Increase your lifespan, improve your immunity and better your health

We all know that eating fruits and vegetables is crucial to maintaining good health, but do you know how to really reap the rewards of consuming nature’s bounty?

Let's explore how foraging for wild plants can give your health a powerful boost.

Stress can make us stronger

A concept called hormesis describes how plants and animals (including humans) benefit from responding to small, intermittent stressors. Low levels of stress can improve your health, wellbeing and adaptability. For example, when you stress your muscles by exercising them regularly and allowing them to recover, they respond by repairing and growing back stronger.

Isn’t stress bad for me?

The chronic stress that often comes with a modern lifestyle is a major threat to our health, but low level and occasional stress is beneficial and necessary for our growth and development. It’s understandable though, in this overworked and overstressed age, that you might be desperate to avoid extra stress at all costs. There is good news and it comes in the form of xenohormesis.

Let plants stress for you

Why not let the plant do the stressing for you?

Xenohormesis - ‘Xeno’ means foreigner (as in xenophobic), and in this context refers to the foreign body (the plant) that has undergone the hormetic adaptation process -  describes how animals, including humans, can benefit from the internal changes that plants undergo in response to environmental stress.

Modern humans are pretty fortunate to be able to easily find shelter from the weather when things start getting a bit rough. We can head inside, put the kettle on and find a comfortable spot on the sofa. Plants on the other hand can’t run and can’t hide. They are quite literally rooted to the spot and have to weather whatever storm comes their way. This makes for some highly evolved stress response mechanisms, including the production of certain bioactive compounds called phytonutrients. Phytonutrients, such as polyphenols give the plant protection from excessive UV exposure and common pathogens, and these same compounds have a hugely beneficial effect on our health too. 

A plant’s superpowers can be ours

This is what xenohormesis is all about; we can benefit from the hormetic adaptations of plants when we eat them and ingest these phytonutrients. Many of these nutrients are known to increase human lifespan, improve health, slow aging, protect our brains and so much more. They are powerful antioxidants and potent anti-inflammatories and in an age of chronic inflammation and disease, they can pass a plant’s self-protective superpowers on to us when we need them most. 

What’s in it for the plants?

Wild plants have been passing on their hormetic benefits to animals for millenia. It’s an important part of the natural balance of an ecosystem and plants (except maybe the one that gets eaten) benefit from the relationship too. Healthier animals that live longer as a result of xenohormesis can more easily help the plants by fertilising the ground and controlling the competition (by eating it). So, take what these amazing wild plants are offering you, activate your plant-based superpowers and in return all they ask is that you do anything you can to protect their (and our) environment.

Foraging. Why wild is better.

Plants exposed to the wild natural environment are perfectly positioned to benefit from environmental stress. Wild plants are hardy, stress resilient, nutritionally enhanced and packed with flavour. The plants that we buy in the supermarket, although still generally healthy food options, are really just the soft, sheltered, molly-coddled distant cousins of their wild counterparts. Farmers keep their plants well watered, protected from disease and sheltered and in doing so limit their exposure to stress and their need to adapt. The result is often as limp, flavourless and nutritionally deficient as a wilted iceberg lettuce. 

Conclusion

We’ve discussed how plants have highly evolved ways of adapting to the stress in their lives and how our health can benefit enormously from these adaptations. If we can learn to forage and identify the best and most nutritious wild plants to harvest and consume, we can become more resilient, improve our immune function and potentially increase our lifespan.

To help you begin your foraging journey, or to find some tips to help you expand your knowledge, we’ve created a guide to Spring foraging. I hope you can soon begin to harness the superpowers of wild plants.