Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders | Hacker News Reader

Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders

neurosciencenews.com

86 pointswhack47 comments

I was once participated in a diet program where I was given some pills to eat to suppress my appetite (in addition to other generic mediterranean diet principles).

Being skeptical, I immediately scanned the ingredients and they all seemed like harmless/filler so I figured it was some placebo to placate those who needed pills as a confidence/mechanic. However, upon taking the pills for a few days, I did notice a marked decrease in appetite.

Re-examining the ingredients, the first one was "silica". Sand. Dirt. I've since come to the belief that our modern diet is too clean, and we are evolved to eat some amount of dirt - even if it's inhaled, so we may need to reintroduce some to control weight/allergies/disorders.

That dirt also contains other beneficial ingredients other than silica doesn't surprise me one bit.

This is interesting, but my nonscientific counter might be:

What if "dirt" is harmful, and causes your body to degrade appetite in attempt to overcome the irritants?

I agree we've evolved perhaps, but sometimes modern is better (e.g. portion control). Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite?

> Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite?

This is something that most people don't understand, given that we live in a world where food is cheap and plentiful.

As many people who have gone through fasting-based diets have discovered, there's a difference between "I'm hungry" and "I need calories, I'm getting weak and tired." Learning that difference is how you discover the actual amount of food your body requires, not just checking off three meals per day.

The feeding patterns of our ancestors were very far from "eat as much as you want all the time with no physical effort required," and that was normal for 15,000+ years, so it'll probably take longer than the 100-200 or so since industrial food production began for our brains and bodies to adjust to the new normal. That, or we'll just have to start teaching our kids about cravings vs hunger vs actual food-need.

I'm not clear on what "I'm hungry" means, other than "I need calories, I'm getting weak and tired." I don't experience anything until I experience that; being tired (after not eating all day) is the first sign my body gives me that I should eat something.

What are the qualia of non-hypoglycemic hunger?

I'm referring specifically to hunger pangs, or hunger contractions - a mild to moderate pain or cramping in the stomach that occurs when you've gone for a while without food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(motivational_state)#...

I've met others who simply don't experience hunger pangs, but I've always felt them and I didn't know how fully in-my-head it was until I tried intermittent fasting a few years ago.

My understanding is that you feel "I'm hungry" when your blood sugar drop below its typical level. The typical level can be increased by eating a lot of sugary processed food over a long period of time. In other words, sugary processed food change your body chemistry to make you addicted to them. If you largely eat healthy food and are at a healthy weight, then "I'm hungry" is a reliable signal for "I need more calories". If you are not, then it becomes a one-sided biased signal.

> As many people who have gone through fasting-based diets have discovered, there's a difference between "I'm hungry" and "I need calories..."

This is so true and it absolutely blew my mind to discover. Like a scifi plot where the air is "poison", you go outside, and... nothing happens.

It was uncomfortable at first, but it's mostly mental. So much of the "hunger" signal is conditioning that, once you decondition it, it just goes away.

Even when I'm fasted to the point where I'm mentally and physically sluggish, there are still no hunger pangs as severe as the ones I used to have between lunch and dinner when I never went more than 8 hours between meals.

I can't recommend it enough. I don't enjoy any particular clarity boosts or lightness like some purport to have, but I do enjoy spending less money, dealing with fewer errands, and being less fat.

I try to not eat after ~8PM, and to go for as long as I can without eating after waking up. In practice, this is usually ~1130 but sometimes as late as ~230. Then I just eat smaller meals, 50-70% of normal size. In this way, I can eat basically whatever I want, on the same schedule as anyone else.

I had a similar experience when I tried intermittent fasting a few years ago.

Most of us are so sedentary but eating like construction workers (at least I was). I also cut my food intake by something like 30-40% with nothing more than a week or two of discomfort.

You guys might be interested in this [0] classic study where a guy fasted for 382 days. He only took multi-vitamins during this period. His weight decreased from 456 to 180 lbs (0.72 lbs/day).

[0] https://pmj.bmj.com/content/postgradmedj/49/569/203.full.pdf

So, fasting this long is only possible if you have a lot of weight for your body to somehow cannibalize?

Well, yes. Basic daily activities, maintaining your internal body heat, and keeping your organs functioning all require energy. The only way humans can get that energy is through food or burning fat. So to keep living without food, you need to be burning fat

You need to be careful not to lose weight too quickly, since that has risks of its own. It is a risk with extreme diets such as extended fasting.

Excessively fast weight loss can cause liver injury. Most obese people will already have some degree of fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and while gradual weight loss is beneficial in reversing that liver disease, excessively fast weight loss can have the opposite effect and promote liver disease progression.

Say why.

Not only is it throwing off hormone/endocrine production, the toxins that have been stored in the fat cells are all being filtered through the body at the time of breakdown.

>so it'll probably take longer than the 100-200 or so since industrial food production began for our brains and bodies to adjust to the new normal.

Do people with bodies that are better adjusted to industrial foods reproduce at a faster rate? If not then I don't see any kind of evolutionary pressure that would cause people's bodies to adjust over the generations. My impression is that evolution in humans has stagnated since modern society came about.

Silica was probably sourced as a refined product and was likely pretty pure and free of things like bacteria.

