Exposure to the bacteria in soil can be good for mental health | Hacker News Reader

Exposure to the bacteria in soil can be good for mental health

qz.com

135 pointsbthallplz62 comments

The real takeaway for me as a parent here is that the more and more we prevent our kids from being actual kids, the more subtleties we might be depriving them of.

Dating myself a little, but growing up as a kid in Virginia, 'outside' play was a mainstay. We went out into the woods, we built tree forts, we dug holes, we made tire swings. Nowadays, the parents of my children's friends are completely unwilling to let their kids engage in such behavior, whether because it's potentially dangerous (it is), or dirty (that too), the kids are expected to meet up in a sanitized location, play in a playroom, or possibly on a playground with rubber mulch as the surface material, and seldom are kids allowed or expected to just go play.

Meanwhile, we've got more and more kids being prescribed more and more things, and while I honestly haven't the slightest clue whether to attribute it to the lack of outdoor play or the miracles of modern medicine, it seems possibly correlated.

It's a weird situation to be an adult. You got cautious along the years (for good or bad reasons) and somehow forgot what you did. When I remember all the crazy things we did as 5yo .. climbing trees out of the blue, alone, no supervision, no phones. We're all alive and well.

True, we're all alive and well.

Simultaneously,

that's the definition of survivorship bias / selection bias right there :)

I hate to say it but...what about Natural Selection bias?

Not all kids I went to school with is alive, for example there was one guy who one day went fast down a hill on his bicycle, straight onto the road and was hit by a car.

One guy I know let his four year old play outside, just for a short while without supervision, he fell into a pond and drowned.

I always felt safe when I was five years old playing outside by myself though, even though I sometimes went several kilometers into the forest. There was no cars there and I was already a good swimmer, so I can't really imagine anything could have happened though.

I thought about this a while ago. I even don't know about any incident in which a child was seriously hurt by playing outside in my former hometown or the villages around, while my whole time as a child or teenager. Though, maybe I forgot about something...

There was a study done in Gothenburg, Sweden a few years ago that compared inner city kindergartens with those in the countryside. The difference was that in the countryside the children were found to be more confident. It seemed that the children in the city were discouraged from taking risks and hence never hurt themselves, no scraped knees, etc., while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped.

The kindergarten (barnehage) my children attended in Norway was much like that, the playground had all sorts of mildly dangerous equipment that you could fall off of, tricycles that you could get run over by, puddles to jump in, mud to play with. All the children were pretty healthy and still are decades later.

>while the children in the countryside were always playing in the mud, snow, trees, and so on, getting dirty, tired, and scraped.

Now. Expect someone to show up with some statistics of how accident rate in the country side is greater than the rate in the city, along with other folks with supporting argument like. "A weak kid is better than a dead kid", "Mental handicap is better than physical handicap", which are obviously not false!

All the evils of modern life can be summarized in a single word..."Fear".

The next breakthrough for humanity would have to be freeing the masses from being perpetually afraid! Might be a bit hard since the fear this fear can be capitalized for massive gains by the current establishments !

I see where you're coming from but I think there's also a lot of unacknowledged variables in play here that get glossed over because of a focus on the outcomes such as dead kid vs. live kid. For example, I'm wondering if the same rules and recreation structure that result in a dead city kid result in a dead rural kid. A lot of environmental factors including traffic, neighborhood crime, average physique (in areas where children might often participate in their parent's physical labor), etc. could all create outcomes that are generally more potentially lethal for a child raised in a densely populated metropolitan area than for a child raised in a rural area.

Or maybe the countryside kids have a better understanding of where real danger is from their experiences.

that's the biggest thing - you have to try and fail. Wisdom comes from learning from your past mistakes.

At the day-care my 3 year old goes to, the children are encouraged to go out and play on a daily basis. The only exceptions are storms and extremely hot days (this does not happen that often in this part of Germany...). This is great for them. They play, explore, breathe fresh air, interact with germs, bacteria.

On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the parents who try to shelter their kids, so that they don't get sick. Staying at home these days is not as simple as when we were kids. The pressure to succeed or lack of personnel take their toll in such situations.

