Educate Your Immune System
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I had a wild childhood: it happened to me to eat hamster food from his cage, eating dirt, eating sand, raw tomatoes directly from the plant, drinking waters from random streams; drinking raw milk without boiling it few minutes after milking it by hand, eating raw eggs, and when I wasn't in school, like during the summer, I had one shower per week, or less...
Don't worry: growing up I am back to civilization. But I have to say that I am never sick. Also during winter.
I pity all those kids and their urban childhood, they will have to endure weird intolerance to random things. I am grateful to my parents.
Back then growing children was still a simple thing, nowadays mothers and fathers are so scared by society.
(Infectious) diseases generally spread more easily in higher population density. That's basic epidemiology, more contacts = opportunities, but it's of course more complicated than one single statement, disease spread models need a lot more variables than just population density to make useful predictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_host_density
http://pai.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PAI-1293-DISEASE_c... (PDF)
http://www.britannica.com/science/infectious-disease/Populat...
In general, we're probably better off with controlled, safe exposures (e.g. vaccines) than uncontrolled exposure and simply hoping we'll survive anything we catch.
The evidence for this is not clear. Actual research is needed, and such research is complex, expensive, and unfortunately potentially political. This article describes a very nice A/B experiment for this one autoimmune condition but makes no general claims.
But outside these few cases we don't know. One factor is reporting. Do poor kids in India suffer fewer allergies or are they simply dwarfed by the other problems -- or just not reported? How do various cultures report and recognize allergies? Did feudal serfs suffer hay fever from close contact with all those grass proteins and pollens or did they develop immunity? Who knows?
It does seem to appear that certain allergies (e.g. tree nut) are on the rise in the US, but the rate is not restricted to urban populations. But if kids have any symptoms they are isolated from nuts just in case, so surely the rate is overstated in the legitimate interest of keeping kids safe (though unnecessary restriction has its own problems). And other "allergies" can be fashionable (e.g. gluten response) which both helps and hurts those with legitimate problems.
This is a great point that gets overlooked: lack of data is often taken as non-existence, even implicitly. When the average life expectancy is under 50 and there's fewer than one doctor for every 10,000 people, sneezing and occasional sinus pain doesn't even warrant a mention.
Consider people lose 0.5 to 1.5 pounds of dead skin a year. That's a great food source for a huge range of micro organisms and it shows up anywhere people wonder around.
Unfortunately, I developed an allergy to dogs, despite living with one for nearly 10 years! I left for literally 3 months and upon my return I was allergic.
Also I still get colds and illnesses like most people (not regularly but I get them) so it's not conferred any super powers in that respect either. That might be because I have my own kids now as kids seem to take their disease spreading role seriously!!
So, I'm sure that there are big benefits to our respective early lifestyles but they're not a panacea unfortunately.
The hygiene hypothesis is interesting but it’s far from proven and there are competing theories for many autoimmune diseases involving pathogens. The trendy attitude of “people were so healthy back when society was simple”, however, is blatantly false. People overall, by any reasonable metric, have better health today than they have even had in the past. As we invent vaccines and improve treatment options we simply forget about the burden of diseases that no longer exist.
This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).
Without reference to a larger dataset, the inference "I"m never sick because I played in the woods and ate weird stuff. If you get sick a lot, it's partially your fault because you didn't do that." could easily be replaced with "I'm never sick because I prayed to the right god every day. If you get sick a lot..."
I never implied that. If something, I said that too much pressure by society is making parents work harder, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
In terms of logical structure, taking an anecdote and universalizing it without a falsifiable explanatory mechanism is indistinguishable from blaming faraway natural disasters on other people sinning against the gods.
In both cases, people and society are held to be at least partially culpable for something bad that happened to them without presenting any evidence other than that they don't do all the same things that you do, and you're doing fine.
As a word, humblebrag is irritating to see in use, even if you are not its target.
could it be that some of the cases we see are linked to the nocebo (I think this is the word, opposite of placebo) effect?
People who are used to dirt knows that they'll handle this alright because they always have lived in these conditions? While people who grew up in cleaner conditions get tricket into a bad feedback loop where any sign of anything wrong gets amplified by the brain and fed back to the autonomous part of the nervous system? (I happily admit I'm on thin ice here.)
Placebo and nocebos are pretty strong effects. Recently we had an incident where a number of postal workers were sent to hospital with rashes after having handled a suspect package which contained white powder. The powder later turned out to be flour.
I have also managed to get, and cure myself from side effects by 1. Reading about the side effects and experience them first hand. 2. Get rid of them immediately once I could proove to myself that they were related to me thinking I had taken my pills, while they were actually still on the countertop.
