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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

Nice little article! And it confirms my anecdotal evidence, so it feels good. ;)

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.

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Doesn't always work though. I grew up in the countryside and similar to you I ate dirt, wild fruit (best ever was a egg plum tree we found, though the natural laxative effect was unwelcome), drank from streams etc etc.

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.

I'm trying to find the source, but I remember reading something about allergies appearing in people later in life, and overexposure in that case was also a factor, IIRC

And possibly something to do with antibiotics too? I had just finished a very heavy course when I was reintroduced to the dog, apparently there is some suspicion that such a scenario could have something to do with it?

I, too, spent my childhood playing outside. And I was never on antibiotics.

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.

I am the same. Always outside, lived on a farm for a few years, lived in the city. No problems with any allergies, and then, about 15 years ago, I worked in a store with photochemistry, but no ventilation. I was diagnosed with asthma some months later. I was pre-disposed to it, though.

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.

> Sometimes you're lucky. And sometimes your luck suddenly runs out.

Sorry to hear about your ...urticaria. But... I don't think it's "luck".

Hospitals are not sterile, let any uncooked food, air etc. The idea that most things a germ free is really far off base. A more likely consideration is the massive amounts of pollution people deal with.

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.

The "hygiene hypothesis" as you described would then prescribe that by getting "dirty" we'd improve our immune health. An interesting article was posted on HN a few months ago, a good read on "if being too clean makes us sick, why isn't getting dirty the solution."

HN Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944486

Article: http://theconversation.com/if-being-too-clean-makes-us-sick-...

Let's not forget that the reason people get sick is because they are infected. Increasing population density will clearly lead to more transmissions, especially in cities.

Actually, TFA makes the case that people living in developed societies are not infected early enough in life, which makes their immune systems vulnerable in the long run.

@verroq is correct though, but that is a different subject than the one of the article.

(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...

Well, it used to be that infant mortality was a lot bigger, some of which was probably infants dying to things they were exposed to. So we can't just ignore survivorship bias in considering these things.

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.

Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time.

> Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time.

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.

> 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?

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.

I used to eat raw meat. Now I never get food poisoning

I mostly stayed inside and played games, everything was kept clean, I bathed every day, all food was prepared very strictly (mother was a professional). And I never get sick. Anecdotes prove nothing.

Do you have children now? I had a similar upbringing and similarly didn't get sick very much. However, once we had a kid, I have been sick way more and more severely. Generally immediately after my child. Do I want to protect my child from getting sick so I can stay productive, or do I want to allow him to exercise his immune system more but reduce my own health and productivity?

I did all that except the milking by hand and the rare showering (grew up in 36-40 °C place), in addition to being barefoot in the mud everywhere, and all I got for all that is a propensity for catching the flu every year.

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.

> a propensity for catching the flu every year.

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.

Ha ha, I walked right into that. Well played.

How old are you currently?

I promise there are plenty of patients with autoimmune disease who had childhoods just like yours. I don’t want to sound hostile but “I am not sick, because I do/did X” is a) not scientifically useful and b) somewhat insulting to patients who suffer from chronic illness. The truth is everyone has risk factors for most diseases and there is still an incredibly large probabilistic element involved - some people are just lucky. This will likely change in the future as true causes are identified of course.

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.

> not scientifically useful

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.)

Indeed; when John Leal added chlorine to water in the early 1900s infant mortality was cut in half. After chlorination spread to most US cities this effect was replicated everywhere else too. Typhus outbreaks went from a sea-saw pattern to almost zero within a few years.

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.

> not scientifically useful

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).

But beyond being a humblebrag, it's also bordering on a just-world view of the universe that's basically superstition.

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..."

Don't know exactly where to leave this comment but:

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.

Maybe for minor ailments but absolutely no way for real hardcore autoimmune disease. Usually there are several objective abnormalities in blood results, on x-rays, colonoscopy, MRI etc. Have a look at some images of the hands of someone with rheumatoid arthritis - there's a lot more going on than placebo/nocebo/anxiety.

> it's partially your fault because you didn't do that

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.

I'm wondering why you are downvoted for this comment?

It's placing blame for a general problem on the decisions and values of certain people and societies.

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.

Claims of humblebraggadocio is the HN counterpart to calling out an "edgelord" elsewhere.

As a word, humblebrag is irritating to see in use, even if you are not its target.

In case this was the first time anyone else encountered this term: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=edgelord

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