My children (3 and 5) goes to a "nature kindergarten". We live in Denmark. Basically they are not inside if possible. They have a rather large building with rooms for each team, kitchens and whatever you would expect, but they use it as little as possible. Outside, the weather is taken into consideration, so even if it rains, they can play outside without getting wet, if that is what they want (the kids are encouraged to play in the rain), and if it's crazy hot and the sun is baking, they can play outside in the numerous locations setup for shade. They almost always eat their 3 lunchboxes outside. In the winter season, there is a bonfire every morning for warmth and hygge. The key to this kind of kindergarten is enough of the right kind of clothes and footwear. There is even a big forrest inside the kindergarten perimeter with trees they climb and holes they've dug. My children absolutely loves it!

3 lunchboxes?

The convention in this particular kindergarten is that for each meal there is one lunchbox. Meals are usually at 8-9 (optional meal), 11:30 and 14:30. My kids kids usually don't have the first lunchbox since they have just eaten breakfast a half hour to one hour before arriving at the kindergarten at around 8-8:30 and are therefore not hungry, but some kids in the kindergarten is there from around 7-8 to 16-17: and thus packs three lunch boxes. Some actually arrive at 6 in the morning and thus eat 2-3 lunch boxes and a breakfast first thing when they arrive.

Ah that makes sense

have young kids, a work in progress:

I used to limit them to 30 minutes of "tv or tablet" a day, which over time was slowly creeping up to an hour or more. So I moved it to "TV or Tablet only on weekends", it was hard for them to adjust for a few days, but now they happily spend their weekday afternoons playing outside, which also helps them spend more of the weekends outside too because they are "used to it". I'm sure the nicer late-spring weather helps too.

hope that's helpful to any parents struggling to balance your kids digital life.

Meanwhile a school in Siberia believes that daily showers in the snow makes children stronger. From 2 years old.

>'Perhaps people will not believe us, but facts are hard to argue with,' insisted teacher Lyubov Daniltsova.

>'Our doctor confirms that children in groups that practice dousing get through the flu season a lot more easily, and generally the statistics show there are 95% of healthy children in the 'wet' group, compared to 75% among the others'.

I would be curious about the overall rates of influenza have varied in the school as there could be a selection bias for the wet group.

http://siberiantimes.com/healthandlifestyle/others/news/like...

I moved to the country purposely to ensure my kids could have that life. They have 100 acres to run around. All the trees they could want to climb, a tire swing, a "fort" which is really just the clearing under a tree with branches that hang down to the ground and shield it from view.

As long as they're not killing each other or destroying anything, I am actively hands off - on purpose. It's my opinion that the roam-free policy my parents took with me instilled the belief that I am capable of anything I decide. I'm actively trying to instill that in my kids. No matter how much frustration that causes me, I want that for them.

There's no rubber mats. There's no safety net. In my whole school of kids, the worst injury prior to anyone learning to drive was a couple of concussions and a couple of broken limbs. 150 kids in the school. There were no deaths, no catastrophic injuries that put them in hospital. Those didn't come until they were old enough to drive. Most of the parents in my village seemed to have this roam free policy. We would all show up at each other's houses, go for bike rides for miles, swim in rivers unsupervised, learned our own fears and boundaries. Heaven forbid we pissed off one of the neighbours and our parents found out about it. Then we'd be for the high jump. Heaven forbid you got grounded and couldn't go outside and all you had to play with was buckets of Lego while all our friends were outside building jump ramps for their BMXs and all you could do was look out the window at them.

Both of my kids have clinically diagnosed ADHD and my eldest also has ODD. If they didn't get this outside time, I might have jumped off the roof myself just to escape the torture this brings.

I actively encourage the kids to go out and play. I'd rather they weren't in the house. When they're in the house, they're just making a mess that it's more of a fight to make them clean up than it is just to clean it up myself.

I firmly believe that kids should be able to be kids without having all of our rules and orders shoved down their throats. It's stifling and all it does is make them question themselves and hurts their self esteem.

My kids believe they can do anything. This frequently makes me pull my hair out in frustration, but I know that once they become adults, what frustrates me endlessly now will be the tools they use to take on the world and succeed.

If you don't mind my asking, how do you pay the bills? I would love to provide this type of an opportunity for my family, but the transition from a 45-minute urban commute from the suburbs to something like what you're doing is uncharted territory.

I'm not the parent, but I've always lived in the suburbs. The suburbs I live in now are far less rural than the ones I grew up in, mind you, and I've never lived within 1,000 miles of California, or the Valley, but through the magic of telecommuting, I have had a few jobs based in the SF/Mountain View area, while maintaining an acre of flat, fenced yard for my dogs and family.

