Hormesis: A Little Bit of Poison May Be Good for Us

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Do toxins and poisons really exist?

We usually think that descriptive words are, like Platonic ideals, applicable in all circumstances. Things are said to be ‘hot’, ‘painful’, ‘beneficial’, and so forth. Language lets us down, however. Here’s a little thought-experiment: Put some salt, some sugar, and some turmeric into a cup of water. Put one droplet of this revoltingly salty, sweet, yellow solution into an Olympic sized swimming pool (nonchlorinated water, please). Mix thoroughly. Is the water in the swimming pool sweet? Salty? Yellow? Obviously not! All those descriptive words are totally inappropriate when applied to very dilute solutions.

The yellow chemical in turmeric is an antibiotic and insecticide, widely used in ayurvedic medicine, with doses about half a gram or so. Consider the much-diluted turmeric in our swimming pool. Will these traces of turmeric kill even one single parasite? Again, the answer is ‘no’.

Our swimming pool water contains traces of chemicals that, as the news media inevitably state, are linked with saltiness, sweetness, yellowness, and death of parasites. It is not, however, sweet, salty, yellow or insecticidal. I believe that anyone who talks about a very low concentration of a poison or uses the weasel-word linked is either ignorant or out to deceive us.

As I’ve argued elsewhere in this book, low concentrations of most toxins are biologically meaningless. Our systems are not so finely balanced that an occasional molecule going walkabout will bring everything to a crashing halt.

High-dose tests frequently produce alarming forecasts of mass poisoning. These tests assume that the injuries produced by high doses of a chemical can be used to forecast the action of that chemical at lower doses, and that there is no threshold below which there is no damage.

Government agencies and self-appointed ‘protecting our heath’ groups assume a no-threshold effect, even though it is impossible to measure effects, negative or not, at very low doses. However, there is mounting evidence that in many cases forecasts for low-dose effects are not valid, because the fundamental assumption of high-dose testing is wrong: the results from high-dose tests fail to predict what might happen at lower doses.

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