon, leptin and adiponectin).   The blood also carries similar signals regarding body temperature, wakefulness and sleep, and state of readiness for action. And the hypothalamus activates the section of neuroendocrine activators via other glands like the pituitary, thyroid and adrenal glands.
• Nerve fibers –”afferents” and “efferents”.  Certain communication is done via nerve fibers. For example, appetite cues are provided from the nose via the olfactory bulb and from the gut via the vagus nerve.  Body temperature cues are provided from remote thermoreceptors.  The sleep-wake cycle is calibrated by neural inputs from the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which responds to dark and light cycles.  And conversely, the hypothalamus uses efferent nerves to remotely regulate adrenal glands and digestive organs.
• Higher order inputs.  The above chemical and neural inputs can be modulated or overridden by “emotional” interpretation of perceptual and cognitive inputs.  This is is where the amygdala comes in.

3. The amygdala is the “handmaiden” of the hypothalamus.  It serves as the emotional eyes and ears for the hypothalamus by translating the input of the senses and the great pattern recognition capability of the higher cortex into emotional responses that feed into the hypothalamus.  Going beyond the undifferentiated, spur-of-the moment emotional drives of the hypothalamus, the amygdala provides a highly selective response to specific and often complex sensory stimuli.  As Joseph explains:

In contrast to the primitive hypothalamus, the more recently developed amygdala (the “almond”) is preeminent in the control and mediation of all higher order emotional and motivational activities. Via it’s rich interconnections with various neocortical and subcortical regions, amygdaloid neurons are able to monitor and abstract from the sensory array stimuli that are of motivational significance to the organism. This includes the ability to discern and express even subtle social-emotional nuances such as friendliness, fear, love, affection, distruct, anger, etc., and at a more basic level, determine if something might be good to eat.  In fact, amygdaloid neurons respond selectively to the flavor of certain preferred foods, as well as to the sight or sound of something that might be especially desirable to eat  including even the sight of drugs that induce extreme pleasure…Belying its involvement in emotion, including the pleasure associated with cocaine usage, is the unique chemical anatomy of the amygdala, which is rich in a variety of neuropetides including enkephalins and beta-endorphins as well as opiate receptors. In fact, of all brain regions, the greates concentration of opiate receptors is found within the human amygdala.

Beyond appetite, the amygdala also provides a selective filter on sensory cues related to other drives such as sociality and sexual attractiveness.  Of significant note, the amygdala is the arbiter of very specific social cues such as facial recognition:

The amygdala is exceedingly responsive to social and emotional stimuli as conveyed vocally, through touch, sight, and via the expressions of the face . In fact, the amygdala, as well as the overlying (and partly coextensive) temporal lobe, contains neurons which respond selectively to smiles and to the eyes, and which can differentiate between male and female faces and the emotions they convey. For example, the left amygdala acts to discriminate the direction of another person’s gaze, whereas the right amygdala becomes activated while making eye-to-eye contact …Moreover, the normal human amygdala typically responds to frightened faces by altering its activity, whereas injury to the amygdala disrupts the ability to recognize faces. With bilateral destruction, emotional speech production and the capacity to respond appropriately to social emotionally stimuli is abolished.

Maybe this explains why Seth Roberts observation that looking at faces in the morning makes people happy–a simple anti depression therapy!

Joseph also notes that “The relationship between hypothalamus and amygdala is bidirectional.  The amygdala interprets sensory information and emotions and passes these inputs on to the hypothalamus to initiate drives. And when a drive like hunger or sex emerges, the amygdala helps out by surveying the environment for suitable choices of food or potential sexual partners.”

4. The hypothalamus and amygdala  are composed of opposing sets of neural clusters or “nuclei”.   These pairs of neural clusters act in an oscillating ying-and-yang fashion to achieve homeostasis. In both the hypothalamus and amygdala, the external or lateral nuclei activate the parasympathetic nervous system, associated with hunger and digestion, pleasure, relaxation and sexual arousal.  In the case of appetite, stimulation of neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (LH) increases  appetite, releases serotonin and dopamine, and activates anabolic storage of  glucose and fatty acids,  In opposition to the lateral nuclei, internal or “medial” nuclei activate the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system, which readies the organism for action, increases heart rate, suppresses appetite and sexual desire, stimulates release of acetylcholine and norepinephrine, and activates catabolic mobilization of nutrients such as fat or glycogen.  Stimulation of the medial nuclei are also associated with “aversive” non-pleasurable sensation.

Similar pairings of opposing limbic nuclei exist for neurons that control thirst, body temperature, the sleep/wake cycle, or activate social or sexual arousal.

The amygdala has a parallel structure to that of the hypothalamus, which allows direct two-way communication between them.   As Joseph notes:

Moreover, through the massive interconnections maintained with the lateral and medial (ventromedial) hypothalamus, the amygdala is able to act directly on this structure, driving the hypothalamus, so to speak, and thus tapping into its emotional reserviour so that its ends may be met. Indeed, it is able to modulate hypothalamic activity through inhibitory and excitatory projections to this structure. Direct stimulation of the basolateral amygdala and the ventral amydalofugal pathway excites the principle neurons of the medial hypothalamus. By contrast, stimulation of the medial (ventro-medial) amygdala and the stria terminalis pathway, inhibits these same hypothalamic neurons. Hence, whereas the lateral amydala exerts excitatory influences on the hypothalamus, the medial amygdala exerts inhibitory influences, and can thus control, or at least exert excitatory/inhibitory and thus modulatory influences on hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, rage, etc., as well as hormonal, endocrine, and other functions associated with the hypothalamic nuclues. Indeed, the amygdala can be likened to the chief executive of the limbic system and weilds enormous power via its control over the hypothalamus.

Similar sets of paired hypothalamic and amydaloid nuclei govern the balances that control thirst, body temperature, sleep and sex drive.  For example, osmoreceptors that monitor the concentration of salt ions in blood control thirst, and respond by adjusting the hormone vasopressin to regulate water retention by the kidney. Thermoceptors in the body and hypothalamus activate different nuclei in the hypothalamus.

Generalized versus conditioned desires. By serving as the “interpreter” that provides higher-level emotive “meaning” to raw sensory inputs, the amygdala plays a prominent role in learning and laying down reward circuitry.  In effect, it turns complex sensory inputs into cues that the hypothalamus can act upon by establishing Pavlovian circuits that automate the way your basic drives respond to the external environment and even your thoughts.  This applies to both attractive (stimulatory) and aversive (inhibitory) stimuli. As mentioned above, the reward circuitry utilizes a high concentration of dopaminergic neurons to reinforce powerful learned responses of the hypothalamus to sensory cues and thought patterns.

While the hypothalamus activates generalized drives and provides hard-wired low-level responses to universal and fairly general cues, the amygdala provides finely tuned and highly specific learned responses that can modify or override these low level cues:

The hypothalamus gets hungry and anything will do…,but the amygdala is picky about which foods it likes or dislikes, to the point of craving a specific type of chocolate with a certain texture, or rejecting a wine with a slight off-note
The hypothalamus wants sex…but the amygdala is selective about what turns it on — down to very fine preferences regarding appearance, aroma, or even sense of humor.  It may be so selective as to be monogamous!
The hypothalamus wants to sleep… but the amygdala picks up cues about danger that can rally your alertness.

The key point is this:   The generic drives of the hypothalamus are equally powerful whether they are activated by low level chemical and nerve inputs from the blood stream or stomach nerves — or rather by higher level perceptual and emotional inputs from the amygdala.  And if the reward circuitry from the amygdala is strong enough, it can override the low level signals.   A Pavlovian response to the aroma of a juicy steak or the sight of a decadent chocolate cake can activate the hunger response and fat storage program initiated in the lateral hypothalamus, regardless of the nutritional state conveyed by blood glucose or leptin and insulin levels.  Conversely, an unappetizing meal, or an emotional shock can quickly suppress appetite or activate a state of arousal and access to energy.

The hypothalamus doesn’t know or care why it is getting hungry, sleepy or sexed up.   It matters not whether the signals are based on blood chemicals or high level emotional perception — the actions taken by the hypothalamus are identical in either case.

An aside on food reward. This dual model of direct hypothalamic regulation versus conditioned amygdaloid regulation of drives like hunger can shed some light on the recent debate about the Food Reward Hypothesis of obesity.  Stephan Guyenet has cited compelling evidence for the FRH, based on the  observation that rats fed a “cafeteria diet” of highly palatable junk food became fatter than rats fed calorically matched standard bland rat chow.  Merely adding flavor or flavor variety to the chow also resulted in fatter rats.

However, in an earlier post, “Does tasty food make us fat?“,  I argued that Guyenet’s version of the FRH suffers from two logical flaws:  First, Guyenet does not take a clear position on whether “reward” is an inherent property of foods, or rather a learned or conditioned property, relative to individual and cultural experience.  Second, while rewarding food is associated with obesity, the causal sequence can be questioned.  I think it is likely food reward is the is the consequence, not the driver of psycho-metabolic dysregulation.  Food becomes rewarding only after primary hypothalamic regulation becomes impaired, for example by the way that the particular fats and sugars in junk food desensitize hypothalamic receptors to insulin or leptin, as I described in “Obesity starts in the brain“.   Of course, once the amygdaloid food reward circuits are established, they can be expected to perpetuate an increased appetite and shift away from fat mobilization to fat storage.  But the amygdaloid reward circuit is not the primary defect — that remains the impairment to the hypothalamus.  The proof is that it is not just appetite that is impaired — it is also the metabolic consequence of a more active lateral hypothalamus and inhibited ventromedial hypothalamus.   If the hypothermic defect is repaired, the food reward circuit should extinguish.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Hormesis and the hypothalamus.   So how do we use this information?  Specifically, how do we “judiciously” apply “stress”s to re-program our limbic control system. What if we are gaining weight due to both a strong appetite and more “efficient” storage. Or what if we have trouble falling and staying asleep?  Or (more speculatively) what if we want to become more or less aggressive, or more or less sexually motivated?

In short, our understanding of the limbic system suggestions two approaches:

1.  Direct reprogramming of the hypothalamus. Every drive is regulated by a balance of stimulatory and inhibitory neurons.  By the logic of hormesis, we can stimulate the growth of one set of neurons or the other by periodically  ”starving” them of their normal stimuli, allowing a compensatory up-regulation of receptor neurons.  Often this process is slow, and the compensating adaptations may take weeks or longer — but with sustainable results. This is the reverse logic illustrated in several posts.

• “Change your receptors, change your set point”  demonstrates how exposure to uncomfortable stresses such as intermittent fasting, strenuous exercise, cold showers and the like can up-regulate dopaminergic neurons and thereby counteract conditions such as obesity, addiction and depression.  While the research cited in that article doesn’t specifically locate the dopamine neurons, , we know they have a high density in the hypothalamus, amygdala and other limbic structures, and the PET scans indicate a brain location consistent with the hypothalamus and amygdala.
• “A cure for insomnia?” describes the use of Sleep Restriction Therapy (SRT).  By forcing extended wake cycles, there is an apparent rebalancing of hypothalamic neurons in the ascending arousal system, thereby activating sleep-active neurons in the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO) associated with the  “flip-flop switch” that produces distinct sleep-wake states.  As a result, SRT reduces the  excessive production of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) that is associated with many cases of insomnia.

Where does obesity begin?  What drives you to eat too much or expend too little energy, and why has there been such a dramatic increase in obesity since 1980? Some recently popular explanations are the carbohydrate / insulin hypothesis (CIH), singling out the prevalence of carbohydrates in the diet, and the food reward hypothesis (FRH), putting the primary blame on the availability of “hyper-palatable” food.

In this post I will present evidence for new paradigm, which I call the  Hypothalamic Hypothesis (HH).  I think it provides a better explanation for the facts of obesity than the CIH and FRH theories, and leads to some different advice about how best to lose weight.

Some recent research suggests that obesity starts with specific physical changes to the brain. Appetite is regulated by the hypothalamus, particularly the arcuate nucleus (ARC), ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) and lateral hypothalamus (LH). It turns out that two very specific changes to the brain cause us to get get hungry, overeat, burn less fat, and gain weight. And these changes to particular brain structures come about as a result of what you eat, eating frequency, and to some extent your activity level. The problem of obesity or overweight is often portrayed as a single problem, but it is really two problems, and each type of obesity corresponds to one type of brain alteration. Failure to distinguish these two types of obesity has resulted in much confusion. In part, the confusion comes about because these two types of obesity frequently occur together in the same individual, although one type is usually dominant. If you understand this, and you understand the role your brain plays, you can become more successful at losing excess weight.

I’ll spend a little time explaining the theory, provide some specific suggestions for how it can help you fine tune your weight loss program, and try to point out why I think the Hypothalamic Hypothesis overcomes some weaknesses of the other obesity theories.

Two types of obesity.  One major type of obesity is subcutaneous (SC) obesity.  The man on the right is a Sumo wrestler with subcutaneous obesity,  but you don’t have to be a wrestler to have this type of fat distribution.  It is characterized by lots of looser, softer fat hanging from the torso, arms, legs and even the face.  A double chin and skin folds under the arms are not uncommon for this type.  SC obesity is more common among women than men.

The second major type of obesity is visceral or “intra-abdominal” (IA) obesity. This is depicted by the classic “beer belly” sported by the main in the left photograph, characterized by a protuberant gut, but frequently not a lot of extra fat on the legs or arms. It’s quite prevalent among men, but seen on many women as well.

The above photos show extreme types, but it is common for both types of obesity to coexist in the same person, in varying degrees.  Those with predominant IA obesity are sometimes referred to as “apples”; those with predominant SC obesity are called “pears”.

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Different metabolisms. The difference between subcutaneous and intra-abdominal obesity is not merely a matter of how adipose tissue is distributed on the body, but also about the biological composition of the fat tissue and it’s metabolic activity.  Subcutaneous fat is located just beneath the skin, and on the outside of the muscle tissue, all over the body.  By contrast, intra-abdominal fat– also called visceral fat–is located underneath the visceral muscles, deep within the gut.  It  surrounds the digestive organs — the liver, pancreas, stomach and intestines.  The difference can be seen clearly in the CT scans at the left.  The top image shows a cross-section at mid-belly level of someone with SC obesity, with most of the dark gray fat mass located right under the skin but outside the lighter grey visceral muscles and internal organs.  The bottom image is a similar CT scan of someone with IA obesity, showing much less subcutaneous fat, but considerable fat beneath the walls of the viscera, packed around the intestines.

What is important to realize is that the adipose tissue stored inside the abdomen is biochemically and metabolically very different than the fat stored right under the skin.  Both are called “fat” or “adipose tissue” but they behave as if they were entirely different substances. The image below at left is a micrograph of SC fat; the image at right shows IA fat cells.  Notice the different shape and size, but also the substantial dark “mortar” between the IA fat cell “bricks”.

The adipose tissue in IA fat is not an inert storage tissue.  On the contrary, it is a metabolically active hormonal “organ”: it is infiltrated by macrophages and secretes “adipokines” like interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and C-reactive protein.  These compounds are inflammatory signaling agents, associated with insulin resistance, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease characteristic of Metabolic Syndrome.  The health effects of this inflammatory process have been the subject of intense study.  In this article, however, I’ll address only the role that these inflammatory processes have in the development of obesity.

The appetite center.  To understand the dynamics of each type of obesity, it is important to understand how appetite and body fat are governed by the brain. The hypothalamus regulates biological drives, including feeding, sleep and hunger.  As shown in the diagram at right (and also in this video) appetite, feeding behavior and metabolic rate are regulated by two sets of neurons that have opposite effects on appetite and metabolism:

• The  ”anorexigenic” POMC/CART neurons that inhibit appetite and increase the rate of fat oxidation in the body.  In response to nutrients and certain hormones, these neurons produce the appetite-suppressing neuropeptides propio-melanocortin, cocaine-and-amphetamine-regulated transcript and α-melanocyte stimulating hormone (α-MSH). The α-MSH binds to and activates secondary melanocortin-4 (MC-4) neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus (VHM), causing satiety and increasing energy expenditure and  fat oxidation in the body. Animals with damaged or lesioned POMC/CART neurons eat voraciously and become obese.  Both leptin and insulin are potent hormonal stimulators of the POMC/CART neurons.  These neurons have receptors for appetite suppressing signals like insulin and leptin; low levels of either hormone will increase appetite and reduce metabolic rate. If  a deficiency of leptin or insulin persists, it will lead to obesity.
• The  ”orexigenic” NPY/AgRP neurons that stimulate appetite and slow down fat oxidation in the body.  These neurons produce two neuropeptides — neuropeptide Y (NPY) and agouti-related protein (AgRP) which act to inhibit α-MSH from binding to and activating the MC-4 satiety neurons and stimulates melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) in the lateral hypothalamus (LH). This inhibition of MC-4 and stimulation of MCH enhances appetite and decreases metabolism and energy expenditure, conserving fat.  Animals in which the NPY/AgRP neurons have been damaged or destroyed by lesions become anorexic and lose weight.  Insulin and leptin inhibit the NPY/AgRP neurons, whereas the “meal timing” hormone ghrelin, which cyclically ebbs and flows, stimulates them.