So there are a few factors here:

Having grown up in the country and being used to being an hour from the closest big city (London) meant that my tolerance for commuting is a lot different than those that are used to a 10 minute commute. So you have to factor that in.

For most of my adult life however, I've lived in reasonably large cities and the commute time hasn't been less of a pain in the ass than if I'd lived in the burbs.

Living in the city I enjoyed for a while. I loved being able to walk... everywhere. Everything was in walking distance close enough to bike or take a bus, a tram or the subway. That is awesome. The bustle and the fact it never shuts off is exciting and invigorating... until you get to a point where you just want everyone to fuck off and leave you alone... like, the whole city. It never sleeps, there's always something going on, fire trucks waking you, drunk people swearing at each other up and down the street, cars, noise, pollution yada yada yada. Anyway, my point is that my love of the city diminished greatly over time. Now I love to visit, but I love to leave more. I don't get much enjoyment sleeping in the city. I'd rather leave. My 3 days a week downtown adequately sates my appetite for city life.

I tried living in the burbs, it was soul destroying. Nobody knew each other, it was cookie cutter houses on cookie cutter streets, everyone chasing the Jones's wanting bigger, better, faster and buying into the whole consumerism bullshit that we have shoved down our throats by the media. It made me want to slit my wrists or drown myself in the bathtub. You couldn't go to the pub without getting in the car, which meant you couldn't drink, which defeated the purpose of going to the pub. You still suffered all the same rules and regulations and busy bodies of living in the city, but none of the fun that you can have in the country - no fires, no loud music, no parties until all hours in the morning... pittsville. What's the point in that? If I'm going to live outside the city, I want to be able to do all the things I'm not allowed to do in the city. So the burbs seems like the worst of both worlds.

So I had many reasons for doing so, but eventually my reasons to leave the city grew to be more compelling than staying in the city.

I now effectively have two jobs, well, three if you include parenting.

I work downtown as a software engineer which is a two hour commute each way. When I took this contract, I ensured that there would be no issue with me working from home 2 days a week.

I also work the farm when I'm not programming. I help with the heavy labour, along with my ex-wife and the kids and we also hire labourers as we need - when I don't have time (or inclination) to help with the workload. We grow our own organic produce and ethically raised animals for meat and we are set up as a teaching facility to help others interested in this lifestyle to adopt pieces of it into their own lives and homes. So it's part lifestyle, part business.

I use my commute time to chillax, listen to ebooks, listen to music, podcasts and basically have a one person party. Sometimes I chat on the phone with my friends, handsfree of course, and sometimes I sit in complete silence the entire way - imagine, 4 hours a day of total silence with nothing but your own thoughts about life, yourself, philosophy, pondering. It's a great time for reflection. The point is, my commute is me time, nobody hassling me, nobody needing me, no booboos to fix, no runny noses, no animals to feed, no crops to harvest, no work harassing me, it's time for me to do whatever I please on top of additionally driving my car in the direction of the office or my house. There's no stress because I don't set out with the mindset that I have to be somewhere quickly. The traffic is what it is, I will get there when I get there. Fuck how long it takes and fuck anyone who gets pissed off that it takes me as long as it does to get where I'm going. It doesn't need to be stressful. I think a lot of people get unnecessarily hung up on this. The down side is that I have to pay for gas and parking. But I treat it like a mini-roadtrip. I make sure I have tea and snacks and don't take it very seriously. My windows are usually down and sunroof open (weather permitting), my music is up and its endless summer.

All in all, the amount of stress you suffer is the amount of stressful perceptions you hang on to and dwell on. If you can reframe as many of those things that cause you stress as things you can derive some level of fun or pleasure from, life becomes much easier to deal with.

So I pay the bills and subsidize the cost of labourers and investments in the farm with my income from my software contracts. I try and ensure I work from home at least 2 days a week so I don't spend too much time partying in my car which while fun is totally unproductive.

I loved my time in the city, but even the thought of a thriving night life, more dating opportunities and the reduction of my commute couldn't bring me back from the country.

Imagine a life where you don't spend your time living to go to the cottage and instead, just find a way to live at the cottage permanently. That's really all I've done. It can be done, quite easily if you sit down and make a plan to facilitate it. Everything is just details, and all of the problems that might be a hindrance along the way are only that, a hindrance.

http://www.alabasteracres.com/

Thanks for taking the time to fill in these details!