Yeah, no way it'd be actual 'dirt', it's going to be food grade silica at the very least.

I can see the webloids headlines now: "Should you eat dirt: Newly discovered fatty acid 10Z-HA helps cure burnout!"

/sigh If only it were so easy.

I'm waiting for my dirt supplements.

You're joking, but in Germany you can buy several different grades of so called healing soil for different uses in many regular super markets.

I take a tea spoon dissolved in water about once a week, which seems to help my system work more smoothly.

Which system? More smoothly?

It's difficult to pin-point these things, especially from the inside. I have Psoriasis since 30 years back, which in turn has something to do with a stressed immune system, which in turn depends on intestinal and stomach health. Drinking the healing soil improves the condition a lot for me, as does dissolving it in oil and rubbing into the skin.

Glad it helps. :)

Edit: no jokes on HN. Got it.

Fecal transplants are still going on, and are showing good effectiveness for certain serious problems, like C. diff infections:

Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile

New England Journal of Medicine 2013

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037

There are plenty of more recent articles as well.

Anxious? Eat dirt!

I wonder if there's a correlation between rural kids anxiety.

Pica?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)

Copyediting your headline a bit with the latest trends in linkbaiting:

Cure burnout by eating this disgusting thing.

Or...

You never thought eating dirt would be a cure for this.

And etc. The linkbaity headline should convey a riddle to be truly effective webtrash.

The wikipedia page on this bacteria says it is not pathogenic and when fed live to mice their maze solving performance increased. If it's not pathogenic to humans, why haven't they tried it with people? With all the rage about gut bacteria an experiment like this seems obvious.

Human trials are expensive and involve a whole lot of being careful beyond "the wikipedia page says it's fine so let's do it!"

Part of that being careful often involves mice.

Clinical trials are expensive. Trying something on yourself is not. I'm not advocating any of us do that. But if the mouse researchers actually believe it's not harmful and believe their own results, why wouldn't they do an ad-hoc experiment on themselves?

I'll try anything to improve my maze solving performance!

This paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05253...

indicates IL6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleukin_6) is down regulated in ex vivo tests (outside animal, cell cultures)

and specifically 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid may be related with PARa signaling in mice

so this is pretty cool. I hope they get some similar results with humans.

Maybe the hidden reason gardening is a viewed as a reason peeps live longer

If soil indeed has anti-inflammatory properties, that would make a whole lot of sense.

I'd be more likely to believe (at least part of) the effect is caused by giving the natural defense systems of the body something actually foreign to 'attack'. Sort of like regular training exercises and legal explosives/fireworks days give a more controlled and thus safer expression of pressure relief, training, and general readiness inspection.

PS: Related to the fireworks I mentioned, I'm for having local fire departments provide basic fire knock back training with basic safety gear (bucket of water and hose) that should be required when they're in use. We focus way too much on black and white bans rather than enforcing responsible consumption.

Anecdotally, I'm reminded that for constipation, Gandhi followed Adolf Just’s prescription of applying to the abdomen a bandage of clean earth moistened with cold water and spread like a poultice on fine linen. This I applied at bedtime, removing it during the night or in the morning, whenever I happened to wake up. It proved a radical cure.

This could explain why some people pick and eat nasal mucus (a dirt colloid) when anxious

As a vegan, I’m not surprised. We all have to get our vitamin b12 from functional food because it would otherwise naturally occur on the foods we eat from bacteria. Our foods are sterile and thus the bacteria never deposit b12 for us. There’s probably much more we don’t know about.

I remember reading a study a while back about the B12 found in unfiltered river water being sufficient for maintaining healthy levels in humans. It would be interesting to see a human study on this - albeit not useful for most people, as river water in most places if very much contaminated.

Also for something more anecdotal, I worked as a labourer on a couple of farms for a while (which had a lot to do with why I went vegan...), and the animals had to be supplemented to the teeth to get sufficient vitamins and minerals. My guess is this was because their feed was all from processed grains and legumes, and their water came from the filtrated mains system.

Off topic but does anyone else automatically filter out any headline that has "may" in it? Literally anything can be true if you add "may".

Eating dirt may cause cancer. Eating dirt may cure cancer. Earth may sit on the back of a giant, invisible tortoise.

It feels like a lazy way to pump out blog articles when there's no real information available.

"In scientific and academic language, may is often used to talk about typical occurrences - things that can happen in certain situations."

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/22134/can-could-vs-m...

I would love a huge study done on say NY Times/Wapo and a few other sources and going back through their science reporting through 2000-2010. Focusing on articles like this and see if how wrong/right they were. Or, if it's so inconclusive, that we really shouldn't be letting scientists push out their work willy nilly without establishing better data/proof. Science journalists seem to take these education PR departments at their word a bit too often.

I'm working on something to track stuff like that. What would you consider evidence of a study being disproved?

May usually means 'has some evidence behind it'. Heuristic: the probability of it being true should be high enough to be worth talking about.

Reminds me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

This is old news (circa 2002) and was published widely under the subject heading of "The Dirt Vaccine". Here's a link to "The Edge" series on this topic:

"The Dirt Vaccine (Bacteria and Health) 2002":

http://emro.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=1059

Google for "the dirt vaccine" for more:

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+dirt+vaccine&ie=UTF-8&oe...

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