These two sets of neurons govern fat gain and fat loss.  They effectively sense the energy status of body by centrally integrating inputs from a large number of circulating nutrients, neuropeptides and hormones, and they respond by outputting neuropeptides that drive behavior and peripheral metabolism. When they are in balance, a normal and healthful level of body fat is maintained, but when the balance of  orexigenic or anorexigenic signals shift, this adjusts the body’s fat and activity set points up or down.  As a prime example, if leptin levels in the hypothalamus are low, either because of low body weight or because the leptin is blocked from reaching its receptors in the POMC neurons, appetite will increase, fat oxidation will decrease, and this will lead to an increase in adiposity.

Insulin, leptin and appetite. There are two hormones which predominantly regulate body fat:  insulin and leptin. In healthy individuals, as Byron Richards describes,

Leptin uses adrenaline as a communication signal to fat cells, telling them to release stored fat to be used for fuel. This takes place in the course of a normal day between meals and at night during sleep…A drop in leptin signals hunger. Food intake stimulates insulin release. As a person eats, insulin is always directing some amount of triglycerides to go over to white adipose tissue and enter fat cells….This turns on the production of leptin in fat cells, causing the blood level to rise in response to the meal. As the leptin levels rise high enough, they signal to the brain that enough has been eaten. Leptin now signals the pancreas to stop making insulin…In overweight people, the communications involving insulin and leptin are inefficient. It is like making a phone call where no one answers. Insulin and leptin resistance mean that the hormones don’t communicate efficiently in response to food.” (The Leptin Diet, p. 13, 17, 23, 36)

Increased basal levels of either of these two hormones indicates increased energy stores and adiposity. The hormones have different metabolic effects depending on their site of action.  As Lustig explains, the action of these hormones “centrally” — inside the brain — is entirely different than that in the “periphery” — the rest of the body:

Insulin also plays a pivotal role in the control of appetite and feeding. In addition to its well-defined peripheral role in glucose clearance and utilization, insulin is involved in the afferent (and efferent) hypothalamic pathways governing energy intake, and in the limbic system’s control of pleasurable responses to food. Whereas insulin drives the accumulation of energy stores in liver, fat, and muscle, its role in the CNS tends to decrease energy intake. This is not a paradox, but rather an elegant instance of negative feedback. When energy stores abound, circulating insulin tends to be high; high CNS insulin tends to decrease feeding behaviors, thereby curtailing further accumulation of energy stores. Insulin’s central effects on energy intake are manifested in two complementary ways: first, insulin decreases the drive to eat; second, insulin decreases the pleasurable and motivating aspects of food.

This self-limiting regulatory action of insulin is also noted by Banks:

Insulin plays many roles within the CNS. Several laboratories have shown that some of the CNS effects of insulin are the opposite of those effects mediated through peripheral tissues. In particular, CNS insulin increases glucose and inhibits feeding, whereas serum insulin decreases glucose and increases feeding. Thus, to some extent, insulin acts as its own counterregulatory hormone, with CNS insulin producing features of insulin resistance.

Both insulin and leptin have an appetite suppressing effect when an elevated level of either one reaches the appetite center of the brain, specifically the satiety-inducing POMC/CART neurons within the arcuate nucleus (ARC) of the hypothalamus.  While similar in their appetite suppressing effect, insulin levels fluctuate in response to the ingestion of meals, especially carbohydrate-rich meals, whereas leptin levels generally reflects longer term changes in energy stores.   Most noteworthy for this discussion, however, these two hormones reflect the two different types of fat.  According to Woods et al:

Insulin is secreted in proportion to visceral fat, whereas leptin reflects total fat mass and especially subcutaneous fat. This is an important distinction with regard to the message conveyed to the brain, since visceral fat carries a greater risk factor for the metabolic complications associated with obesity than does subcutaneous fat. Elevated visceral fat carries an increased risk for insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. Hence, leptin and insulin each convey specific information to the brain regarding the distribution of fat, and the combination of the two additionally conveys information as to the total fat mass of the body.

Interestingly, Woods also reports the brains of females are more sensitive to leptin than insulin, whereas the reverse is true in mails, and that estrogen mediates this difference.   According to  Cnop el at., women on average have three times as much leptin as men, even after controlling for comparable degrees of body mass and insulin resistance. Which explains why there are more male “apples” and more female “pears” — though of course both types of obesity are represented to varying degrees in both genders.

While the appetite regulating actions of insulin and leptin within the brain are well known, what is less well known is that these the two hormones also use “remote control” from within the brain to activate fat loss in the rest of the body.  According to Woods:

As previously mentioned, when leptin is administered into the brains of experimental animals, there is a selective reduction of body fat, with lean body mass being spared. Likewise, when insulin is administered into the brain, there is a reduction of the respiratory quotient, suggesting that the body is oxidizing relatively more fat. These observations suggest that one action of these adipose signals within the brain is to reduce body fat, and a corollary of this is that fat ingestion would be expected to be reduced as well. Consistent with this, we have observed that when insulin is administered into the third cerebral ventricle of rats, fat intake is selectively reduced. Hence, it is reasonable to hypothesize that leptin and insulin, acting in the brain, reduce body fat by increasing lipid mobilization and oxidation and simultaneously by reducing the consumption of dietary fat.

In short, if you want to control your appetite and burn fat faster,  you want leptin and insulin to get inside your brain!  The problem in obesity is that these hormones are not adequately reaching and communicating with the appetite center of the hypothalamus.

Putting up resistance.  So far, I’ve described how leptin and insulin work to homeostatically regulate appetite and body fat in normal individuals.  But this carefully balanced feedback system becomea derailed in obesity.  There are some interesting, but fortunately rare, genetic or disease conditions where the leptin or insulin sensitive receptors in the hypothalamus become defective and insensitive to leptin or insulin. In other words, the “off” switch for appetite stops working correctly.  Or where the leptin or insulin molecules themselves are mutated or damaged and are thus unable to turn off the appetite switch.  Animals or humans with these defects eat voraciously, insatiably and become extremely obese. These rare cases provided some of the initial evidence for the current understanding of how leptin and insulin regulate appetite and body weight.

But defective  hormones and receptors are rare and do not explain the vast majority of cases of obesity. The “normal” cause of obesity involves involves leptin resistance or hypothalamic insulin resistance, whereby there is plenty of leptin or insulin circulating in the bloodstream, and the appetite-suppressing POMC neurons are functional, but not all of the hormone is reaching the receptors in the hypothalamus. The messenger is yelling, but the ears hear the message faintly.  There is a barrier or impediment between messenger and receiver.   The result in each case is that appetite is not getting satisfied, so there is a drive to overeat.  And furthermore, as Woods notes, the “remote control” fat burning functions of the hypothalamus are also reduced.  As a result, with more eating and less fat mobilization and oxidation, you get fatter.

Now, let’s see in more detail what happens to the hypothalamus in each main type of obesity.

Subcutaneous (SC) obesity and the brain.  Leptin is produced in adipose tissue, but specifically in SC fat.  The more SC fat, the more elevated the leptin concentration in the blood.  Normally this would provide a negative feedback signal, inducing satiety in the hypothalamus and increasing the release of fatty acids from fat cells.  In SC obesity, however, only a low level of this leptin is reaching the hypothalamus, so appetite and eating are not inhibited.  But why does this happen?  What is the mechanism?

Some, like Lustig, see insulin resistance in the brain as a likely driver of leptin resistance:

Hyperinsulinemia itself may be a cause of leptin resistance. As described, insulin and leptin use many of the same neurons, the same second messengers, and the same distal efferents to effect induction of satiety….Although confirmation in animal studies is needed…CNS insulin resistance may be a proximate cause of leptin resistance, promoting continued weight gain.

However, it is not plausible to blame leptin resistance on insulin resistance, because many of the obese are insulin sensitive.  For example, Sumo wrestlers notably  can weigh 500 pounds or more,  but they are typically insulin sensitive, and have low cholesterol. According to an study by  Gerald Reaven of Stanford:

The ability of insulin to mediate glucose disposal varies more than six-fold in an apparently healthy population, and approximately one third of the most insulin-resistant of these individuals are at increased risk to develop cardiovascular disease. Differences in degree of adiposity account for approximately 25% of this variability, and another 25% varies as a function of level of physical fitness. The more overweight/obese the person, the more likely they are to be insulin-resistant and at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but substantial numbers of overweight/obese individuals remain insulin-sensitive, and not all insulin-resistant persons are obese.

Recent evidence suggests that the crux of leptin resistance can be located at the door to the brain:  the blood-brain barrier (BBB).  The BBB is semipermeable along the arcuate nucleus.  This allows for controlled, selective transport of various nutrients and energy signals.  According to Banks,

The blood–brain barrier (BBB) prevents the unrestricted movement of peptides and proteins between the brain and blood. However, some peptides and regulatory proteins can cross the BBB by saturable and non-saturable mechanisms. Leptin and insulin each cross the BBB by their own transporters. Impaired transport of leptin occurs in obesity and accounts for peripheral resistance; that is, the condition wherein an obese animal loses weight when given leptin directly into the brain but not when given leptin peripherally. Leptin transport is also inhibited in starvation and by hypertriglyceridemia. Since hypertriglyceridemia occurs in both starvation and obesity, we have postulated that the peripheral resistance induced by hypertriglyceridemia may have evolved as an adaptive mechanism in response to starvation.

In a study on mice, Banks et al. showed  that triglycerides, but not free fatty acids, induce leptin resistance.  This same study showed that, that fasting for 16 hours reduced triglycerides and increased leptin transport, whereas fasting for 48 hours increased triglycerides and impaired leptin transport. This provides support for intermittent fasting as a strategy to reverse leptin resistance.  Elevated triglycerides also enhance the transport of ghrelin, the hormone responsible for initiating feeding at conditioned meal times, which explains why certain obese people get especially hungry around meal time.

Triglyceride levels tend to increase with your degree of adiposity.  But what causes them to rise in the first place?  The primary culprit seems to be fructose, which is converted to triglycerides if consumed in excess. Of course, fructose is part of sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, so any of these sugars in excess will elevate triglycerides, cause leptin resistance, and SC obesity.  Foods containing high concentrations of sugar include  sodas, candies, breakfast cereal, bread and other baked goods, but also sugary fruits like bananas, mangos and raisins. Michael Eades recognized the connection between triglycerides, the blood brain barrier and appetite in his 2007 blog post “Leptin, low-carb and hunger“. But I suspect that it is specifically the effect of fructose reduction — and not the generalized carbohydrate reduction postulated by Eades– that is the primary explanation for low carb diets work to reduce appetite so well for many people.

Diet, of course, is not the only factor affecting how the blood-brain barrier affect leptin resistance.  For example, Banks also notes that epinephrine enhances leptin transport across the BBB by a factor of 2-3 fold.  This explains why exercise and excitement can act to suppress appetite.

Intra-abdominal (IA) obesity and the brain.  Insulin is produced by the pancreas, when it circulates through most of the body outside the brain and spinal cord — what physiologists call the “periphery” — it’s main function is to regulate the availability and storage of glucose and fatty acids, thus preventing excessive glucose or fatty acid levels in the bloodstream.  When insulin receptors in liver, muscle, and other tissues become less responsive to insulin, the resulting insulin resistance results in hyperinsulinemia and its associated metabolic derangements such as Type 2 diabetes. There has been much investigation regarding what causes insulin resistance, the lead hypothesis being some sort of inflammation due to many suspects, including certain fats.

Unlike leptin, triglycerides do not impair insulin transport into the brain. According to a study by Urama and Banks,

[T]he triglyceride triolein significantly increased the brain uptake of insulin, an effect opposite to that on leptin transport, in starved obese mice….That is, leptin transport across the BBB increased with short-term fasting but decreased with starvation and with administration of triolein. In contrast, insulin transport is decreased by short-term fasting but increased by starvation and by triolein.

So what, if not triglycerides, leads to insulin resistance in the brain?

The answer appears to be: free fatty acids. Certain fatty acids – trans fats, certain long-chain saturated fatty acids, and omega-6 unsaturated fatty acids  – produce an inflammatory response in insulin receptors that blunts insulin sensitivity. By contrast, other fatty acids — principally omega-3 fatty acids (like flax or fish oil) and short or medium chain triglycerides (like coconut oil) — are actually anti-inflammatory).  Certain sugars like fructose also appear to be pro-inflammatory.  But what has not been recognized until recently is that these inflammatory processes occur not just in the liver and muscles, but also within the hypothalamus.

And in fact, inflammation of the hypothalamus may be where insulin resistance starts.

Posey et al found that mice fed a high fat diet, with equal calories to a low fat diet, gained 60% more adipose tissue than those on the low fat diet.  Other experiments by Kaivala et al. showed a high fat diet resulted in a 60% reduction in CNS insulin levels, inversely associated with changes in body weight. Thaler et al. , Schwartz et al and Benoit et al. showed that  one particular long chain saturated fatty acid — palmitic acid — causes inflammation and reduces insulin sensitivity in the hypothalamus, leading to overeating and obesity.  Arruda et al. found that intracerebroventricular  injection of an inflammatory cytokine (TNF-α) or stearic acid (another long chain saturated fatty acid) into lean rats induced insulin and leptin resistance in the hypothalamus and hyperinsulinemia and down regulated thermogenesis and oxygen utilization.  In TNF knockout rats (those missing the TNF receptor), the TNF-α did not produce any of these effects, and the rats were protected.  Furthermore, Araujo et al showed that co-administrering an anti-inflammatory drug (infliximab) restored normal oxygen consumption in the obese rats.  Similar results from other studies have been reviewed by Schwartz et al .

Interestingly, high levels of fructose can also cause inflammation and insulin resistance, leading to IA obesity.  If you are lean and healthy, fructose at reasonable levels is converted to glucose in the liver, and brief excess is then stored as glycogen in the liver and muscles.  But in vast excess, fructose is converted to fat of two types — triglycerides and one particular fatty acid.  Can you guess which fatty acid?  The answer is palmitic acid, the fatty acid associated with brain insulin resistance. The liver begins to accumulate the excess fat – a condition known as steatosis or fatty liver disease — which results in hepatic insulin resistance.   So while high fructose consumption causes elevated triglycerides, those triglycerides cause leptin resistance and are not a direct cause of insulin resistance. do not cause insulin resistance, only So it looks like fructose (and of course sucrose which is 50% fructose) is involved in the genesis of both SC obesity and IA obesity.  The fact  is just one manifestation of how easy it is to get confused about “the cause” of obesity.  Because there are two types of obesity with different but intertwined etiologies, the logic of obesity is not always so easy to sort out.  But the various diveres causal threads always come together in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus

What is most illuminating, however, is research by Ono et al showing that hypothalamic insulin resistance precedes — and probably causes — insulin resistance in other organs and tissues.  Ono found that feeding rats a high fat diet induced insulin resistance in the hypothalamus after only one day, with no concurrent hepatic insulin resistance!  It took a full 3 days on this diet for insulin resistance to show up in the liver, and 7 days for the muscles and peripheral tissues to become insulin resistant.   The mechanism of inflammation was the activation of the mTOR/S6K pathway by exposure to fatty acids.  The S6K protein apparently inhibits insulin signaling in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, activating the orexigenic NPY/ArGP neurons and inhibiting the POMC neurons.  Similarly, Pagotta has marshalled other evidence suggesting that insulin resistance starts in the brain.  Of particular note is a study by Obici et al, in which central administration of insulin suppressed glucose production by the liver, and blocking insulin signaling in the brain impaired the ability of insulin to inhibit glucose production in the liver. Finally, an excellent post by Stephan Guyenet cites a similar study by Morton and Schwarz showing much the same thing.  As Guyenet notes,

Investigators showed that by inhibiting insulin signaling in the brains of mice, they could diminish insulin’s ability to suppress liver glucose production by 20%, and its ability to promote glucose uptake by muscle tissue by 59%.  In other words, the majority of insulin’s ability to cause muscle to take up glucose is mediated by its effect on the brain.  

