There’s a general principle that very small doses of toxins or stresses of any kind—vaccines, radiation, oxidants, poisons, alcohol, heat, cold, exercise—are beneficial, because they provoke the body to a protective overreaction. One of the talks at the 2007 DC conference on cognitive aging even suggested that this is responsible for why people who think more have fewer memory problems as they age.
(This suggests that our bodies are lazy—they could maintain themselves better than they do on every dimension. Or it might be that, if we measured all the responses simultaneously, we’d find that mounting a protective response to radiation made us more vulnerable to infection, alcohol, and all the rest.)
Or it might be that, if we measured all the responses simultaneously, we’d find that mounting a protective response to radiation made us more vulnerable to infection, alcohol, and all the rest.
Or maybe it would just require the expenditure of energy.
And yet anabolism and expenditures of energy pretty reliably shorten lifespan. Many of these responses rely on the use of regulatory RNA; and the dicer-mediated siRNA mechanism has been shown to have a limited capacity that degrades when multiple regulatory responses occur simultaneously.
Be wary of placing too much trust in that logic, that way lies homeopathy.
For the radiation thing there’s at least some evidence that humans can adapt to high background radiation but I’ve never seen any evidence that the reaction ever outweighs the exposure.
There’s a general principle that very small doses of toxins or stresses of any kind—vaccines, radiation, oxidants, poisons, alcohol, heat, cold, exercise—are beneficial, because they provoke the body to a protective overreaction. One of the talks at the 2007 DC conference on cognitive aging even suggested that this is responsible for why people who think more have fewer memory problems as they age.
(This suggests that our bodies are lazy—they could maintain themselves better than they do on every dimension. Or it might be that, if we measured all the responses simultaneously, we’d find that mounting a protective response to radiation made us more vulnerable to infection, alcohol, and all the rest.)
Or maybe it would just require the expenditure of energy.
And yet anabolism and expenditures of energy pretty reliably shorten lifespan. Many of these responses rely on the use of regulatory RNA; and the dicer-mediated siRNA mechanism has been shown to have a limited capacity that degrades when multiple regulatory responses occur simultaneously.
That principle would be hormesis, no?
Be wary of placing too much trust in that logic, that way lies homeopathy.
For the radiation thing there’s at least some evidence that humans can adapt to high background radiation but I’ve never seen any evidence that the reaction ever outweighs the exposure.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11769138
Yep, my impression from what I can remember of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is that people who believe models other than LNT are privileging the hypothesis.