Stressed Plants Help Us Live Longer

Pic Courtesy: IndiaMart - Tissue Culture Plants

Stress is not always detrimental for our health. For human beings, we divide stress into two – Eustress and Distress. The former effects us positively, energizes us and motivates us to do better while the latter impairs our emotional health and impairs our physical state.

Similarly, plants also experience two types of stress – biotic and abiotic.

Biotic stress is caused by other living organisms, such as disease or infections which make the plants unhealthy.

Abiotic stress is caused by non-living factors such as change in the temperature, intensity of sunlight, quantity of water, over or under fertilization. Such stressors improve the survival skills of plants. Consequently, stressed plants produce chemicals for themselves that help them to activate their survival circuits.

As David Sinclair in his groundbreaking book ‘Lifespan: Why we Age – and Why we don’t have to’ writes, “Many health promoting molecules, and chemical derivates of them, are produced in abundance by stressed plants; we get resveratrol from grapes, aspirin from willow bark, metformin from lilacs, epigallocatechin gallate from green tea and allicin from garlic.”

Pic Courtesy - HungryForever

Thus, it is favorable for us to search for new drugs in the stressed plants, stressed fungi and the stressed microbiomes in our guts.

David emphasizes on his theory by mentioning that the best wines in the world are produced in dry, sun-exposed soil or from stress sensitive varietals. The most delectable strawberries are those that have been stressed by periods of limited water supply.

Resveratrol found in grapes has proven to enhance lifespans of fruit flies, ringworms and mice. It is this resveratrol that makes red wine instrumental in longevity.

In an experiment with Rafael Le Cabo, Sinclair discovered that resveratrol combined with intermittent fasting greatly extends both average and maximum lifespans even beyond what intermittent fasting accomplishes alone.

Thus, having a stressed plant-based diet, some red wine coupled with days of intermittent fasting would help you live longer.

References:

1. https://www.greenhousegrower.com/production/plant-culture/stress-is-good-for-plants/

2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131219130738.htm

3. Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To – Loc 2258 to 2265