In regard to insulin signalling,  the brain seems to be in charge of the liver.  And this plays out in the genesis of insulin resistance.

This raises an interesting question:  why would insulin resistance start in the brain, rather than the liver or the muscles?  When you think about it for a few minutes, it actually makes sense.  The hypothalamus is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not the body has adequate energy intake. It does this by homeostatically regulating energy stores and energy balancing hormones. In the case of leptin resistance, as we’ve already seen, the brain acts to restore homeostasis signaling the peripheral metabolism to “grow” more subcutaneous fat (by increasing appetite and slowing fat oxidation).  If insulin signaling in the brain is blocked or impaired, homeostasis requires the initiation of compensatory processes that will bring more insulin into the brain.  But how to do that?  Insulin is not produced in the fat cells, so growing more fat won’t directly help.  To do this, the periphery must become somehow become hyperinsulinemic, in order to overcompensate so that enough insulin gets into the hypothalamus.  And the best mechanism for this is to induce whole body insulin resistance, primarily in the liver and muscles.

But how does the insulin resistant brain orchestrate insulin resistance in the periphery?  The answer, apparently, is to grow intra-abdominal fat. As Ljung notes, hypothalamic insulin resistance disrupts the hypothalamic-pituitary -adrenal axis (HPA), leading to increased secretion of ACTH and cortisol.  These hormones in turn stimulate the growth of intra-abdominal adipocytes.  The IA fat proliferates macrophages and releases pro-inflammatory  fatty acids and “adipokines” into the bloodstream. (See “Intra-Abodominal Adipose Tissue: The Culprit?“) The portal circulation carries these to the liver where they promote steatosis (fatty liver), insulin resistance, and local inflammation. The systemic circulation further carries these fatty acids and proinflammatory molecules to skeletal muscle where they promote lipid accumulation, insulin resistance, and local inflammation.  As Ross showed,  it is IA fat, not total fat or SC fat, that is associated with whole body insulin resistance.  Insulin resistance in the body causes the pancreas to go into overdrive to supply more insulin, resulting in hyperinsulimia. As basal insulin levels increase, the hypothalamus is now getting its fix of insulin, keeping hunger in check.  Of course, the level of IA obesity and hyperinsulimeia will only be what is required to handle the degree of inflammation experienced by the arcuate nucleus in the brain.  One this inflammation is reduced or removed, and the NPY/AgRP neurons become more sensitive to insulin, the requirement for elevated basal insulin should go down, and with it the need for intra-abodominal fat.

In slogan form, here is the Hypothalamic Hypothesis of Obesity:

If the hypothalamus is deficient in leptin, it directs the body to grows more subcutaneous fat.

If it is deficient in insulin, it directs the body to grow more intra-abdominal fat.

Now for some practical advice:   How can you use the Hypothalamic Hypothesis to lose unwanted fat or better control your weight?

1.  Start by assessing your degree and type of adiposity.  Do you have a waist-to-hip ratio greater than 0.8 (women) or 1.0 (men) and carry your extra weight a belly that sticks out in front? That’s IA fat and you are a probably an  ”apple”. Or do you have a waist-to-hip ratio of less than 0.8 (for women) or 1.0 (for men) and carry most of your extra weight on your butt, your thighs, chest, and possibly also your arms and neck?  That’s SC fat and you are probably a “pear”.   Of course, you may be an “apple-pear” and carry extra fat in both locations, but it is good to know which type of fat is dominant.  If you want a much more precise assessment using specific measurements of body weight, height and other body dimensions, I recommend consulting “Assessing Your Risk”, Chapter 9 in Protein Power, by Eades and Eades.

2.  If you are primarily a “pear”, and particularly if you are significantly overweight, you are leptin-resistant.  Your primary focus should be on reducing triglycerides.  Largely, this means cutting back on carbohydrates with fructose or sucrose (which is a disaccharide of fructose attached to glucose) is readily converted to triglycerides by the liver.  And it is triglycerides that primarily induce leptin-resistant SC obesity.  So of course you want to cut out soft drinks, cookies, cakes, ice cream, candies, most fruits, and most breads (except those with no sugar, which are hard to find). But so long as you are reasonably insulin sensitive, you don’t have to cut out starches.  Potatoes and rice are probably fine if you are insulin-sensitive as long as you avoid any sugar in the same meal.  If you are an “apple-pear” and are resistant to both leptin and insulin, then you can still eat fructose-free starches like potatoes and starch, but you must not add any pro-inflammatory fats. The question of what constitutes a “pro-inflammatory fat” is a controversial one.  Some fats, such as trans fats and high levels of omega-6 fats are clearly pro-inflammatory, while omega-3 fats, mono-unsaturates like olive oil, and medium chain triglycerides like coconut oil are anti-inflammatory.  But for saturated fats, the picture is less clear and the studies are all over the place.  Probably some saturated fats are OK.  But some people have found that cutting back on cheese and nuts help them shed abdominal fat.  Milk and butter from grass fed cows may be preferable to that from grain fed cows.

What about alcohol?  Alcohol is frequently assumed to raise triglyceride levels, but observational studies show this may not necessarily not true.  Moderate alcohol may actually reduce triglyceride levels.

Finally, as the Banks’ fasting study suggests, intermittent fasting (16 hours, but not 48 hours) can reduce triglycerides and restore leptin sensitivity.

3.  If you are primarily an “apple”, pre diabetic, or trying to lose stubborn belly fat — the last 10-20 pounds,  your primary focus should be on eating a non-inflammatory diet.  For the most part, this means cutting back on certain fats — trans fats (anything “partially hydrogenated” on the nutrition label), vegetable fats high in omega-6 oils, and perhaps certain saturated fats like those in meat, milk, butter or cheese from grain-fed cows. As mentioned above, the question of which saturated fats are “pro-inflammatory” is controversial. The strongest evidence that connects saturated fatty acids to brain insulin resistance is for palmitic acid, but that does not mean all saturated fatty acids cause insulin resistance. In any case, don’t shun non-inflammatory fats like fish oil, olive oil, or coconut oil.  Adding these to your meals can help reverse IA obesity.  I’ve personally found coconut oil to be great for energy and weight loss.

Because consuming high levels of sugar in the diet (fructose, sucrose or syrups that contain them) causes output of pro-inflammatory palmitic acid,  foods containing sugar should be restricted.  If you are lean and have a have a healthy liver, I see nothing wrong with fructose in moderate quantitates.  The daily apple will not hurt you, but the excessive amounts of sugar in  sodas, pastries, ice cream, bread (which contains sugar)  sweet fruit — make you (or maintain you as)  both a  ”pear” and an”apple”.

In addition to avoiding high levels of certain fatty acids and sugars, inflammation can also be reversed by a few additional steps:

• ensuring adequate intake anti-inflammatory micronutrients such as Vitamin D and magnesium
• high intensity exercise, intermittent fasting, cold showers and other hormetic stressors which upregulate anti-inflammatory brain compounds such as BDNF

Caveats. In making the above suggestions, I would like to make a disclaimer:  This post is primarily about a new paradigm of obesity, but I realize that people are looking for specific dietary recommendations.  The  above dietary advice is based upon my best attempt to interpret two general principles regarding the effects of triglycerides and inflammation on the appetite center of the hypothalamus.  In doing this, I am relying on a large body of empirical evidence that is sometimes ambiguous or contradictory — for example, regarding which saturated fats are pro-inflammatory, and which are protective.  And so I may be wrong about the hypothalamic effect of this or that specific food.  Despite this uncertainly, the HH provides a test for deciding whether a food or practice is obesogenic and leads to overeating: namely whether it raises triglycerides or inflames the hypothalamus.  And it is also apparent that these guidelines for foods to avoid cut across conventional macronutrient categories like “fat” and “carbohydrate”, since the hypothalamus does not sort things out that way.

…

OTHER THEORIES OF OBESITY.  I would like to close by contrasting the Hypothalamic Hypothesis with two other theories of obesity, showing how it better accounts for certain facts, and leads to perhaps some different recommendations for losing excess body fat.

The Carbohydrate / Insulin Hypothesis (CIH).  Most prominently advocated by Gary Taubes, CIH holds that dietary fat plays no role in obesity.  Rather, dietary carbohydrates, through their stimulation of insulin secretion, result in a greater degree of fat storage. Carbohydrates drive insulin drives net fat storage. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating or inadequate energy expenditure.  In its favor, CIH can account for the close correlation between obesity and hyperinsulinemia, and the success of low carb dieting.  However, it manifestly does not explain why many obese people, like Sumo wrestlers, are insulin sensitive, with normal insulin levels and no indications of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or other signs of Metabolic Syndrome.  It also does not account for why others, such as the Kitavans and Okinawans, can  eat a diet low in fat but high in certain starchy carbohydrates (polymers of glucose) like root vegetables or rice, and remain lean, with low basal insulin levels.  And it cannot explain why, despite sincere attempts, many people can lose only a certain amount of weight (probably subcutaneous fat) on low carb diets, but often stall and remain insulin resistant when continuing to eat a high fat / low carb diet.  The HH can explain all these facts by carefully distinguishing SC obesity from IA obesity, and by narrowing the cause of type of obesity to very specific types of carbohydrate (fructose and sucrose) and fat (long chain saturates, trans fats and omega-6 fats).  And, perhaps heretically, HH predicts that once you’ve maxed out the benefits of low carb, you can get rid of that paunch and insulin resistance by cutting back on fats– at least the pro-inflammatory fats.

The CIH also cannot explain certain anomalies such that described by Stephan Guyenet and Chris Masterjohn:  the LIRKO mouse which has severe hepatic insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia — but remains leaner than its normal counterparts.  Guyenet and Masterjohn seem to conclude from this that insulin resistance cannot be a cause of obesity.  The mistake they make, I believe, is overlooking the possibility that only one type of insulin resistance — that of the hypothalamus — leads to obesity.  The LIRKO mouse they discuss had an insulin resistant liver, but apparently a well functioning hypothalamus.  It would have been interesting to feed it some pro-inflammatory fats to see what would happen.

One further aside about the CIH:  I must admit that I was previously persuaded by the orthodox version of CIH and it’s explanation about hunger–which I now suspect is incorrect.  I employed this theory elsewhere in this blog to explain the appetite-suppressing effect of low carb diets, intermittent fasting, and flavor control diets such as the Shangri-La Diet.  The explanation was based on what I thought was a very plausible theory I first encountered in Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, Chapter 24,”Hunger and Satiety.” .  The insulin-lowering effect of low carb diets is supposed to counteract hunger from hypoglycemia by making glucose and free fatty acids more available.  And the appetite inducing effects of  appetitive flavors or aromas is explained by their action (probably via the vagus nerve, mediated by the brain’s  tractus solitarus) in eliciting a preprandial insulin response.  This preprandial insulin response supposedly causes a sudden drop in  blood glucose, inducing hunger.   I now believe this theory is wrong, or at least incomplete, for several reasons.  Primary among those reasons are my own experience with blood glucose self monitoring, where I noticed that my blood glucose would typically drop after, but not before I would get hungry.  Also, preprandial insulin responses are typically fairly small and unlikely to reduce blood sugar enough to induce hypoglycemic hunger. So the preprandial insulin response seems too little, too late.  It is more likely an effect, not a cause, of hunger.  I now suspect that a more likely explanation would be the direct action of the vagus nerve and tractus solitarus on the orexigenic or anorexigenic neurons in the ARC, or on the permeability of the blood brain barrier.  But that will be a topic for another post.

The Food Reward Hypothesis (FRH).  The most effective advocate for the FRH is Stephan Guyenet, of Whole Health Source.  Guyenet is the first to admit he is not the originator of this theory, which is common among obesity researchers and was prominently featured in David Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating. And Stephan also takes a modest stance in stipulating that he takes “food reward” to a be a major explanatory factor, but not the sole causal factor, for obesity. For example, he mentions exercise, leptin resistance, energy excess and, yes, even hypothalamic inflammation, as “other” contributory causes to obesity. So FRH is not supposed to be a monocausal theory of obesity. But modesty aside, Guyenet has put a stake in the ground and marshaled considerable argument and evidence in support of FRH.  Briefly, FRH holds that feeding people (or animals) foods have a high “reward” level results in overeating and obesity.  Here is how Guyenet defines “food reward”:

I use the term food reward to refer specifically to the motivational value of food, i.e. its ability to reinforce behavior.  For example, acquiring a taste that causes a person to seek out the food in question more often.  This is how some, but not all, researchers define the term.  Others use the term “food reward” to refer to both the motivational and the palatability value of food.  Palatability refers specifically to the enjoyment derived from a food, also called its hedonic value.  Palatability and reward typically travel together, but not always. (“The Case for Food Reward,” Oct, 1, 2011)

The theory is supported by experimental evidence, for example by the rapid weight gain seen with rats switched from ordinary chow to a  high fat, high sugar “cafeteria diet”, and further developed by referring to the effects of such diets on brain opioids, dopamine circuits and other neurochemistry. Guyenet goes on to propose a remedy for the abundance of super palatable food:  just say no.  By avoiding overly rewarding food, our brains can return to sane eating and obesity can be avoided or reversed.

I feel a certain affinity for the FRH theory because, like HH, it is a “brain-centric” theory of obesity.  Guyenet’s self-described field of research is “neurobiology of body fat regulation and obesity”, which I agree is the most promising way to study of obesity.  I’ve been excited to follow his cogent summaries of the most interesting research in this field. However, the FRH seems to have incorrectly formulated the connection between the brain and obesity.  In fact, I’ve already discussed the FRH theory in another post, “Does tasty food make us fat?“.   Here is what I wrote there:

But I think the theory is wrong, for the simple reason that it too blindly takes correlation for causation. And in doing so, it gets the causal direction mostly wrong. We don’t get fat because food has become too tasty. Rather, to a large extent, it is the metabolism and dietary habits of the obese that make food taste too good to resist, leading to insatiable appetites. And the good news is that we are not consigned to blandness.  If we eat and exercise sensibly, we can eat flavorful, delicious foods and enjoy life, without packing on the pounds.

I had not formulated the HH theory when I wrote that post, but it fits the bill of what I said there: it is the metabolic effects of the pertinent foods in “cafeteria” diets that make them “rewarding” and engender the secondary effects on pleasure-related neurotransmitters like beta endorphin, dopamine or serotonin.  What HH does is to more specifically locate the primary metabolic effects within the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, rather than elsewhere in the body.

I think that HH can explain a number of things that FRH cannot.  FRH is a somewhat vague in that it does not go very far to identify what specific attributes of food make them rewarding and what specific mechanism are involved.  Somehow, sugar, fat and salt are involved. It is more like a schema than a full theory, which makes it hard to test or criticize. By contrast, HH is very specific about the mechanisms by which specific food chemistries interact with specific parts of the brain.  HH,  unlike FRH, provides an explanation for why certain “rewarding” foods will eventually lead to  either subcutaneous obesity or rather intra-abdominal obesity.   HH holds that if you are neither leptin resistant or insulin resistant, then no foods will be inherently hyper-rewarding, at least initially.  Foods only become hyper-rewarding once insulin or leptin resistance begins to manifest itself.   HH makes the further prediction that very tasty, palatable foods that contain no fructose or sucrose (or other agents that elevate triglycerides) or pro-inflammatory fats, will not lead to obesity, no matter how good they taste.

A wider perspective: The homeostatic pleasure principle.  Finally, I think that the Hypothalamic Hypothesis provides a way to connect the hormonal regulation of obesity to something overlooked by both CIH and FRH:  the role of emotion and cognition in obesity, and the relation of obesity to our wider sense of well being.  Obesity is often a response to emotional factors like stress and depression, and conversely might be reversed by cognitive techniques such as cognitive reframing and meditation.  By locating the original of obesity within the hypothalamus, it becomes plausible to understand how stress hormones like cortisol and or calming neurotransmitters like serotonin can have a powerful and direct effect on the behavior of hypothalamic neurons and their sensitivity to leptin and insulin, since these neurochemicals are lurking nearby within the “neighborhood” of the brain.  Looked at more broadly, the hypothalamus can be thought of as a homeostatic regulation system that attempts to maintain an internal subjective sense of well-being or pleasure with respect to a broad range of drives, including not just eating, but sleep, sex, aggression, fear and other emotions.   This  homeostatic “pleasure principle” is fundamental — its provides a way to translate objective needs of the organism into conscious desires and emotions.  This fits into a related line of thinking about brain receptor sensitivity that I wrote about in my post “Change your receptors, change your set point“.  Whenever there is a dysregulation of the pleasure principle, such as occurs in the appetite drive of obesity, but also in conditions such as depression or addiction, we should look within the control system itself to find out what is going wrong. And that is what the HH does, by looking for specific brain mechanisms that explain not only our subjective experience, but the way the rest of the body responds objectively in homeostatic response to physiological disturbances.