Yes we need some exposure to germs. Vaccines are an excellent way to do that without the risk of catching the disease.
Yes we shouldn't go overboard with antibiotics or stop kids from playing in the dirt. But there are plenty of health measures that are clearly beneficial despite lowering our exposure to germs.
There's no need for comments here to be scientifically useful. HN threads are simply conversation. Anecdotes are not only welcome, they're conversation's life blood.
(ellyagg already made this point, and was right.)
HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944486
Article: http://theconversation.com/if-being-too-clean-makes-us-sick-...
At 30 I would have told you I was in perfect health. No allergies or asthma or anything remotely like that. Then one day my immune system got out of whack and develop chronic urticaria. (Thankfully modern medicine makes it a minor issue).
My childhood didn't retroactively change during that interval. Sometimes you're lucky. And sometimes your luck suddenly runs out.
Recently, I developed a new allergy to certain types of grass. Now I end up with white dots in my eyes, and a lot of pain.
Sorry to hear about your ...urticaria. But... I don't think it's "luck".
My brother grew up when we started moving out of this sort of environment (so he had 4 years less of this) and he falls sick much less than I do.
My guess is that other factors dominate.
I don't think that a faraway childhood affects resistance to the flu, right now, significantly. Maybe to some of the maladies mentioned in the article. The fact is the immune system is an engine, just like everything else in the human body. People who exercise more get sick less often. People who exercise more get sick less severely. People who have sex more often have more immunoglobulin A. People who sleep more, get sick less often.
If you get the flu more often than you'd like, start exercising more, having more sex, or sleeping better. Ideally all three.
While there may be other beneficial (to the immune system) things happening in Russian Karelia, I can't help but wonder if the absence of unpasteurized dairy is the single massive thing that causes failure of gut microbiomes in the modern world.
P.S. I love cheese and will forever eat it but I don't drink milk.
There are many things people eat and do that other mammals don't.
Its a treat and not a requirement.
For example, I have seen apparently healthy and non-starving adult black bears, some dogs, and cats happily consume cow milk if it is available. There are pros and cons to it, for sure, but there is clearly nutrition present.
How does that prove milk is good for us? Or for them?
Non-starving animals and humans can also enjoy the taste of junk food, we don't judge junk food's nutritional value based on that.
It doesn't happen very often but it could still contribute more than we think.
Such proof was neither requested nor attempted. The challenge I responded to was, "Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults?"
Clever cats have domesticated their humans (who then domesticate cows) to provide milk on a regular basis. ;-)
For that matter, other than the isolated, exceptional cases of a lactating mammal adopting the orphans of another mammal and nursing them, humans are the only mammals that consume the milk of a different species.
Cats drinking from a saucer of milk put on the floor in front of them is nothing like milking a cow — except, I suppose, at the level of digesting lactose.
I'm sorry, but your comment is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The original article is about autoimmune disease that develops at an early age. Whether you drink milk as an adult or not would have had no impact on the development of the disease. If you like your non-milk diet, you can keep your non-milk diet.
Name one mammal besides humans who regularly cooks food before eating it.
1) Considering that the original article is about autoimmune disease, it's possible that there is a critical time period during early age (<3-4 years) when it is important to consume a particular substance, and beyond which the substance is completely ineffective---i.e. marketing to middle-aged ladies is great because they have money to spend, but the fact that this marketing exists is besides the point. 2) It wasn't my goal to present a finding for which there is lots of available evidence, but rather the opposite---to suggest a possibly under-explored area.
I wonder if they looked at antibiotic use. Wealthier countries often have better medical access. Perhaps it isn't that poor countries are "dirtier" so much as that when kids do get ill, they are less likely to get nuke-em-from-orbit antibiotics, use of which is known to have a scorched earth effect on the gut. The gut is about 70 percent of the immune system.
I really dislike the hygiene hypothesis. I have reversed a lot of the symptoms of my so called auto immune disorder in part by staying impeccably clean and avoiding exposure to germs as best I can. To me, this "a dirtier world is better for you" line of reasoning just does not make sense. It would make a great deal more sense to me if the conclusion was that casual use of antibiotics does egregious harm to the biome in the gut, from which some people never recover. Modern doctors are perfectly happy to prescribe antibiotics and I don't think I have ever had one tell me that I need to consume yogurt afterwards to foster healing of the damaged gut biome.
Autoimmune disease rodent models don't translate well to the clinic, so an academic group tried to look for reasons. They found that normal, healthy humans have far more memory B cells than lab mice, which may be a major factor.
So they looked at wild mice and pet store mice. Wild mice had a lot of memory B cells, but pet store mice had the most. They found you can house pet store mice with lab mice, and the lab mice will eventually increase the number of B cells, but you lose about 20% of them.