Of course, no problem, if you have any more questions, just yell!

Purely anecdotal (and of course showing my age) but when we were kids we were not supposed to wear trousers (long to the ankle) until we became maybe 12 or 13 (exception made when we were all dressed up for some ceremony or similar), we had some choice between shorts and knee length shorts.

There was a reason, I have no real memory of myself (nor of any of my friends) having ever both (at the same time I mean) knees/lower legs NOT scraped, bruised or cut, no matter if it was due to falling from a tree or from the bycicle or from experiments with any other possible 2 to 4 wheeled or sliding vehicle of sort, or simple bruises because of thorns while we went through the woods to get some berries.

Of course we promptly washed the bruises (and in some cases even disinfected them) but if the article is even marginally right, given the quantity of dirt that must have entered my organism I should not ever be concerned with depression.

I spent half of this week researching industrial food processing methodologies and the cleanliness you can get to is obviously unhealthy. It's like humans look at biology and see 10 major pathogens and over-optimize for that chunk of biology what-ifs they better understand due to macro effect. They then shut their eyes and bury their heads in the ... chemically clean and white fluffy pillow, eat a salad bathed in chlorine, sit inside in air conditioning, and wonder why they get ill. Let them eat dirt.

Yeah, germ theory of disease is silly. The doubling of life expectancies since the late 1800s just feels too industrial.

We should go back to when everything was just so much more natural.

You said it, brother!

This is a flippant dismissal that is perhaps important to address.

Science is not a binary thing: hackers of all audiences should know that you can respect science while admitting partial knowledge of the world and embracing holistic (or less fully informed, yet well evidenced) modes of action.

In short, daveguy's argument simultaneously presents a false dichotomy and shifting the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_burden_of_proof based upon the implied assumption that formal, academic science is the only true source of evidence. In fact, there are many valid sources of information other than science, and many of its outputs are near philosophical anyway. For example, monocultures are weak would be scientifically founded, philosophical perspective for holistic thinking and against the implication.

PS. In fact my comment was mostly aimed at the folly of human behavior (overoptimization for macro-visible pathogens and backslapping self-assessment of broad self-assumed understanding when mounting evidence shows just how little we know about even human biology), not claiming that industry is bad, mmkay?

I don't claim any knowledge on the matter above that of a layperson, so please don't take this as picking sides, as I'm far too uninformed to do so intelligently... that said, would it not be considered appropriate for the body populace to get their dirt exposure through play, sport, gardening or other activities that bring them into contact with it, while simultaneously applying germ theory to our food processing, preparation, emergency rooms, etc?

There's not enough land for most people to have a garden, and it's a rare sporting venue in major world cities that is now (a) based on proper dirt, with an ecosystem (b) not pumped full of chemicals (c) used by a large percentage of the population for sports that would readily and regularly facilitate eating dirt. Otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly.

On the contrary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land

Not counting huge land-masses in central africa and I'd also be skeptical of the numbers provided for Khazakstan and Mongolia

iow a 2ar garden for every human being currently living on our planet with still plenty of room left and this with only using land that's already deforested.. (+ we could easily grow a lot food on water. the tech is already here, waiting to be assembled - although not needed) .. this is meant to be a philosophical-kind-of-post, and its appropriate to recap that the 2 most important limiting factors in terms of population growth are (low)childhood mortality, (freely-available)education and a (working) social safety net (if an educated woman could have children without risks in her late 40s and live an active live up to her 90s ,,)

Yes, there is obviously a lot of space on the planet, but we should talk about places people actually and increasingly live, ie. Asian cities, particularly Chinese and Indian cities.

So let's rephrase that to "At current densities where most of the world's people actually live there is no way everyone can have a garden, because of lack of space."

They're not making a naturalistic fallacy. They're saying that our understanding of environmental influence of internal makeup is incomplete. What they're saying would extend our theory, and potentially our lives, too. It could also create new inventions, pushing us to become even more artificial in a technological/medical sense.

> sit inside in air conditioning

What's wrong with air conditioning?

Nothing is wrong with it, but temperature fluctuations (particularly heat) seem to promote gene expression that is ultimately healthy. Sauna use has been shown to lower blood pressure and heart rate in the short term, and there is some correlation with longevity in the longer term.