Like this article or disagree with it?  Add you comments below, or join the more extended discussion in the Discussion Forum.

But one can come away from the study of hormesis with the misleading impression that it’s all about adjusting the level and timing of stressors to induce an appropriate adaptive or defensive response.  In this article, I would like to focus on a frequently overlooked ingredient in hormesis:  the role of intention, attitude and voluntary choice.  If you omit this ingredient, you are leaving out an important element of the way that stress helps you become stronger.

Voluntary, deliberate exposure to stress can be particularly effective in providing psychological benefits, including overcoming anxieties, obsessions and phobias, and vanquishing appetite cravings, addictions. Beyond overcoming such self-defeating tendencies, deliberate exposure works to unleash confidence and generate a sense of joy and accomplishment.

Hans Selye

General Adaptation Syndrome. Our modern understanding of stress can be traced in large part to Hans Selye, the Hungarian-born endocrinologist whose detailed studies of animals and humans under stress led to a model of stress as a generalizable force capable of causing disease.  Selye distinguished between good  stress, which he called “eustress”, and bad stress, which he called “distress”.  While acknowledging that some stress is good because it is energizing and activates our defenses, Selye spent most of his career studying the negative effects of exposure to stress, which he fit into a pattern called GAS or General Adaptation Syndrome.  Selye claimed that GAS proceeds through three stages:

• Stage 1: Alarm reaction is what is often called “flight or fight” syndrome — a quickening of the heartbeat, tensing of the muscles, release of adrenaline and a cascade of other neurochemicals.  This is typically a short term galvanizing response, reversible once the source of stress is removed.
• Stage 2: Resistance or adaptation occurs when the stressor is sustained.  Glucocorticoid hormones and catecholamines are ramped up to maintain alertness and provide a continued supply of blood glucose, and blood pressure increases to sustain tonicity of the muscles and other organs.  Positive coping and adaptation during this stage can increase resistance and immunity, although not indefinitely. With time, and if continued unimpeded without periods or rest and relaxation, this stage leads to mental fatigue, overtaxing of the adrenal glands and immune system, and vulnerability to disease
• Stage 3: Exhaustion, in which the organism becomes depleted of energy energy reserves and immunity. Mentally, it leads to emotional withdrawal and depression.  If sustained, this third stage leads to grave illness and eventual death.

While Selye did acknowledge some positive aspects of stress during Stage 1 and the Stage 2, he did not leave much room in his model to account for the beneficial biological aspects of stress. Looked at this way, only relatively mild and short-term stresses can be considered useful and positive, insofar as they activate readiness and resistance.  But even here, Selye held that repetition of Stage 1 and Stage 2 stresses can weaken and degrade resilience.  He saw chronic, repetitive, and sustained stress as uniformly damaging to both the psyche and the body. The possibility that routine or frequent stress could significantly and sustainably build resilience was something he did not address.

Learned helplessness. Angela Patmore, in her illuminating book, The Truth About Stress, points out that Selye’s model has led to an emphasis on “stress management”, which is largely about stress prevention and strategies for coping and relaxation.  While acknowledging Selye’s contributions, Patmore believes that he overlooked a key factor which can make a very big difference in whether stress is beneficial or detrimental:

In animal experiments using inescapable threat (prolonged and repeated tail shock, forced swim, water restraint, hot plate contact and other ordeals dreamed up by researchers), long-term inability to respond to perceived danger results in a syndrome that is the biological opposite of the galvanizing stress response. In this quite different response, which has nothing at all to do with survival, the subject gives up the struggle for its life and resigns itself to its fate. This is the so-called ‘third phase’ of Selye’s GAS, but it is important to realize, as Selye evidently did not, that the animal may do this in return for a degree of neural tranquilization, and that its brain may now release pentapeptides and other opiate-like substances to dull the pain and horror of its situation. The resigned animal then succumbs to morbid physiological changes…Giving up may buffer you from reality, but at considerable cost. Resignation causes the suppression or shutting down of the immune system.  If you’ve given up, why would you need an immune system anyway? (TTAS, pp. 110-111)

The act of “giving up” or resignation literally turns a switch and redirects the entire physiology of the animal’s response into a downward spiral of depression and failing health.  This is seen not only with animals, but also in human studies.  Patmore describes experiments by Martin Seligman that demonstrate much the same phenomenon:

…Seligman and his colleagues turned their attention to students, shutting them in a room with loud unpleasant noise, and various knobs that might or might not control the volume. Some continued to alter the sound levels. Others gave up. By now Seligman had developed a model of depression based on his experimental work. His concept of learned helplessness — resigned failure to act in the face of threat — has become of fulcrum of psychological research. (TTAS, p. 113)

The concept of learned helpless highlights the importance of looking beyond the type and extent of stress alone, to consider the internal mental state of the subject.  The essential factor is the perception of control and self-determination:

A number of key studies in the stress literature have highlighted the importance of control in the vulnerability to illness from distressing experiences. Here we plainly see why this is so. Those who act to help themselves assume control. Those who fail to act requlinquish it…Viktor Frankl studied [first hand] the behavior and susceptibilities of the victims of Auschwitz and Dachau, and formulated a theory of survival that he called the ‘will to meaning’. Of immense significance was self-determination. As Frankl observes: ‘Everything can be take from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s own way.’  Taking action based on personal choice..may also send vital messages from the brain to the body to keep fighting and not fall sick. (TTAS p. 116)

Countering Selye’s GAS theory, Patmore puts forward an alternative theory of stress:

The distress-disease link that he formulated was not the direct, simple bond that he envisaged, but a complex sequence of events dependent on each individual’s psychological make-up, courage and coping skills. According to this alternative theory, disease strikes not a direct result of the response to threat, but as a result of resignation, helplessness and failure to act.  (TTAS, p. 118)

Learned control and mastery. We can take these learnings about the negative effects of learned helplessness and turn them around:  Perhaps we can enhance the effectiveness of adaptation and resistance to stress by enhancing our sense of intentionality or deliberate control when we are exposed to stress.    One way to do this is to train ourselves to become more resilient to stress by deliberately exposing ourselves.  This is well recognized in the case weight lifting or athletic training to become physically stronger and more skilled.  But I’m talking here about something more fundamental: our attitude towards facing life’s challenges and hardships.

In contrast to the modern ideology of stress management, which teaches us to avoid stress in order to stay healthy and sane, Patmore recalls that

…there was a far different school of thought, dating back to the Romans, based not on avoiding negative emotions such as fear and tension, but on rehearsing them.  Children were taught resourcefulness and mental strength by ‘character-forming pursuits’ that developed fortitude and self-mastery. By using the opposite of stress management – emotional rehearsal…our ancestors made themselves psychologically more robust….Childhood dares, games and contests, sport and adventure activities — all provide emotionally challenging experiences that help people to understand and season their own sensations and feelings, and take them through unpleasant emotions in order to achieve a resolution…

This attitude goes back at least to the Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. William Irvine, in his excellent modern reinterpretation of Stoicism, A Guide to the Good Life, notes:

Indeed, by practicing Stoic self-denial techniques over a long period, Stoics can transform themselves into individuals remarkable for their courage and self-control. They will be able to do things that others dread doing, and they will be able to refrain from things that others cannot resist doing. They will, as a result, be thoroughly in control of themselves.

By rehearsing or training techniques such as these, you can substantially improve your resilience in handling everyday stressors, whether they be physical or social and emotional.   But what about situations in which we actually have no real control, or where the outcome is highly uncertain?  Perhaps ironically, I think that fostering a sense of control can be helpful even when we may not or do not actually have much control over the situation.  By “making the involuntary voluntary”, we can transform the way the way we respond to stress at the deepest levels of both our biology and our psyche.

I think this attitude of voluntarily embracing unavoidable stress is most articulately expressed by Epictetus, the Greek Stoic and slave whose teachings have inspired two millennia of philosophical and religious thought.  Epictetus distinguished between externals — the events and actions of others which we cannot control — and internals — our values and attitudes.  A slave for much of his life, Epictetus realized how much freedom he nevertheless retained in choosing how to react to his fate. A Stoic “sage”, he said,  never finds life intolerable, but sees in every challenge as an opportunity to test and improve oneself:

You should look to the faculties that you have, and say as you behold them, ‘Bring on me now, O Zeus, whatever difficulties you will, for I have the means and the resources granted to me by yourself to bring honour to myself through whatever may come to pass.’ (TD, Book One, Ch. 6, p. 18).

Furthermore, it is by how we handle the challenges in life that our character is revealed and built:

Difficulties are the things that show what men are. Henceforth, when some difficulty befalls you, remember that god, like a wrestling-master, has matched you with a rough young man.  (TD, Book One, Ch. 24, p. 53).

By deciding to accept the hardships that come your way, as if you had deliberately chosen them, your reactions are transformed.  What may otherwise have been a stress that leads to resignation, giving up, and Selye’s third phase of exhaustion, now becomes a challenge deliberately embraced.  This does not mean deceiving oneself and pretending that you can control the uncontrollable.  Rather, it means embracing the challenge as an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to handle a physically or emotionally difficult situation with courage and grace, to grow from it, and to actually become stronger, not weaker.  Whether or not the stressor eventually diminishes or resolves, with or without your intervention, you are left more resilient as a result.

For a more detailed discussion of Stoicism and its similarity to Hormetism, the philosophy advocated in this blog, I would encourage you to read my page on Stoicism.

Real world applications.   Many of you who have read this far may be wondering: “Interesting philosophy, but how do I actually apply this to my life?”.   I’d like to answer that by illustrating with three very different examples.  Cold showers, intermittent fasting, and exposure therapy for anxiety and phobias.

Cold showers.  The single most popular page on this blog is the March 2010 article on Cold Showers. Initially, it surprised me that so many people would show an interest in something that is without any question uncomfortable. And for some people: terrifying. The article recites a number of health benefits that have been shown or claimed to result from taking cold showers or baths.  

But the article goes beyond the objective physical health benefits to describe my subjective experience of taking cold showers.  In particular, I noted that cold showers are initially quite uncomfortable, provoking an involuntary reactions like rapid breathing, a pumping heart and even laughing. While the shock and discomfort becomes less the more cold showers you take, my experience is that–unless the weather outside is hot–there is almost always hesitation and discomfort when first stepping into the cold shower. It takes an act of will to force myself to do this.  But I do it willingly because I’ve come to understand the benefits that result.  Beyond that initial hesitation upon jumping into the cold shower each morning, I embrace it and enjoy it.

The intentional, voluntary attitude makes a big difference to the experience.  Consider the case of those who must take cold showers unwillingly, perhaps because they have no hot water for a period of their lives, or perhaps were forced to take cold showers at camp or school dormitories.  I get comments from such people, and their attitude towards cold showers is typically very negative.  It is likely that they did not receive much physical or psychological benefit from taking cold showers.  Perhaps the experience even had an adverse effect on them, at least psychologically.

Intermittent fasting.  Going without food some days, or eating only one meal per day is the involuntary fate of millions of people living in poverty or near-poverty.  It can also happen to you if you become lost, stranded or trapped in a place without ready access to food.  This experience of hunger can be quite uncomfortable, even painful.

It’s entirely different matter, however, to abstain from eating periodically for 12-24 hours as a deliberate, voluntary practice.  I’m not talking about eating disorders hear, but rather the practice of intermittent fasting (IF), undertaken to achieve not merely for healthful weight management, but for the well-documented health and longevity benefits, which I’ve discussed in my video article, Intermittent fasting for health and longevity.   When you engage in IF voluntarily, you’ll surely experience moments and periods of hunger cravings.  But in just knowing that hunger cravings are expected and are possible to
“ride out” without adverse effects, you gain a sense of control over your urges. You soon come to recognize the difference between a conditioned craving that can be extinguished by training, and true biological hunger that deserves attention.  The sense of achievement in mastering your appetite, rather than being its slave, can be empowering.  

I’ve found that intermittent fasting works best for me when I am the one who controls the eating schedule. Rather than follow someone  else’s rigidly prescribed diet or eating schedule, I like the flexibility that IF affords.  I can choose which days to fast and which meals to skip, adapting the schedule to the demands of my week.  But once I make a decision, for example to skip breakfast and lunch tomorrow, I am very disciplined about sticking to my plan.  Here again, I believe that feeling “in control” plays an important role in the outcome. A prisoner forced to follow a fasting regimen against his would be much less likely to reap the benefits — unless perhaps he decided to “own” the imposed diet in the manner of Epictetus.

Exposure therapy for anxiety, obsessions, and phobias.  One of the most common and successful approaches to treating anxiety, fear and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is the use of exposure therapy.   Often this involves both a cognitive and a behavioral component, in which a therapist works with the patient to identify beliefs, emotions and responses relating to stimuli that provoke anxiety, fear, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) emphasizes the cognitive component and proceeds by demonstrating that the underlying beliefs are false or irrational.

My personal view is that the changing the behavioral component by controlled exposure to the problematic stimulus is the most important aspect of exposure therapy, and may be sufficient even without examining your beliefs. The essential element of treatment is progressive exposure to stronger stimuli until habituation or extinction occurs.  The theory of Pavlovian extinction and deconditioning is discussed in more detail on the Psychology page of this blog.

So if you have a fear of height, snakes, or social situations, you should progressively–and very gradually–expose yourself to tougher situations.  To counteract acrophobia, you could start by ascending very small elevations.  Walk to a height that just begins to make you anxious and hold there for a while, but retreat before it becomes too uncomfortable. If you fear snakes, start by looking at photographs of snakes, then handle fake rubber snakes, or observe real snakes cages at zoos.  Eventually, work on handling real, but harmless snakes for increasing amounts of time  For social situations, start with small groups of friends, and build from there.  A related version of this exposure therapy, called exposure and response prevention, has been found useful in treating OCD.  The key is to recognize the obsessive thoughts or compulsive behaviors as “escape responses” or “safety behaviors” in response to stressful stimuli, while learning to prevent the escape response to progressively stronger stimuli.

It is especially important with exposure therapies that you stay in control of the situation at all times.  There must always be an “exit hatch” that allows you to back down and escape or stop the stressful stimulus before real panic sets in.  Being forced by a therapist or third party to go beyond the edge of your comfort zone can be extremely counterproductive and anxiety-inducing.  The therapist, if any, should be at best a “guide” or coach.  If you are strongly motivated to succeed, exposure therapy may be quite effective if you do it yourself, without a therapist.

Psychology and hormesis. What all the above practices and treatments have in common is an important psychological dimension. In each situation, the extent to which the exposure process is voluntary is the key to successful hormesis.  When stress exposure is voluntary, the gains in resilience can be substantial, even when the stress faced is sustained or repeated over the long term.  Contrary to Selye, chronic and repeated exposure to stress does not invariably lead to impaired health and depression.  What is perceived as stress can be turned into an energizing stimulus, when it is approached with a willing and inviting attitude.  Just as you can decide to “give up” in the face of stress, you can make the opposite choice: to persevere and embrace mastering what challenges you.

Voluntariness is not an essential component of all types of hormesis.  For example, it is likely that low level exposures to radiation, chemical toxins and allergens build biological resilience by activating DNA and mitochondrial repair mechanisms, endogenous antioxidant enzymes, and immune responses that involve no psychological or neurological mediation.  But a surprisingly large realm of human biology, including digestive, metabolic, immune processes — has a significant psychological or neurological dimension.  An entire field — psychoneuroimmunology — has been laboring to elucidate the mechanisms of such neurologically-mediated processes.  Human intentionality — or what is sometimes called “will”– must be considered a key factor in the successful application of hormesis to improve your health.

At points, paradoxically in spite of his focus on the detrimental aspects of stress, Selye himself came close to appreciating the importance of  this.  I was particularly struck by one statement attributed to Han Selye, that succinctly crystallizes the essential insight of this entire article:

“Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one.”