- In Finland 80% of 3-year olds have had ear infection.
- 53% of 2-year olds are in daycare. Due to various reasons group sizes are getting bigger and bigger, new normal can be around 30 kids in a single daycare group (=constant infections...)
- Half of the kids have private health insurances (public outpatient care has some issues..)
- Typical treatment for ear infection(although many times unnecessary) is antibiotics.(=to keep parents happy / easier for the doctor)
These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old
(and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In
order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the
hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic
disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation
early in life. It needs an education.
I think it's funny that we Western people get so quickly sick from street-food in Asian countries (e.g. Thailand), while most locals have no problem eating the food.
I can eat food in Shanghai without suffering from traveler's diarrhea afterward. It took a while to get to that point.
With exposure, you'll develop tolerance for the local food. Hopefully, all of the locals have already had that exposure.
I am not a statistician, but wouldn't this be underpowered relative to what you would need to draw a solid conclusion?
https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/FactorsInfl...
A study with low power is perfectly alright for an exploratory study that is not meant to prove anything but to check if it's worthwhile to spend a lot of resources on an idea in the first place.
http://lynn-library.libguides.com/researchmethods/researchme...
> 1. Exploratory research generally utilizes small sample sizes and, thus, findings are typically not generalizable to the population at large.
> 2. The exploratory nature of the research inhibits an ability to make definitive conclusions about the findings.
> ...
The problem is when exploratory studies make it to the media and people confuse them with studies meant to settle questions rather than just raise them.
very telling giving the history of Estonia during last 25 years.
An unfortunate analogy. It is exactly weeds that our microbiome needs. Not manicured lawns.
Ok, so where's the productization? Where's the startup?
Surely this product/service already exists in some form or other, somewhere
When I was a small child and caught chickenpox several of my friends were brought round to play so they could 'safely' catch it as children, rather than waiting to catch the altogether nastier grown-up version later in life.
I suspect my mother didn't charge for the product/service , although that may be because she couldn't get a node.js stack up and running.
Also it was in 1983.
It is unfortunate that children are now commonly vaccinated against chickenpox. This is a weakling virus that barely kills anyone, and more good could be done by figuring out factors that help children have a mild case.
One angle is the use of parasites to treat autoimmune diseases. It wasn't mentioned in the article, but hookworms are being studied for their ability to secrete a wide range of immune-modulating molecules. Companies are trying to determine which molecules are especially useful, and in what combination, so they can synthesize them and sell them.
But, you can get their beneficial effect right now, which is very appealing to people with major autoimmune diseases. Some companies are selling parasite eggs by mail to people who otherwise can't get them. I have MS, I take them.
It's not a lucrative business, and there are a lot of regulatory hurdles, but the treatment is quite safe.
Most people are disgusted by the idea of infecting their self with parasites. The reality is that humans evolved with parasites constantly inside of their bodies. It's only in the last 100 years that widespread anti-parasitic medication has wiped them out.
That did a lot of good for society in general, but we took it too far, essentially, by wiping out parasites entirely. There are a lot of benign "parasites", which should be thought of as symbiotes.
The way that big pharma is dealing with this is as mentioned above: they're trying to synthesize the right stew of immune-modulating chemicals to deal with this. But the immediate solution is to educate people, and sell them clean, safe parasites (or their eggs).
It's also nice if they live a long time in their host, and don't reproduce inside of the host. This is why Necator Americanus is mostly used; it fits all of these characteristics.
Anyway, it's interesting to hear about the hookworms and your direct experience with them. I'd be curious to hear more about your experience with that therapy, if you are willing/interested to share it.
Basically, I wonder in what circumstances would you recommend that therapy to others who have an autoimmune condition? (e.g. for all cases, just some cases, cases that did not respond to drugs, diet, etc.) Is it a first resort, or a last resort or something in the middle, etc. ?
Again, thanks.
Coronado Biosciences was running clinical trials using pig whipworm ova to see if it had an impact on inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's and ulcerative colitis). Turns out there was no observable effect.
Edit: read it on mobile with JavaScript off.
I also find it how remarkably consistent my experience is that people who complain about "tone" never, ever have anything to say about the actual subject.
And the "petty" is all in your head. There are too many people who blame others for what's in their own head.
The latter is an immature, weak intellectual position (see Appeal to Ridicule and Question Begging Epithet) that says nothing more than "you are so wrong as to look asinine".
This only fosters more emotional, insult-riddled dialogue, which is why the user above quoted HN guidelines, which you are now impotently raging against. This is a pretty civil place, we like to keep it that way.
Please stop doing this and post civilly and substantively, or not at all, from now on.