Poorly maintained systems can germinate and spread disease.

https://www.airconditioningservices.com/info/legionnaires-di...

There are definitely positives and negatives. This may have been mentioned in part due to this recent discussion:

The far-reaching effects of air conditioning | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14485962

I'd rather avoid much of the residential dirt on the eastern coast of the US, especially in older towns, due the accumulation of decades, if not centuries, of lead paint in the soil. In these parts, unless you've had it tested or you're living in a newer home with virgin soil, I'd think twice before letting the kids dig around too much. Lead exposure will negate any positive psychological effects of the dirt microbiome rather quickly.

Maybe don't let them dig around the foundation of a house with old paint on it... but just general dirt in the environment seems really unlikely to contain much lead. Not speaking from experience here, just speculating...

Which is fine and all if you're acutely aware of the risk, but most residential dirt readily available for digging in happens to be in the garden beds around houses and garages, right were flaking paint has been accumulating. The dirt people are likely digging in, if they're in an older community, isn't just any old random dirt. Also, most parents I've known aren't too keen on holes in the middle of the yard, away from the house.

https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-exposures-lead#...

Rather than take my word for it, there are plenty of federal, state, and county resources which can give you some idea of the likely lead levels to be found in your area and extrapolate from there. I'm not in the safest area myself, but I hope you find it's not something you yourself have to worry about.

Lead (and other toxic heavy metal) contamination is so fucked up. I hate how much attention and fear has been given to nuclear power / radioactivity while we cheerfully spent the entire 20th century contaminating everything with bioaccumulative toxic metals. At least radioactive waste / fallout has the grace of fucking decaying.

Radioactive waste often decays into lead. (generally after 30 steps of decay - some of the intermediate steps are a radioactive lead that decays to something else and then back to lead)

Here is the chart for radon http://www.ccnr.org/radon_chart.html (radon is of course natural not waste)

I can feel a new startup coming up, selling packaged soil dirt on a subscription basis.

My first thought was bullies making kids eat dirt and shouting "It's good for your mental health!"

In the article they cite as evidence for serotonin deficiency's depressogenic effects:

"Overall, this evidence suggests that impairing serotonin function can cause clinical depression in some circumstances, but is neither necessary nor sufficient."

From Wikipedia[1]:

Since the 1990s, research has uncovered multiple limitations of the monoamine hypothesis, and its inadequacy has been criticized within the psychiatric community.[44] For one thing, serotonin system dysfunction cannot be the sole cause of depression; antidepressants usually increase synaptic serotonin very quickly, but it often takes at least two to four weeks before mood improves significantly. One possible explanation for this lag is that the neurotransmitter activity enhancement is the result of auto receptor desensitization rather which can take weeks.[45] Intensive investigation has failed to find convincing evidence of a primary dysfunction of a specific monoamine system in patients with major depressive disorders. The antidepressants that do not act through the monoamine system, such as tianeptine and opipramol, have been known for a long time. There has also been inconsistency with regards to serum 5-HIAA levels, a metabolite of serotonin.[46] Experiments with pharmacological agents that cause depletion of monoamines have shown that this depletion does not cause depression in healthy people.[47][48] Another problem that presents is that drugs that deplete monoamines may actually have antidepressants properties. Furthermore, some have argued that depression may be marked by a hyperseretonergic state[49] Already limited, the monoamine hypothesis has been further oversimplified when presented to the general public.[50]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_of_depression

Finally, scientific proof that wandering barefoot is good for the soul.

And good for the Hookworm

Actually the hookworm is also good for us, it seems to reduce some allergic responses!

This sounds like preliminary research spun into health recommendations that are unjustified and possibly dangerous. What else is new.

Well in this case the preliminary science looks plausible. In the 10 years since this preliminary trial nobody has bothered doing a placebo controlled trial of this bacteria for depression, so it's probably reasonable to spin it a bit.

Are we reading the same article? I didn't see any recommendations, just some interesting info and a couple of theories that might explain the results that were seen.

Lovely, another AFB I have to memorize. Damnit!

AFB ?

I think he's referring to Armed Forces Bikers, a UK-based motorcycle charity to assist former members of the armed forces.

Nice, I'll look them up :)

But, no, AFB = Acid Fast Bacillus.

acid fast bacillus.

Think I'll stick with the pills...

Why, though? (Unless, by any chance, you mean pills for enhancing gut flora? :)

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