That theory has been around the block but it is in fashion again.   In 2009, David Kessler’s book, “The End of Overeating” put forward the thesis that food in contemporary American food has been deliberately engineered–by adding fat, sugar and salt–to exploit our neurochemistry and hijack our free will.

More recently, one of the luminaries of the Paleo movement, Stephan Guyenet, has formulated his own version of this theory, in a compelling series on his Whole Health Source blog, arguing that  ”food reward” is a main driver of obesity. His prescription:  eat a bland diet. Guyenet’s talk about this at the Ancestral Health Symposium last month is the buzz of the paleosphere.

But I think the theory is wrong, for the simple reason that it too blindly takes correlation for causation. And in doing so, it gets the causal direction mostly wrong. We don’t get fat because food has become too tasty. Rather, to a large extent, it is the metabolism and dietary habits of the obese that make food taste too good to resist, leading to insatiable appetites. And the good news is that we are not consigned to blandness.  If we eat and exercise sensibly, we can eat flavorful, delicious foods and enjoy life, without packing on the pounds.

Brain chemistry. Stephan Guyenet’s series on food reward, like Kessler’s book, pins the blame for obesity largely on the increased availability of more palatable “high reward” food.

According to USDA data, Americans today eat an astonishing 425 more calories per day than they did in 1970.  That is the reason for the obesity epidemic, plain and simple.  However, that fact doesn’t tell us why we’re eating more calories, so its usefulness is limited. The increase in calorie intake has come primarily from refined carbohydrate, but even that doesn’t get us very far, because why did we decide to eat more refined carbohydrate?  Probably because of the systematic efforts of commercial food manufacturers to increase the palatability/reward value and availability of processed food.  In the last four decades, the US has become saturated with hyperpalatable/rewarding commercial and restaurant foods including fast food, soda, french fries, chips, candy and other industrial products.  I’ve seen people claim that they ate these things just as much in the 1960s and 70s, but the USDA and National Restaurant Association data show otherwise.  The qualitative changes in the US diet have been swift and profound… (A Roadmap to Obesity, August 25, 2011)

But what is it about food that makes it rewarding or not?  Guyenet suggests that food reward relates to opioid and dopamine signaling:

Feeling satisfied after eating something is not reward. If you keep eating a starch food beyond what’s appropriate, that is probably because it has too much reward/hedonic value for you. Opioid signaling, implicated in hedonic processing, shuts off satiation signals in the brain and may also increase the setpoint. Dopamine signaling, implicated in reward, can strongly influence food intake and also seems to be able to increase the set point.

In “The End of Overeating”, Kessler also emphasizes the way that “hyperpalatable” foods stimulate dopamine, opioids and other reward neurotransmitters.  To be fair, both Guyenet and Kessler acknowledge that food reward is not the only explanation for obesity.  They acknowledge the role of genetics, exercise and other factors.  But for both of them too-tasty food is the leading culprit.

The relativity of taste.  But is it really that simple?  Are some foods inherently and invariably rewarding? Do our taste buds and noses directly respond to tasty foods or foods high in fat, sugar or salt by stimulating the secretion of dopamine and opioids in the brain, turning us into addicts? Somehow, it must be more complex than that.

Seth Roberts has postulated a different explanation, in which learning plays a role. His Shangri-La Diet was derived from observations that tasty foods lead to weight gain only after repeatedly encountering the flavor and the calories together. Roberts calls this process “flavor-calorie association”.  It’s a Pavlovian conditioning process: the more habitual the association, the greater the obesogenic potential of the food or beverage.  So his diet involves regular doses of “flavorless calories” in the form of bland oils, sugars or proteins.  Alternative strategies include consuming foods with unfamiliar flavors or “crazy spices”, or flavored noncaloric beverages like herb teas. (For more on flavor-calorie association, see my post on Flavor Control Diets).

Some foods and flavors may be naturally appealing to infants and children, but there is strong evidence that food preferences vary considerably among individuals and cultures.  ”One man’s food is another man’s poison”. Roberts describes the interesting story of a Gaku Homma, Japanese cookbook author whose initial impression of Coke was  that it tasted “like medicine” and was repulsed by it. Similarly, Westerners are often repulsed by Asian fermented foods, or delicacies like dog or snake. Certain cultures find insects and grubs to be delectable, but most of us would probably pass, even knowing that such foods represent a nutritious source of calories.  There are many unfamiliar foods, rich in fat, sugar, salt or flavor, that the average fan of potato chips and ice cream would reject, even if hungry. For an interesting discussion of the cultural relativity of food acceptance and rejection of unfamiliar or novel foods, see the article by  John Prescott in the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture.

Likewise, over time we can learn to like flavors and tastes that were once unappealing.  Roberts cites experiments where rats that do not like the taste of saccharine, grow to like it when they are intravenously fed glucose.  There are many “acquired tastes” that we come to like only after repeated exposures.  Our palates are changeable.

If you think that food aromas are naturally or inherently appetizing, rather than relative, ask yourself: Why do we respond to food odors differently than other evocative and pleasant odors – flowers and plants, soil, sea, even pleasant or sensual human scents?  Smelling a rose does not make you hungry. Could we be conditioned to salivate and secrete insulin in response to the smell of a rose if we always sniffed a rose before gulping down a sweet drink? I think so. Pleasant aromas or tastes don’t necessarily generate a drive to eat.  The association between sensation and the drive to eat must be learned.

In fact, both Guyenet and Kessler appear to acknowledge the relativity of taste at certain points in their accounts.  For example, Guyenet notes that taste preferences towards beer or vegetables change as we transition from childhood to adulthood.  It is instructive that Guyenet defines “food reward” in a surprisingly  broad way:

Food reward is the process by which eating specific foods reinforces behaviors that favor the acquisition and consumption of the food in question.  You could also call rewarding food “reinforcing” or “habit-forming”, although not necessarily in an addictive sense.  Food reward is a perfectly normal and healthy part of life, although I believe it can be harmful if it exceeds the bounds of what we’re adapted to.  Food reward is essential for survival in a natural environment, because it teaches you what to eat and how to get it through a trial-and-error process. (Food reward, May 26, 2011)

In this definition of reward, Guyenet seems to move away from the idea that “reward” is an inherent property of food (i.e. fat, sugar, salt) in triggering opioids and dopamine, but rather is a result of conditioning. Sounding very similar to Roberts, Guyenet notes that

Researchers have demonstrated in rodents and humans that pairing a flavor with a source of calories makes us gradually enjoy the flavor more, whether or not it remains paired to calories afterward.  That’s called a “conditioned flavor preference”, and it’s a simple demonstration of food reward in action.  The brain senses the ingested calories and assigns a positive reward value to the cues (flavor, location, etc.) associated with the calories, after which we’ll be more likely to eat something that contains the preferred flavor.

As another example, rats prefer to hang around a place where they have repeatedly received rewarding food.  Have you ever seen a child run after an ice cream truck?  After a certain time, our motivation to obtain a food that we perceive as rewarding increases, and so does our consumption of it.  Rats accustomed to eating human junk food will endure foot shocks and extreme temperatures to obtain it, even when much healthier unprocessed rodent chow is freely available

Put another way:

It doesn’t matter whether or not you like the Little Debbie cake once it’s in your mouth.  It doesn’t matter how you feel afterward.  The only thing that matters is whether or not you’ll buy another one tomorrow.  That’s food reward.

Kessler also acknowledges the role of Pavlovian conditioning in appetite, recognizing that not just flavors, but any cues can serve as reinforcers.  In Chapter 10 of his book, he cites Pavlov’s success in training dogs to salivate in response to the ringing of a bell, even after it is no longer accompanied by food. Kessler discusses Kent Berridge’s related concept of “incentive salience” :

Simply put, incentive salience is the desire, activated by cues, for something that predicts reward.  It’s a learned association — we learn to want a food or some other substance we once liked…Cue-induced wanting, said Berridge is “triggered by the sight of a cookie or someone lighting up a cigarette nearby or clinking the ice cubes in the glass of alcohol…Those kinds of cues have the power to evoke the desire to take that thing again.” Experience imbues the cue with incentive salience. Positive emotions become embedded in cues, which then develop a force of their own. (The End of Overeating, Ch. 10)

So the door has been opened here to the idea that “reward” is not an inherent property of food but rather the consequence of a conditioned association or “pairing” between the calories in the food and a sensible signal or cue.  The cue could be a flavor, but it could just as well be a visual or auditory cue,  a familiar location or a social context.  In this understanding, “reward” not an inherent property of the food, but is rather a learned response to perceptual cues associated with the food.  These cues need only at some point to have become associated with a conditioned expectation of caloric value.

But now we come to the internal contradiction in the Kessler-Guyenet theory of food reward:  Is “reward” objective and invariant — or relative, subjective and variable?  It cannot be both. To say that reward is “relative” means that it varies markedly among individuals and across cultures, but that does not make it any less real.  It can be a powerfully motivating force, driving the obese to overeat and even binge to unhealthful extremes.  But to acknowledge the subjectivity and relativity of food reward is at odds with the idea that there is such thing as inherently “hyperpalatable” food that is irresistibly obesogenic in and of itself.

An alternative explanation: impaired metabolism.  I’m not denying here that people crave or get addicted to foods like potato chips, cookies and ice cream.  No doubt these people find the flavors salient and compelling, even to the point of addiction. But it’s not the flavor that causes the behavior in the first place. The flavor only becomes a strong cue under certain conditions.  That’s obvious from the simple fact that many people, eating the very same foods, do not find them to be addictive.  While I occasionally enjoy a cookie or some ice cream, I actually find it repulsive to eat more than a modest amount.  While I used to like soda, I now experience Coke as sickly sweet.  And I think I’m not alone in that reaction.

A more likely explanation is that food addicts have altered, perhaps even damaged, their metabolisms.   They are most likely insulin-resistant and leptin-resistant as a result of many possible factors, including obesity, stress and inflammation of their insulin receptors and glucose transporters.   Guyenet aptly describes how inflammation and lipotoxicity damage the hypothalamus:

There’s an additional factor that I’ve come to believe may be an “elephant in the room” when it comes to insulin/leptin resistance and chronic inflammation, and that is, ironically, energy excess.  Glucose and fatty acids, the body’s main two fuels, are toxic when present in the bloodstream in excess.  When someone eats too many calories, his body has to deal with the excess.  The healthiest way of doing this is actually to shunt the excess energy into fat tissue where it is inert.  If the fat tissue does not have a sufficient affinity for the excess fat, free fatty acid levels in the circulation may rise, and tissues and cells may accumulate fat and fat metabolites…if fat mass increases enough, fat cells become insulin resistant, release more fatty acids into the circulation and fail to clear fatty acids from the circulation after a mixed meal.  Essentially, fat tissue loses its formerly high affinity for excess fat, and these undesirable fat metabolites accumulate in lean tissues in a manner reminiscent of lipodystrophy.  This contributes to insulin resistance and glucose intolerance by the same mechanism described above, creating an excess of circulating glucose as well, which together with the excess of fatty acids can enhance chronic inflammation, further insulin resistance and damage the insulin-secreting pancreas.

…Therefore, it’s possible that an excess of circulating fatty acids (and perhaps glucose) itself acts to raise the setpoint through the gradual accumulation of fatty acid metabolites and inflammation in the hypothalamus, promoting leptin resistance and creating a “cascading failure” of energy balance regulation, glucose metabolism and inflammatory signaling.  This would explain why people in affluent societies have trouble staying lean as they age, as well as why obesity is so difficult to treat.  I think this is likely to be a late stage process, occurring after significant body fat accumulation and essentially “cementing” the increase in body fatness.  The early stage that causes the initial rise in body fatness probably has more to do with food reward/palatability/availability, although that should remain a factor even after obesity is well established…The basic idea is that in genetically susceptible people, excessive food reward/palatability/availability and inactivity cause overconsumption and an increase in the body fat setpoint, followed by the eventual accumulation of fat metabolites and inflammation in the hypothalamus, which exacerbate the problem and make it more difficult to treat.  Other factors, such as micronutrients, gut flora, fiber, fat quality, polyphenols, sleep and stress, may also play a role.  I think this is a reasonable working hypothesis of why obesity has increased so rapidly in the last 30 years, and is so difficult to treat once established.  I believe these ideas are broadly consistent with the research and opinions of senior obesity researchers I respect. (Roadmap to Obesity, August 25, 2011)

Cause and effect. Where I believe Guyenet goes wrong in the above passage is in postulating that “the early stage” of obesity is driven by primarily by food reward causing overconsumption, which then leads to obesity and leptin resistance.  I think the cause and effect relationship is reversed. Certainly “normal” reward is part of a healthy appetite, but that doesn’t lead to obesity.  It is the leptin resistance of obesity that sets one up for food reward to become pathogenic.   According to Robert Lustig, the normal satiating effect of insulin within the brain (CNS) becomes impaired in those with insulin and leptin resistance:

Although CNS insulin levels tend to reflect serum insulin levels, the relationship breaks down in obesity states. In obesity, there is proportionally less CNS insulin; the expression of the CNS insulin transporter is decreased in several obesity models. This paucity of insulin available for satiety signaling may represent a form of CNS insulin resistance. (Lustig, Fast Food, Central Nervous System Insulin Resistance, and Obesity)

Put simply, it takes more time and larger quantities food or beverage for insulin-resistant individuals to become sated, because the appetite-suppressing or “shut off” effect of insulin in the hypothalamus is impaired.  Added to this is the fact that obese, insulin-resistant individuals typically have a grossly amplified preprandial insulin response, which means that blood glucose is more easily stoked by mere appetite cues like the sight, aroma, or even thought of food.  Frequent, regular and familiar eating of these reward foods further strengthens the reinforcement.  Even stress can trigger this hunger cycle.  This leads to a very strong drive to start eating and great difficulty in shutting off the eating.  And with more overconsumption of food and the resultant obesity, a vicious cycle sets in, leading to heightened insulin-resistance and leptin-resistance.  Once this vicious cycle begins, the psychological component of food cravings and addictions is enhanced.  The association between flavor cues — or any cues — and consumption of the food is strengthened.  And the food becomes more and more palatable, even “hyperpalatable”.  But it is the impaired metabolism of obesity and the reinforcing eating patterns that make these foods hyperpalatable to the individual, not the other way around.

Foods are not inherently hyper-rewarding.  Rather, an impaired metabolism, combined with reinforcing eating patterns  lead to food becoming hyper-rewarding. 

I can anticipate the following objection to my argument:  Am I saying that any food can become hyperpalatable or addictive?  If so, why are foods like french fries, bread, cookies, chocolate and ice cream craved more than celery, cucumbers and lamb chops?   The answer, I think, is that if you are leptin-resistant and insulin-resistant, these high calorie foods provide a sufficiently rapid “bolus” injection of calories into the bloodstream to overcome any initial preprandial drop in blood glucose, and to spike insulin sufficiently high to overcome the CNS insulin resistance and thus satisfy appetite.  However–and this is a key point–not everyone finds junk foods to be irresistable.  Most insulin sensitive individuals are readily sated on pizza or dessert.  And not everyone even finds these foods to be enjoyable.

Another important factor in the addictiveness of food is the reduction or impairment in dopamine receptors in the brains of the obese, as documented by PET scans. Interestingly, a similar reduction in dopamine receptors is seen in drug addicts and depressed individuals.  This could be a result of the overstimulation by raised levels of dopamine from the “bolus” of large meals or binges. resulting in a homeostatic downregulation of receptors.  I’ve discussed this in more detail in my post Change your receptors, change your set point. Probably any large amount of calories, even with unfamiliar, less palatable, or weaker flavors would do the same trick.  For a short time, there would be frustration due to reduced dopamine signaling  — until the brain learned the new flavor-calorie association.

Bland food diet.   From his theory of food reward, Guyenet proposes a way out:  Eat bland foods.  He supports this by citing evidence that pre-industrial cultures such as the Kitavans eat a diet that is quite bland, despite being high in carbohydrates, and thereby they remain lean and healthy.  He references studies on the effects of bland food diets in lean and obese humans (by Hashim and Van Italie, and by Michael Cabanac) to support his thesis.

Investigators have known for decades that the cafeteria diet is a highly effective way of producing obesity in rodents, but what was interesting about this particular study from my perspective is that it compared the cafeteria diet to three other commonly used rodent diets: 1) standard, unpurified chow; 2) a purified/refined high-fat diet; 3) a purified/refined low-fat diet designed as a comparator for the high-fat diet. All three of these diets were given as homogeneous pellets, and the textures range from hard and fibrous (chow) to soft and oily like cookie dough (high-fat). The low-fat diet contains a lot of sugar, the high-fat diet contains a modest amount of sugar, and the chow diet contains virtually none. The particular high-fat diet in this paper  (45% fat, which is high for a rat) is commonly used to produce obesity in rats, although it’s not always very effective. The 60% fat version is more effective.

