The History of Adaptogens: A Cold War Invention

Quick answer on where adaptogens came from

The word adaptogen is about eighty years old. It was coined in 1947 by Nikolai Lazarev, a Soviet toxicologist, to describe substances that increase non-specific resistance to stress. The plants the category describes are genuinely ancient. The category itself is not, and it was built for reasons that had rather more to do with Cold War performance research than with traditional medicine. Knowing that history is useful, because it explains why the definition is so unusual and why the evidence is shaped the way it is.

The problem Lazarev was trying to solve

Lazarev was a pharmacologist working in a context where the Soviet state had a practical interest in substances that might help people withstand extreme conditions. Soldiers, pilots, cosmonauts, deep-sea divers, factory workers on punishing shifts. The question was not how to treat an illness. It was how to make a healthy person more resistant to strain.

That is a genuinely different pharmacological question from the one Western medicine was mostly asking, and it needed a word. Lazarev proposed adaptogen, from the same root as adaptation, for a substance that raised what he called non-specific resistance.

Non-specific is the key term and the one that causes all the trouble. A painkiller is specific: it acts on pain. An adaptogen, by this definition, was supposed to be non-specific, helping the organism cope with whatever the stressor happened to be. That is a much harder thing to define, and a much harder thing to test.

The three criteria

In 1968 two of Lazarev's colleagues, Israel Brekhman and I.V. Dardymov, tightened the definition into three requirements that are still quoted today.

An adaptogen had to be non-toxic at normal doses. It had to produce a non-specific response, raising resistance to a broad range of physical, chemical and biological stressors rather than to one. And it had to have a normalising influence, meaning it would tend to move the body toward balance regardless of which direction it had strayed in.

That third criterion is the strangest and the most contested. A substance that lowers what is high and raises what is low does not behave like most pharmacology, and critics have reasonably pointed out that a claim which cannot fail is difficult to test. It is also, notably, very close to how traditional tonic herbs were already described in both Chinese and Ayurvedic practice, which we cover in what are adaptogens.

The plants they landed on

Brekhman's own work focused heavily on two plants from the Russian Far East.

The first was Siberian ginseng, Eleutherococcus senticosus, which is not botanically a ginseng at all. It was cheaper and more abundant than true Panax ginseng, which mattered enormously for a programme intending to supply large numbers of people, and it became the most studied adaptogen of the Soviet era.

The second was rhodiola rosea, growing in the cold high altitudes of Siberia and Scandinavia. Rhodiola had a long folk history in those regions before any of this, and the Soviet research built on that rather than discovering it.

Much of this work was published in Russian, some of it was classified, and a great deal of it used methodology that would not pass a modern review. That is a real limitation on the evidence base, and it is why so much adaptogen research from that era gets cited enthusiastically and examined rarely.

How the word travelled west

The concept reached the English-speaking world unevenly, arriving properly in the 1970s and 1980s as Soviet research became more accessible, and landing in a culture already primed by growing interest in herbal medicine.

What happened next is that the word broadened considerably. Plants with no connection whatsoever to the Soviet programme were absorbed into the category, ashwagandha and holy basil from Ayurveda, reishi and schisandra from Chinese practice, and eventually almost anything herbal and vaguely calming. Some of those additions are defensible on the original criteria. Others are marketing.

This is the practical reason the history matters. Adaptogen is not a regulated term. It has a reasonably precise 1968 definition that very few products are actually measured against, and a loose modern usage that means approximately herbal and good for stress.

What to do with all this

Two things follow, and they pull in different directions.

The first is scepticism about the word itself. When a label says adaptogen it is telling you which marketing category the product belongs to, not that it has met Brekhman's criteria. Judge the specific plant and the specific evidence behind it rather than the term.

The second is that the underlying idea is not silly. The observation that some plants seem to help people cope with strain, without acting on any one system in an obvious way, shows up independently in Chinese, Ayurvedic and Siberian traditions long before anyone named it. Lazarev did not discover that. He gave it a vocabulary and tried, with mixed success, to make it testable.

For the current state of the evidence on individual plants, see best adaptogens for energy and stress, and for the question of how long to take them, do you need to cycle adaptogens.

Frequently asked questions

Who invented the term adaptogen? Nikolai Lazarev, a Soviet toxicologist, coined it in 1947 to describe substances that increase non-specific resistance to stress. Israel Brekhman and I.V. Dardymov refined it into three formal criteria in 1968.

Are adaptogens an ancient concept? The plants are ancient. The category is not. Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic practice had their own tonic-herb frameworks that overlap considerably, but the word adaptogen dates to the twentieth century.

What are the three criteria for an adaptogen? Non-toxic at normal doses, producing a non-specific response that raises resistance to a broad range of stressors, and having a normalising influence that moves the body toward balance in either direction.

Why did the Soviet Union research adaptogens? The interest was in performance and resilience under extreme conditions for soldiers, pilots, cosmonauts and industrial workers, rather than in treating disease.

Which plants did the original research focus on? Principally eleuthero, or Siberian ginseng, and rhodiola rosea, both native to the Russian Far East and Siberia. Most of the plants now called adaptogens were added later.

Is adaptogen a regulated term? No. It has a reasonably precise 1968 scientific definition and a much looser marketing usage, and products are not required to meet the former to use the word.

Sources

Panossian A, Wikman G. Effects of Adaptogens on the Central Nervous System and the Molecular Mechanisms Associated with Their Stress-Protective Activity. Pharmaceuticals.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Rhodiola.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Asian Ginseng.

National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. Botanical Dietary Supplements: Background Information.

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