Insights into Ice baths, Cold Showers, Polar Plunges, and Hormesis
Book Recommendation:
A one-stop healing book with everything you need to know about herbs, featuring a detailed layout of over 550 plants and their medicinal properties, with advice on how to sow, grow, and harvest your very own herb garden.
Get it here: Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine: 550 Herbs and Remedies for Common Ailments
Research Articles of the Week:
“Sedentary behaviors reduce lipoprotein lipase activity, muscle glucose, protein transporter activities, impair lipid metabolism, and diminish carbohydrate metabolism.”
Sedentary Lifestyle: Overview of Updated Evidence of Potential Health Risks
“Regular consumption of unpasteurized milk was inversely related to asthma onset at 6 years of age”
Raw Cow’s Milk and Its Protective Effect on Allergies and Asthma
“Consuming specific dietary components can alter the prevalence of bacterial communities within the gut to a healthy enterotype, which can influence the production of beneficial metabolites by microbiota”
Modifying the diet and gut microbiota to prevent and manage neurodegenerative diseases
The Cold & Hormesis.
Hormesis is when something is damaging or toxic in excess, but highly beneficial in smaller doses. Exercise is a classic example of hormesis — you damage your muscle fibers and they build back bigger and stronger.
This compensatory defense response, follows exposure to a mild stressor that is disproportionate to the magnitude of the stressor. Other examples include intermittent fasting, saunas, oxygen deprivation, sun exposure and yes, cold exposure.
Hormesis triggers a vast array of protective mechanisms that not only repair cell damage but also provide protection from subsequent exposures to more devastating stressors.
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