Consistent with previous findings, rats on every diet consumed the same number of calories over time… except the cafeteria diet-fed rats, which ate 30% more than any of the other groups. Rats on every diet gained fat compared to the unpurified chow group, but the cafeteria diet group gained much more than any of the others. There was no difference in fat gain between the purified high-fat and low-fat diets.

So in this paper, they compared two refined diets with vastly different carb:fat ratios and different sugar contents, and yet neither equaled the cafeteria diet in its ability to increase food intake and cause fat gain. The fat, starch and sugar content of the cafeteria diet was not able to fully explain its effect on fat gain. However, each diets’ ability to cause fat gain correlated with its respective food reward qualities. Refined diets high in fat or sugar caused fat gain in rats relative to unpurified chow, but were surpassed by a diet containing a combination of fat, sugar, starch, salt, free glutamate (umami), interesting textures and pleasant and invariant aromas.

Guyenet’s interpretation is that the rats ate more of the “cafeteria diet” because it was more palatable, presumably due to the higher fat, starch and sugar content, than the equally calorie dense blander diets. But this is not proven.  How do we know it was more “palatable”, if this is a subjective quality?  All we know is that more of the cafeteria diet was consumed.  We can of course define that as palatability, but that would make the argument circular.  The real question is:  Do we eat more calories because inherent “palatability” or taste characteristics?  Or do foods become  perceived as more palatable because of prior food experience, eating patterns and associations that modify neural circuitry and the drive to eat?  Palatability appears not to be something inherent in food, but rather something changeable. We do not know what diets or reinforcement schedules the rats were raised on before Cabanac’s conducted his experiments.

From these and other observations, Guyenet concludes:

Some people may be inclined to think “well, if food tastes bad, you eat less of it; so what!” Although that may be true to some extent, I don’t think it can explain the fact that bland diets affect the calorie intake of lean and obese people differently. To me, that implies that highly rewarding food increases the body fat setpoint in susceptible people, and that food with few rewarding properties allows them to return to a lean state. (Food Reward, A Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part II)

In recognizing that bland diets have different effects on the lean and the obese, Guyenet here seems to made a full retreat from asserting the explanatory power of food reward as a primary driver. The relativity of taste here reveals that it must be a consequence, not a determinant, of metabolism and neural conditioning.

What can we do?  If you believe that tasty food is inherently addictive, it is reasonable to seek out bland food, and avoid strong flavors, fat, sugar and salt.  But is this necessary?  Do we have to give up not just “junk foods” like Big Macs, french fries and ice cream — but also more healthful foods that are flavorful, fatty, sweet or salty? What about lamb curry (fatty and flavored), berries and cream (sweet and fatty) or salted steak?  I think not. Flavor, fat, salt and even a modest amount of sugar is not the seed of obesity.  Rather, it is the effect that foods have on our hormones and receptors that we should think about.  To avoid obesity, we should strive to maximize our insulin sensitivity and leptin sensitivity. This can be done by a variety of measures, discussed elsewhere on this blog, including:

• weight loss, particularly abdominal fat
• intermittent fasting
• avoiding inflammatory foods and toxins that impair receptor sensitivity
• supplementing with fish oil, magnesium and vitamin D for receptor health
• avoiding chronic stress, but pursuing intermittent, intense “good” stress, such as:
• > high intensity exercise
• > cold showers
• > brief thrills and unpleasant challenges

…

Bon apetit.

Many of the questions I get on this website and the forums are of this type.  People understand the general concept of hormesis, namely that exposure to controlled amounts of stress can be beneficial, because it elicits beneficial adaptive responses in the organism.  They understand that weight lifting builds muscles, and that intermittent fasting and calorie reduction can be healthful. But too much of any stressor — weight lifting, caloric restriction, sunlight, allergens  – can have adverse consequences.  With hormesis, it seems, the Goldilocks principle applies: to get a benefit, the level of stress must be “just right”.  And because it’s so easy to veer into overload, many people seek to avoid even mild stress:  Avoid allergens. Cover up with sunscreen. Eat frequent small meals. Don’t exert yourself. But if you choose this path, you forgo the possible hormetic benefits.

So how do you determine the optimum level and frequency of exposure to a stress?  And how much rest or recovery between exposures is optimal?

These are important questions, difficult to answer with certainty.  Of course, all over the Internet you will find those who tell you exactly how many days each week is optimal for lifting weights, how much sun tanning is safe or dangerous, what level of dietary carbohydrate or food restriction is optimal or unhealthy.  In some cases, they will cite studies to support their position. But there is one big problem with all this advice, even the advice based upon careful scientific studies:

Individual responses to hormetic stressors can vary significantly.

Just as responses differ between individuals, a given individual’s ability to tolerate and benefit from hormesis changes over time, and as a function of previous exposures to stressors.  This makes it virtually impossible to reduce hormesis to a simple formula. And yet, the situation may not be so hopeless.  There are actually some tools and metrics we can use to quantifiably determine whether hormesis is helping or hurting us, and thus to “adjust” the dose.

Allostasis. There is a general biological principle that can help us dial in the right level of hormesis.  The principle is called “allostasis”.  Most people are familiar with the related concept of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to maintain a constant internal state, such as the pH, temperature, or oxygen concentration of the blood, within a fairly narrow range.  This concept was developed by the famous nineteenth century biologist, Claude Bernard, who observed that organisms strive to control their internal environment, or milieu interieur, within tight physiological constraints, through physiological processes that resist disturbances from the external environment and quickly restore normal operating conditions.   This notion was later formalized by Walter Canon as “homeostasis”, the tendency of a biological system to regulate its internal environment within a stable range.

While the concept of homeostasis has some validity, in actuality it is of fairly limited application.  In fact, most biological systems do not self-regulate physiological variables within a narrow range, but tolerate a fairly wide range of variation.  During the course of a typical day, blood glucose and insulin levels rise and fall by as much as 50% or more.  Blood pressure, heart rate, and adrenaline surge upon waking and standing in the morning, and increase to further heights when engaging in vigorous exercise, or responding to threatening or emotional situations.

Bernard and Cannon developed the concept of homeostasis to apply only to regulation of the internal environment, particularly that of the cell or circulatory system. It was not intended to describe the external condition of organs or whole organisms.  Yet others have extrapolated this concept and applied it to the misleading notion of “set points”.  For example, some have advanced the idea that each of us is born with a body weight set point from which we can only deviate transiently and in a futile manner through diet and exercise, but which we are doomed to return to.  But body weight or body fat is not an “internally” regulated physiological variable, despite the efforts of some to tie this to the hormone leptin.  Rather, it is the result of a number of interacting systems, which frequently lead to a relatively stable output.  I’ve provided a more detailed critique of the set point concept in my post, Change your receptors, change your set point.

On the contrary, when you consider the whole organism, you are struck more by its variability over time than by its constancy.  Sterling, Eyer and McEwen have contrasted the stability of homeostasis with what they call “allostasis” or “stability through change”. “Stability” here does not mean a static state, but rather a dynamic physiological process which allows the organism to sustain itself in the face of external challenges.  For example, hormones like cortisol, adrenalin and catecholamines, and mediators like cytokines, allow us to adapt to changes in activity level. Digestive hormones like insulin and glucagon, and secreted digestive enzymes like proteases, amylases and lipases, allow us to effectively respond to the sudden ingestion of food, otherwise known as “meals”.  On longer time scales, major morphological changes in the overall shape and and size of the body allow animals to handle episodic changes like pregnancy, migration, or hibernation.  While organisms and physiology are stable enough to survive, they do not maintain or even strive for a state of constancy.

Allostasis, not homeostatsis, better describes how we deal with changing circumstances.

Changes which are beneficial in the short term to handle an external stress, may be harmful or pathological if maintained chronically.  So for example, glucocorticoid and catecholamine hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline are helpful, even essential, for gearing the body up to handle acute stress.  Without such hormones would we be unable to get up in the morning, much less deal with emergencies. But these same hormones become harmful or deadly when chronically elevated, causing significant damage to the cardiovascular system and neurodegenerative conditions such as depression and memory loss.  The “biphasic” effect of cortisol and other arousal hormones and catecholamines is encapsulated by the Yerkes-Dodson Law, illustrated in the figure at the right, which holds that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.

Similarly, insulin, which is essential for the short term digestion of carbohydrates and protein, and for facilitating tissue growth, can likewise be harmful if elevated chronically, leading to obesity, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory diseases, and possibly cancer.  McEwen refers to the elevation of these stress related hormones and effectors as “allostatic load” and their chronic elevation as “allostatic overload”.

Hormones are neither good nor bad in and of themselves.  They are helpful at the right time and for the right length of time.

Alternating states and opponent processes.  I’ve written about opponent processes as an explanation for psychological adaption in my post on The opponent-process theory of emotion.  Here I would like to go further and generalize the opponent process theory to more broadly characterize our adaptive physiology.

Our natural allostatic variability typically manifests itself in an oscillation between two states or “extremes” which alternate or fluctuate over some characteristic interval of time that can range from seconds, to hours, days, months, or years.   These two states are often thought of as “high” and “low” levels of some variable hormone, enzyme or effector. But I think they are better considered merely as opposing conditions.  That’s because what appears to be “states” are really the results of underlying processes that move the organism in opposite directions — opponent processes. These processes typically come in pairs and act to balance each other, like yin and yang. It is important not to confuse the states and the opponent processes.  These alternating states are the resultant outcomes of the opponent processes; the visible “state” reflects the dominant process, but both processes are always in play to greater or lesser extents.

This concept of may be confusing, so here are a few examples of alternating states and associated opponent processes, with widely varying temporal scales. In each case “State A” exists when “Process a” dominates over “Process b”, and “State B” exists when process b dominates:

State A     State B            Process a        Process b                     Frequency

Eating      Fasting             Anabolism       Catabolism                    3-24 hrs
Waking    Sleeping           “C” process      ”S” process                   24 hrs
Exercise   Rest                Sympathetic     Parasympathetic            varies

Eating and fasting. You could attempt to characterize the A and B states as “active vs. passive”, “stressful vs. restful” or “bad vs. good” but that is not quite right. Take eating and fasting, for example.  You might argue that eating is the active or stressful state, because it places a demand on the digestive system, and the fasting period between meals allows the digestive system to recover.  However, if the fast is continued beyond a certain point, it becomes the stressor.  After about 12 hours, the stress of fasting causes a rise in catabolic “breakdown” processes, upregulates the neuroprotective hormone BDNF, and the process of autophagy activates the breakdown of intracellular materials to fuel the mitochondria. Utilized in moderation, the “stress” of fasting thereby activates beneficial processes that protect and defend us.  Once you resume eating, the “stress” of fasting is relieved and the anabolic “building” process kick in with the rise of insulin.  This has its own benefits, in repair and growth.  It is important to note that the anabolic hormones like insulin and the catabolic ones like glucagon or adrenaline are always present at some level; they never “go to zero”.  Yet one or the other is dominant at a given time, depending on the state of digestion.

Wake and sleep. Similarly, you could say that wakefulness is active and stressful, whereas sleep is passive and restorative.  But again, this would be misleading. Wakefulness and sleep are the outcome of a dynamic, alternating balance between two essential processes, the “C process” and the “S process”. The “C process” generates a wakeful state based upon activation of  the ascending arousal system, including cholinergic, noradrenergic, serotoninergic, dopaminergic, and histaminergic neurons located in the hypothalamus and other brain nuclei.  These neurons release corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF),  ACTH, and cortiosol on a regular diurnal cycle. This arousal system interacts with inhibitory “sleep-active” neurons in the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO), releasing GABA and other sleep-inducing neurotransmitters.   These sleep promoting neutrons and neurotransmitters represent the “S” process. The result is a “flip-flop switch”  producing distinct sleep and wake states with abrupt transitions.  The “C” and “S” processes each never actually stop, but they continuously wax and wane, with one of the two becoming dominant and leading to either wakefulness and sleep. Even within the states of wakefulness and sleep there are many regular oscillating subcycles; for example REM sleep, deep sleep and light sleep. Disruptions in this process can lead to insomnia, and can be corrected by Sleep Restriction Therapy, as I’ve described in my post A cure for insomnia.

The reality is that for each basic physiological process we need both A and B states and the underlying a and b processes.  The opponent processes represent polarities of an indivisible “yin-yang” pair.  They balance each other, but not in a constant ratio.  The a and b processes cannot be indefinitely sustained, but each have within themselves the seeds of their own demise, by inducing their complementary, inhibitory process.  Biological organisms are constructed out of complementary and opposing physiological process, which naturally give rise to  an alternation between the A and B states.  This is a phenomenon I will refer to as stress oscillation.

Stress oscillation builds dynamic range.  So what does allostatis and the opponent processes have to do with hormesis?  Sometimes hormesis is thought of unidimensionally:  lift weights to build muscle.  Fast or reduce carbohydrates to lower insulin and reduce weight.

But in reality, hormesis should be thought of as a binary process of alternating stress and recovery.

Lifting weight builds muscles because it induces “catabolic” microtrauma to the muscles; it is the rest between workouts, in combination with adequate diet, that leads to the “anabolic” rebuilding of the muscle.  Both stress and recovery are necessary.  For the same reasons, weight loss through insulin lowering should be balanced with sufficient periodic insulin raising to maintain lean body mass, and maintain the healthy function of the insulin producing system, including the pancreatic secretory islets and the insulin receptors in the brain and muscle tissues.  One risk of an unremitting “insulin sparing” diet, such as a very low carbohydrate diet without periodic insulinogenesis is the induction of a state of physiological insulin resistance. This is indeed a paradoxical outcome of a diet which many pursue in order to improve their insulin sensitivity!

In the wake-sleep cycle, the ascending arousal system or “C-process” is stimulated by the secretion of CRF (corticopin releasing factor) by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.  But a state of interminable wakefulness or insomnia results in cognitive deterioration. Both the “C” and “S” processes are necessary, and they must oscillate:  An unvarying simultaneous activation of both processes would not lead to cognitive stability, but rather mental deterioration.  Stress and renewal must follow one another as night follows day.

For any physiological function like digestion, muscle synthesis, or the wake-sleep cycle, the oscillation between State A and State B produces a dynamic stability that exhibits a certain dynamic range between stress and rest.   The cycle of eat-fast-eat leads to a cycling of digestive hormones such as insulin, glucagon, and adrenaline.  The cycle of wake-sleep-fast leads to a cycling between the arousal system and the sleep system.

And here is the takeway:  By exposing ourselves to alternating A and B states of increasing intensity, we build tolerance and dynamic range for the opponent processes.  We should strive to increase the magnitude of contrast between the opponent states.  I believe that we can generalize the use of dynamic capacity between allostatic states as a marker of fitness.  This can be illustrated by several examples:

Example 1.  Aerobic capacity.  Exercise phyiologists understand that athletes are able to build aerobic capacity (so-called VO2 max) by exerting themselves at or near maximal heart rate.  Their state of fitness is manifest in a reduced resting heart rate or pulse, and a higher ratio between peak VO2 and resting VO2.  This ratio or difference is sometimes referred to as VO2 reserve or VO2R, and it represents a good measure of aerobic fitness, a kind of dynamic capacity to oscillate between rest and exertion. Yet another measure of dynamic capacity is the rate at which heart rate or VO2 return to normal, after exertion

What is interesting is that training harder does not necessarily increase VO2R or dynamic capacity.  A study by the Navy Seals showed that overtraining can actually decrease VO2R, and can elevated resting heart rate by as much as 10-15 beats per minute.  Monitoring your resting heart rate is an excellent way to know if you are overtraining.  (Caveat: the heart rate measure must be used with judgement, as severe overtraining can lead to extreme exhaustion and an abnormally low heart rate).

More generally, high intensity interval training (HIIT), whether it be in the form of weight lifting, sprinting, or other metabolic training, is based on the very same premise.  Maximal exertion, into the anaerobic range, activates the full range of muscle fibers, including the ever-important fast-twitch muscle fibers, empties muscle glycogen, and activates the glycolytic pathway, resulting in an upregulation of insulin receptors (GLUT4 transporters), and improved insulin sensitivity.  But for HIIT to work effectively, it is equally important to allow adequate time for rest and recovery.  (I’ve discussed this in more detail on the Fitness page of this blog, with particular emphasis on the physiological analysis of Doug McGuff in his book, Body by Science).

For sports as varied as running and weight lifting, the well known principle of periodization recognizes the importance of variation in intensity and proper rest. In short, both high intensity training and aerobic training, if carried out with adequate rest and recovery, build dynamic range.

Example 2.  Digestive or metabolic fitness can be measured by a low basal insulin level in combination with a pattern of sharp, but brief insulin secretion in response to ingested carbohydrates or insulinogenic protein.  Low basal insulin level is seen, for example in non-industrialized populations such as the Kitavins, whose average basal insulin levels of about 4 mIU/ml are about half those of Western populations.  And yet the Kitavans consume meals with a high percentage of carbohydrates and have good insulin sensitivity.   So low basal insulin levels alone are not the whole story. The optimal pattern seems to involve an alternation between feast and fast, allowing the digestive hormones and enzymes to cycle between anabolic (insulin) and catabolic (glucagon, adrenaline, and cortisol).

This is also the premise behind the concept of intermittent fasting.  By training yourself to cut out snacks and go for longer periods of time between meals, the metabolic system — which includes not only digestive hormones and enzymes, but neurotransmitters and hypothalamic receptors — adapts to increase its dynamic capacity.  The resulting benefits are lower basal levels of anabolic hormones like insulin and catabolic hormones like glucagon and adrenaline. But just as importantly, intermittent fasting develops improved sensitivity and the ability to both ramp up and reduce these hormones quickly and responsively.

The benefits of spending time in the fasting state are numerous, including a natural detoxification and nutrient recycling process known as autophagy, and the upregulation of brain-protective growth factors such as Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF).  Fasting allows for the upregulation of fat-liberating enzymes and hormones and a significant and glucose transporters, thereby improving insulin sensitivity. McEwen has compiled research showing that an appropriate level of “stress” or allostatic load will increase markers of brain plasticity. By contrast, following the conventional wisdom to eat six small meals a day of controlled glycemic foods, in the misguided attempt to “regulate” blood glucose at a constant level, deprives your body of these important restorative and protective processes.

But at the other extreme, extensive fasting or strict low carbohydrate dieting can leave the pancreas underutilized and thereby lead to a reduction in glucose transporters in the cells, since these are no longer “demanded”.  Our cells and organs tend to “economize” by synthesizing only the machinery they really need: use it or lose it.  People who abstain from or never consume milk will lose the ability to produce the enzyme lactase, so they become lactose intolerant.  Similarly, we need to regularly “exercise” our ability to secrete insulin on demand and the ability of cells to utilize glucose. This doesn’t necessarily have to occur every day, but several glucose loadings a week are probably necessary.

So the wise course is to apply “stress oscillation” to diet, and alternate judiciously between fasting and nutritious, balanced meals with a variety of macronutients and micronutrients.   Remember that the “stress” is binary: fasting represents recovery from the “stress” of eating; and eating relieves the “stress” of fasting.   A dynamic approach of hormesis involves stretching the ability to move between these two poles, increasing “allostatic capacity”.

Example 3.  Stress, health and cortisol.  Of all the hormones, cortisol has acquired a reputation as “the bad guy”.  It is well known that elevated cortisol levels are the mark of chronic stress and adrenal fatigue.  It has been suggested that higher levels of cortisol are linked to disregulated or high blood glucose levels and predispose one to diabetes. Chronically elevated cortisol also damages neurons in the hippocampus, leading to memory loss and cognitive decline. As a result, some practitioners mistakenly advise trying to minimize stress and even eat frequent meals, in order to keep cortisol at bay and avoid “stressing” the adrenal glands. But this is a one-sided perspetive.  Cortisol is necessary to normal alertness and mental function, as well as our ability to respond to sudden demands like exercise or threats. The problem comes when cortisol does not exhibit a normal morning peak level, followed by a steady decline through the day, but instead remains flat or even increases in the evening.  Chinook et al. classified four different cortisol patterns, shown below.  Pattern 1 (Graph A) is normal; Patterns 2, 3 and 4 show the flattening or later peaks that characterize dysregulation:

Diurnal or event-related elevations in cortisol are not problematic, so long as cortisol levels return to baseline at a decent rate, as in Pattern 1. According to Lovell et al., higher percieved stress levels are reflected not so much in average cortisol levels, but rather as higher basal or evening cortisol levels, and flatter diurnal fluctuations in cortisol levels. Matthews et al found that individuals with the flattest cortisol pattern (slowest rate of decline to baseline) were most at risk of coronary calcification.  Sephton et al found that flatter cortisol patterns were predictive of suppressed immunity and lower survival rates in women with metastatic breast cancer.

In short, we should be less concerned with absolute cortisol levels, than with the pattern of cortisol secretion.  As with other hormones, increased dynamic range and a robust cyclical pattern are indicative of fitness, stress-hardiness, and health.

The larger lesson.  James Loehr (about whom I wrote in my earlier post on Stress management and toughness training) has written eloquently about the use of “stress oscillation” to build athletic capicity and resilience in the corporate world in his book The Power of Full Engagement:

Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover energy, we fill it back up.  Too much energy expenditure without sufficient recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown…Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness….Oscillation occurs even at the most basic levels of our being. Healthy patterns of activity and rest lie at the heart of our capacity for full engagement, maximum performance, and sustained health. Linearity, by contrast, ultimately leads to dysfunction and death. (TPOFE, pp. 29-31).

How to apply stress oscillation to your life. Let’s return to the question at the beginning of this post: How much of any kind of stress is enough, but not too much, to generate a hormetic benefit? The answer is: This is the wrong question!  You should not be striving for some magic optimum level of constant stress. Rather, you should strive to oscillate stress, by exposing yourself to intermittent, but intense sources of stress.  This builds dynamic capacity or strength. The amount and frequency of the stress are variables you can experiment with, but younow have a way to measure the benefit and know whether you are on track. The key metric is dynamic capacity. The appropriate measures of dynamic capacity depend upon what our goals are:

• For physical fitness:  a high VO2 max during exertion combined with a low resting VO2, resting pulse, and blood pressure.
• For dietary or metabolic health:  a rapid insulin and blood glucose response to food and low basal insulin and blood glucose levels
• For stress hardiness:  peak cortisol levels upon waking, followed by steady decline to low evening (basal) levels.

These may be imperfect measures, and they are subject to exceptions and interpretations based upon special health circumstances. Some of these measures are easy to implement at home; others are less convenient because they require blood or saliva analysis (which can be purchased online). But the general principle is valid:  Don’t look for average biometric values, but look for the dynamic range between high and low. And look for an oscillatory pattern that demonstrates periods of testing and building capacity, alternating with periods of rest and recovery.  I’ve discussed only three applications here in detail: digestion, exercise, and general stress tolerance.  But the principle of stress oscillation can be applied to many other applications of hormesis:  suntanning, allergen immunotherapy, cold showers or plus lens therapy.  I leave it to the curious reader to think about the physiological processes at work, and the appropriate measures of improved dynamic capacity.

The goal of hormetic stress should be to increase dynamic capacity to handle allostatic load — variable stresses — in a measureable way.  The precise level and frequency of stress exposure will vary from person to person. This is not a one-size-fits all path to health, but rather a journey that each of us must take for ourselves.  But on this journey, our engine is stress oscillation and our compass is increased dynamic capacity.

The remedy I want to discuss here is called Sleep Restriction Therapy (SRT). I credit Derek Haswell for bringing SRT to my attention. A 4-8 week course of treatment has been shown to be very effective in restoring normal sleep. The basic idea behind SRT is to limit your sleeping in a controlled manner until it renormalizes. As with any application of hormesis, the solution may at first seem paradoxical:  to combat a stress you should apply judicious amounts of that very stress to train the mind or body to adapt. It works for building muscles, improving eyesight, normalizing appetite, and improving immunity.  And sleep therapists have now found a way to use hormesis to improve the quality of sleep.

The protocol. Here is how Sleep Restriction Therapy works:

1. Determine a fixed time to wake up every morning and set your alarm for that time. This is an absolute requirement: when the alarm goes off you must get out of bed immediately with no snoozing or exceptions.  If necessary, use a loud alarm and put it across the room.  Some researchers find that exposure to bright morning light upon waking is important to the success of SRT.
2. Determine the minimum number of hours you need to sleep. This is usually done by keeping a sleep log for several nights to figure out the average number of hours you are actually sleeping. If you are in bed for 8 hours but are awake for 2 of those hours, then your sleep requirement is 6 hours. In general, the minimum sleep requirment should never be less than 4.5 hours.
3. Do not go to bed or even go into your bedroom until the official bedtime. If your wake time is 6 a.m. and your initial sleep time is five hours, that means you cannot go into your bedroom to sleep until 1 a.m.  You have to keep yourself awake between 6 a.m. and 1 a..m. the next day.  No napping, lying down or nodding off is allowed.  This is difficult and can produce drowsiness and grumpiness during the initial days of treatment.  In some versions of SRT, slightly longer hours are allowed on weekends as a “reward” for making progress.
4. Measure your “sleep efficiency” each night. Calculate sleep efficiency as the hours you actually sleep expressed as a percentage of the total hours you are in the bedroom.  To track sleep efficiency, keep a sleep log — a record of when you go to bed and wake up during the night, noting the related circumstances and activities. Your goal is 90% or better sleep efficiency. An alternative method is to use a home sleep monitor such as that made by Zeo.  The Zeo sleep monitor is an affordable and comfortble “headband” that wirelessly transmits data on your different sleep phases and sleep efficiency to a bedside “alarm clock”, with the ability to view your progress on your PC.  I’ve found the Zeo to be very useful in analyzing sleep patterns.  It reveals the inner workings of your sleep in a way that a manual sleep log cannot.
5. Adjust your sleep time. If your sleep efficiency is greater than 90%, increase your sleep time by moving your bedtime 15 minutes earlier.  If your sleep time is less than 85%, delay your bedtime by 15 minutes.
6. Allow your sleep to normalize. Continue the treatment until your sleep time can be increased to  ”normal” sleep time of 6-8 hours with at least 90% sleep efficiency and subjective feeling of restfulness upon waking and during the day.

Case study. Here is a very compelling video about the success that one British man had using SRT to overcome insomnia:

A study of SRT in 10 elderly patients found that it significantly reduced both sleep latency (time to fall asleep) and subsequent waking during sleep. And the benefits were still in place 3 months after ending the therapy. SRT appears to be effective for most types of insomnia, except for sleep disturbances related to depression, bipolar disorder, sleep apnea or circardian disorders resulting from, e.g., shift work.  One of the immediate benefits that patients note is the reduction of “anticipatory anxiety” — the time and concern spent worrying about what the night will bring.  Many insomniacs see their bedroom as a prison or place of dread.  SRT very quickly compartmentalizes that anxiety. Once they begin to bank 5 or 6 good hours of sleep each night, the progress itself helps to dissipate the anxiety, which in turn tends to make for better sleep.

As with any application of hormetic stress, SRT at first involves “one step backward” by seeming to make things worse.  And indeed the first few days may bring increased drowsiness, while the benefits take weeks to become evident.  The reality is that our bodies adapt often slowly, over a period of weeks or longer.  And so it is with SRT.  But once patients begin to adapt to the new sleep regimen, the quality of their sleep usually improves markedly.  Several weeks of drowsiness and irritability seems a small price to pay for a cure that lasts.

Why does it work? Looked at from a behaviorist perspective, SRT is a form of behavior modification based upon stimulus control. Because patients are truly much more tired when they are finally allowed to climb into bed, the association between the action of getting into bed and the response of falling asleep is strengthened, and the association with “tossing and turning” is weakened.  Undoubtedly, at the level of neuropeptides and receptors in the hypothalamus, SRT must be restoring a  functional homeostasis.  The neuronal pathways, transmitters, and receptors involved in sleep regulation are quite complex.  The ascending arousal system located in hypothalamus interacts with sleep-active neurons in the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO) producing a “flip-flop switch” that produces distinct sleep-wake states with abrupt transitions.  The sleep disruptions characteristic of insomnia are believed to involve an excess of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) secreted by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.  This results in excess production of the hormones ACTH and cortisol, leading to hyperarousal.  It appears that Sleep Restriction Therapy quiets the HPA, leading to improved sleep.

Regardless of the underlying mechanism, Sleep Restriction Therapy appears to be an excellent example of hormesis, a chemical-free way to teach your body to adapt, by exposing it to controlled doses of the very same stress than you want to tolerate more effectively.

It is because I’ve found intermittent fasting to be an attractive practice, both scientifically and personally, that I was so excited to be invited to give a lecture on IF at The 3rd Door, an innovative health and fitness studio, cafe and social center in downtown Palo Alto. The fitness director at The Third Door, Johnny Nguyen, is himself an advocate and practitoner of IF, which he blogs about with great flair and common sense at The Lean Saloon. The talk gave me an opportunity to reframe intermittent fasting in the terms of the philosophy of Hormetism, or applied hormesis that I write about on this blog.  I believe that the framework of hormesis helps to make sense of why IF works, and why it is so much more than a diet.

What follows is a video of my talk on the benefits of intermittent fasting, presented on May 18, 2011 at The 3rd Door.  I would like to thank Dianne Giancarlo and Johnny Nguyen for inviting me to speak, Vaciliki Papademetriou for technical assistance, Francesca Freedman for introducing me to The Third Door, Tom Merson for the still photos and Ken Becker for the masterful video production.

The talk is divided in to five sections for ease of viewing.  It was followed by a 30 minute question and answer session, which I will upload as soon as the video production is complete:

Part 1:  The benefits of calorie restriction

Part 2:  Calorie restriction and hormesis

Part 3:  Intermittent fasting and diet myths

Part 4:  How intermittent fasting turns you into a “flex fuel vehicle”

Part 5:  Practical advice on how to get started with intermittent fasting

Within the coming week, I will add here a recording of the 30-minute question and answer session following the talk.

If the above talk was of interest, you can find more detailed information in two of my other posts:

• Calorie restriction and hormesis
• Learning to fast

Happy fasting!

Those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area may be interested in attending a talk I’ve been invited to give on May 18 in Palo Alto.  The topic is “Intermittent fasting for health and longevity”, and I plan to summarize both the recent science and the best practices for successful fasting.

UPDATE: A video of this talk is now posted HERE.

The venue for the talk is Palo Alto’s cutting-edge combination fitness studio and heath food cafe, The 3rd Door. Beyond providing a friendly environment to get fit and meet friends after workouts for a light meal or coffee, The 3rd Door is involved in community outreach through their well respected WANDA program to empower the financial independence of single mothers.

The fitness philosophy of the 3rd door and their director, Johnny Nguyen, resonates with my own views:

We know that exercise is good for us –it makes us stronger, boosts our mood, enhances our confidence, makes us look better, and improves our lives. We believe exercise should be strenuous and challenging but not impossible. Our luxurious training facility with première fitness experts and diverse range of fitness classes and restorative therapies offer something for everyone at every fitness level.

I’m excited about the growing interest in intermittent fasting as path to improved health and fitness, and for the opportunity to talk about it and perhaps meet some of you at the 3rd door.

Here are the event details:

“Intermittent Fasting for Health and Longevity”

by Todd Becker

7-8 p.m.

The 3rd Door
131 Lytton Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94301
650.352.1241

Many people take daily supplements that include antioxidants such as Vitamins A, C, and E; beta carotene, coenzyme Q10, and alpha lipoic acid. I used to be one of them, convinced of the theory that supplementation with antioxidants is an effective way to neutralize harmful free radicals.  These free radicals, also called ROS or “reactive oxygen species”, can cause oxidative damage to cells and organs, and have been implicated in the pathogenesis of degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’ disease.

However, study after study not only fails to show a consistent benefit, but in many cases documents positive harm from taking antioxidants. While I continue to believe that antioxidant supplementation is helpful in certain isolated cases of acute infection, tissue damage, or a damaged or aged metabolism, for most of us antioxidants are probably worthless. In fact, antioxidant supplements can interfere with and weaken the body’s inherent ability to mount an effective defense against oxidative damage and its contribution toward degenerative diseases.

I’ve resisted this conclusion because I could not make sense of it.  That is…until I came across recent research into the biochemistry and genetic regulation of the antioxidant response element (ARE). Fortunately the ARE provides us with an in-built adaptive stress response that combats oxidative stress and inflammation The ARE makes the need for antioxidants in the diet unnecessary — other than to keep our food fresh. Surprisingly, antioxidant supplements can impair our adaptive stress response.  But there’s much we can do to strengthen this response.

Fruits, vegetables and green tea. One of the strongest arguments for taking antioxidant supplements is the observation that consumption of fruits and vegetables reduces the levels of oxidative damage and associated degenerative diseases. This has been shown in both epidemiological studies and observational studies.  Similar benefits have been associated with the consumption of certain herbal compounds rich in polyphenols, such as green tea, garlic and curcumin.  The assumption has always been that these benefits can be attributed to the fact that many fruits, vegetables and herbs are rich sources of naturally occurring antioxidants. Therefore, it only makes sense that if you can’t get enough fruits and vegetables in your normal diet, supplementation with purified chemical forms of these antioxidants can boost those benefits.  But it turns out that the protective effects of fruits and vegetables are most likely not due to their antioxidant content, which is probably too weak and inconsistent to explain the health benefits.

But before discussing the real reason that fruits and vegetables have health benefits, let’s review what is known about supplementation with antioxidants.

Antioxidant supplementation studies. It may surprise you that numerous of clinical trials and metabolic studies show no benefit, or even harm, from using antioxidant supplements:

• A 2004 American Heart Association meta-analysis of 20 clinical trials showed no benefits for the use of Vitamins C, E and beta carotene in the prevention of heart attacks or strokes, and no reduction in mortality.  While they acknowledged that the scientific evidence from observational studies supports the conclusion that “a diet high in food sources of antioxidants and other cardioprotective nutrients” reduces the risk of CVD, they found no support for any benefits from the use of antioxidant vitamin supplements.  They did indicate that antioxidant supplementation may be useful in certain critical medical procedures, but not for routine dietary supplementation.
• A 2008 Cochrane Institute meta-analysis of 67 randomised clinical trials on antioxidant supplements (beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium) versus placebo or no intervention found no evidence that antioxidant supplements prevent mortality in healthy people or patients with various diseases
• A University of Washington randomized trial showed evidence of positive harm from antioxidants.  A cocktail of antioxidants added to the course of patients with high cholesterol and using statin-niacin therapy led to reduced levels of HDL and increased levels of coronary blockage .
• A Kansas State University study showed that administering antioxidants during exercise can impair muscle function by suppressing hydrogen peroxide, a key signaling compound.  This can lead to reduced blood flow in the muscle.
• A study at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute showed that cardiac stem cells cells that were loaded with high doses of antioxidants developed genetic abnormalities that predispose to the development of cancer.
• A study comparing chemical Vitamin C with oranges containing an equivalent amount of Vitamin C given to test subjects showed that the blood from those who ingested the oranges could neutralize hydrogen peroxide (an oxidant) but those who ingested Vitamin C tablets failed to do so.

These results were at first puzzling to me.  How can it be that administering the same antioxidant chemicals ubiquitous in “protective” fruits, vegetables and herbs — the same chemicals which have been shown to neutralize oxidants in the test tube — appear to be ineffective or even harmful when taken as dietary supplements? What’s going on here?

The endogenous antioxidant defense. What is missing in the above picture is the role of our body’s own innate defenses system for handling toxic chemicals like free radicals. While our immune system handles invading organisms and large proteins, another system is needed to deal with chemical toxins. It’s called the xenobiotic metabolism; “xenobiotic” is Latin for “foreign to the organism”.  It consists of three “waves” of protective enzymes which neutralize dangerous chemicals, designated: Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III.  In Phase I the “xenobiotic response element” (XRE) chemically modifies the foreign toxins, which can sometimes make them even more reactive oxidants.  In Phase II, a set of antioxidant enzymes known as the “antioxidant response element” (ARE) neutralizes these toxins, including free radicals. Phase III involves further modifications and excretion.

The ARE is your body’s own endogenous antioxidant defense.  And it is far more powerful and effective than any antixodants you consume orally at mounting a defense against free radicals.  The ARE system is activated by the presence of oxidants in specific tissues in the body. These oxidative toxins are detected by transcription factors, most importantly Nrf2 (Nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2).

Nrf2 has been called the “master redox switch”.  It turns on a series of cytoprotective genes, which have been nicknamed “vitagenes” by U. Massachusetts toxicologist and hormesis researcher Edward Calabrese. These vitagenes upregulate the production of endogenous antioxidant enzymes that combat oxidative stress and inflammation. Collectively, they are known as the Phase II antioxidant enzymes:

• glutathione transferase
• glutathione peroxidase
• glucuronysyl transferase
• quinone reductase
• epoxide hydrolase
• superoxide dismutase
• gamma glutamylcysteine

So how can it be that supplementing with antioxidants can actually dampen the body’s internal antioxidant defense system?

Homeostatic compensation. As we’ve seen time and again in this blog, the body is an adaptive system.  The organism adjusts to maintain a relatively constant state: homeostasis. Provide it with external “help” and it will reduce the effort in building its own internal defenses.  Just as using corrective lenses will weaken the eye’s inherent ability to focus, and avoiding exposure to allergens will prevent the adaptive immune system from developing, it turns out that chronic consumption of exogenous antioxidants reduces the “pressure” on your adaptive stress response — specifically your ARE system — to gear up its own endogenous antioxidant defense system by producing adequate amounts of the the Phase II enzymes.  In biological terms, taking antioxidants leads to homeostatic downregulation of the antioxidant response element.  This actually makes biological sense:  Why should the organism expend precious energy and resources building a defense system if the defense is provided for “free” through diet or supplements?

A number of studies bear out this compensatory effect:

• A metabolic study in houseflies showed that administering Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), Vitamin E (alpha tocopherol) and beta-carotene caused a compensatory depression of  activity of key endogeneous antioxidant enzymes includiing superoxide dismutase, catalase, and glutathione. The administration of vitamins C and E also reduced life span. Granted that humans are not the same as flies, but we use the same enzymes to detoxify.
• A study of supplementation of cells with the antioxidant lipoic acid showed that it inhibits the antioxidant adaptive response triggered by treatment with UV-B light  The added lipoic acid decreases the intracellular oxidative signals necessary to develop the adaptive response in human mononuclear cells.
• A 2008 study at the University of Valencia showed that  Vitamin C supplementation hampered exercise endurance.  While Vitamin C reduces ROS levels in short term, it impairs the adaptive response by reducing transcription factors that enable mitochodria production, and inhibiting expression of antioxidant enzymes superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase.
• A 2010 study showed antioxidants can cause neurodegeneration by inhibiting autophagy — an important process for removing damaged cellular material.  Inhibition of autophagy by antioxidants has a range of other potential negative consequences.

So it appears that, by consuming more antioxidants, we become dependent upon them and perversely reduce our innate ability to detoxify. With any let-up in the constant supply of external defenses, we become more vulnerable to oxidative and inflammatory attack. And the externally supplied antioxidants themselves are in any case much less effective than the endogenous ones.

But if the endogenous antioxidant defense system is so potent, what steps can we take to build it up?

Plant toxins to the rescue. Nature exhibits a wonderful phenomenon called “biological arms races”.  To defend against predators, plants or animals develop defenses, and often this involves the production of biological “poisons”.  To defend themselves againts pests and parasites, plants have evolved a set of mildly toxic substances that discourage, sicken, or even kill predators, from microbes and insets to mammals.  These toxic substances typically taste bad and can be irritating.  However, predators evolve to be able to tolerate at least some of these plant toxins, at least in moderate amounts.  They do this by developing detoxification systems.  Which is exactly what the ARE is!

Some plant toxins are too poisonous and deadly.  But, as Nietzsche said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.  Biologically speaking, this is the principle of hormesis advocated on this blog, the principle by which small amounts of a stressor activates and strengthens our internal defenses, but excessive levels of the same stressor overwhelms these defenses.  Our ARE anti-toxin system will develop in response to virtually any toxic compound.  In principle, you could strengthen it by ingesting all kinds of chemical poisons. But why play roulette?  Humans have grown up for eons consuming a fairly regular supply of certain plants to which they have become habituated, plants that contain tolerable amounts of toxins which moderately stimulate the adaptive stress response, but not sufficiently to kill us.  Of course, there are still poisonous plants and mushrooms which exceed this threshold, so there is a continuum.  And probably some people and populations can tolerate more than others of certain plant toxins. But some of these plant toxins are well enough tolerated by most of us to prove reliably beneficial.

What are the good plant toxins? We refer to them as “phytochemicals” or “phytonutrients”.

There are a nearly infinite number of phytonutrients, most of them unknown and uncharacterized.  But a number of them have been studied for their impact on upgregulating the Phase II enzymes of the the ARE system, as Mattson et. al. have detailed..  Many of these compounds fall into the chemical class of polyphenols, more specifically flavonoids.  They are typically pigmented, bitter or spicy tasting molecules. A partial list includes:

• resveratrol – from red grapes, which turns on sirtuins and has broad cardiovascular, memory and anti-aging benefits
• sulforaphone – from broccoli, which turns on antioxidant and anticancer enzymes in the skin, arteries and stomach
• curcumin – from tumeric, inhibits transcription factors and kinases involved in cancer and inflammation
• green tea - a rich but variable source of bioflavinoids which have been shown to have anticancer and cardioprotective effects

Other polyphenolics that stimulate that Phase II enzyme system have been found in garlic, rosemary, ginko, bee propilis, and even…coffee!

What may have confused many researchers is that these polyphenolic flavonoid compounds in many cases have antioxidant properties.  This fact may have led to drawing the mistaken conclusion that they work because they are antioxidants in their own right.  And yet this antioxidant effect is not consistent — polyphenols and other phytochemicals sometimes function as pro-oxidants, dependent on the context and dosage.  I believe the evidence for their being hormetic stimulants of the endogenous ARE system is stronger than the case for thinking of them as antioxidants.   For example:

• A review of cell culture experiments with various polyphenols shows that their mechanisms of action goes beyond their intrinsic antioxidant properties, by indirectly stimulating enzyme transcription through the ARE system.
• Resveratrol seems to have its optimal effect at concentrations too low to be explained by an antioxidant effect. A metabolic study of resveratrol in heart cells, showed that even at very low (micromolar) concentrations, it upregulates endogenous “cytoprotective factors” — antioxidants and phase 2 enzymes such as superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione, glutathione reductase, glutathione peroxidase, glutathione S-transferase (GST), and NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase-1 (NOQ1).
• An Israeli study showed that caratenoids in tomatoes activate the ARE transcription system, upregulating the phase II detoxification enzymes in a manner that is not correlated with the antioxidant potential of the caratenoids.   However, caratenoids appear to have an optimum level, above which they may be harmful.

Am I the only one challenging the paradigm that fruits and vegetables are good for us because they are rich in antioxidants?  Certainly not. Stephan Guyenet has likewise challenged this explanation, and highlighted the hormetic properties of plant polyphenols in an excellent two-part series on his Whole Health Source blog:

• Polyphenols, Hormesis and Disease: Part I
• Polyphenols, Hormesis and Disease: Part II

In his article, Guyenet mentions the interesting phenomenon that the hormetic effects of polyphenols tend to be non-specific:

One of the most interesting effects of hormesis is that exposure to one stressor can increase resistance to other stressors. For example, long-term consumption of high-polyphenol chocolate increases sunburn resistance in humans, implying that it induces a hormetic response in skin. Polyphenol-rich foods such as green tea reduce sunburn and skin cancer development in animals.

Another researcher who has come to similar conclusions as me is Robert Rountree.  If you had trouble following the science here and you have 90 minutes to spare, please do yourself a favor and click here listen to this extremely informative, lucid, and humorously entertaining lecture by Rountree that was presented at the 2010 Integrative Healtcare Symposium.  Unfortunately this is an audio recording so you’ll have to just imagine the slides, but not much is lost without the pictures because Rountree is such a vivid speaker:

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN:

“Beyond Antioxidants: Nutrigenomic Regulation of the Adaptive Stress Response“

by Dr. Robert Rountree

Rountree makes the very powerful point that the skin-protective effect of the sulforaphane in broccoli cannot be explained by its inherent chemical antioxidant properties. He cites a Johns Hopkins study in which broccoli extract applied to the skin of nude mice prevented oxidative damage from UV light for a period of several days, even after it was washed off the skin.  The absorbed sulforaphane could only act as an antioxidant for 30-60 minutes, at best a short-term effect. However, the induced upregulation of antioxidants in the skin protected the skin from UV for two days! To put it in chemistry terms: antioxidants are stoichiometric and used up quickly, whereas the endogenous antioxidant enzyme system is catalytic and long-lasting.

I’ll conclude by considering three interesting questions:

1. Why are there antioxidants and polyphenols in plants, vegetables and herbs?

Rountree suggests a plausible reason for why plants are rich in polyphenols: they act as natural pesticides. As I suggested above, this is part of the evolutionary arms race, and we’ve at least partially adapted to tolerate certain levels of these natural plant toxins.  But what about the antioxidants?  They don’t seem to protect the plant from predators, so why are they there?

I think the most plausible evolutionary reason for the presence of the antioxidants in plants is to protect the seeds in the fruit or vegetable against oxidative damage.  But this doesn’t take much antioxidant, as vegetables and fruit are relative “static” seed protectors.  They aren’t dynamic organisms requiring a long term sustained defense, as is the case with animals.

2.  If antioxidants are useless or even detrimental to our endogenous antioxidant defenses, should I take vitamins?

This is not a simple question, and I’m not your medical practitioner.  But a few things can be said here. First, antioxidant vitamins like Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and E (tocopherols) are not merely antioxidants. They also perform certain other essential biological functions in processes such as collagen synthesis (Vitamin C), preventing scurvy, and protecting against lipid peroxidation in membranes. However, for these functions only very low amounts of the vitamin are required. By some estimates, 10 mg per day of Vitamin C will prevent scurvy, and 4 mg per day of Vitamin E will ensure good membrane function. The multi-gram  megadoses recommended by advocates of “orthomolecular medicine” such as Linus Pauling are based upon the antioxidant function of these molecules. In light of the studies showing that high levels of exogenous antioxdants suppress our innate endogenous Antioxidant Response Element, these high levels seem to me to be uncalled for, and likely to impair our native ability to handle oxidative stress.  The only exception I would make is in the case of acute or severe infection or illness, or advanced age, where the body’s own immune system and xenobiotic defense system may be compromised or unable to mount a sufficient defense on its own. But routine daily supplementation with antioxidants seems unwise if you are otherwise healthy and eat a good diet.

I’m also only addressing here the antioxidant vitamins and minerals, so this discussion is silent as to the wisdom of supplementation with other vitamins, such as Vitamins A, B and D, which are not classically considered to be antioxidants. Yet I think the general principle of hormesis should always be considered: that which is beneficial at a low or moderate dosage is often detrimental at higher doses. So be careful.

3.  What dietary guidelines can I follow to strengthen my endogenous antioxidant defense system?

What is most exciting for me is that I think I finally have a scientific reason to eat more and varied vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices! Coming from a generally low carb orientation, I’ve made sure to get plenty of protein and fat in my diet from meat, fish, dairy and nuts.  I happen to like broccoli, asparagus, brussell spouts, green and red peppers, and mushrooms, strawberries and blueberries.  But I always thought of them as something to liven up a low carb / Paleo diet with variety, texture and flavor, and perhaps add a little fiber.  I had heard the benefits of “phytonutrients” touted, but never heard a solid scientific reason for their nutritional value.  Thinking of them as hormetic “plant toxins” that help strengthen our internal defenses puts them in a new light.  This suggests a few guidelines to maximize hormetic stimulation of the ARE Phase II enzyme system:

• eat especially those vegetables and fruits with bright or intense colors (these contain bioflavonoids)
• eat fruits, skins and seeds which are bitter (these contain glucosinolates)
• consume teas, herbs and spices which have strong, bitter, or hot flavors
• to ensure hormesis, vary your choices, and limit the amount and frequency of any single fruit, vegetable or herb

Finally, the consider the activation of your in-built detoxification system — your ARE — as just one element of your adaptive stress response capability, which more broadly extends to your immune,  endocrine, nervous, and musculo-skeletal systems, and at a higher level — your psychology and spirit. The more we probe, the more it becomes apparent that we have within ourselves the ability to strengthen our defenses and take on increasing challenge. Relying on external supplements and external crutches is unwise except in the short term. The role of nutrition should be to build us up, not to replace — and thereby weaken — our internal defense, repair and growth capacities.