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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Or even if it does, is that a short term pain but a longer term strengthening of the immune system? We keep sanitizing our environment - which is an outlier's outlier relative to the history of the species - and we keep getting more ill, more autoimmune diseases, more allergies, etc.

TBH when my friend's dog links my face, I sometimes lick my lips. The odds of that making me stronger are 1000x the odds of it killing me. Mind you, I'm not going to lick a toilet bowl. But perhaps some minor exposure to such things isn't so bad in the broader sense?

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This resonates given my love of dogs and the huge chain of complex events that likely connects the sewage plant effluent that fertilized the lawn where I lived as a child and my emergent disease states that followed.

Ignoring the fact that exposure may be a problem from E. coli to sewage, I read Robynne Chutkan's microbiome book at the suggestion of my doctor several years ago and nothing has come closer to the truth on our lack of exposure also being part of the problem.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Try finding the median there and there's a Nobel waiting for you.

https://robynnechutkan.com/

My "come to Jesus moment" on the importance of microbiome was a feature article in the NY Times' Sunday Magazine five or so years ago.

We always hear "People with pets live longer" and "couples live longer", right? While I can imagine the emotional value of those relationship and how it enables better health, my theory is that the constant presence of other microbiomes - human and/or pet - is also a major contributor to better health. Live alone? Without a pet? You aren't exposed as much.

p.s. Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll add them to my Wish List on ThriftBooks.com

No problem on the book suggestion.

Chutkan deserves the success she's had since that book shipped. The book is not an easy read. It requires a strong stomach, to say the least.

I was lucky to have a doctor who was thoughtful enough to connect my obsessions with diet and exercise to continuous improvement by leveraging my hyperlexia against the root cause that I have a stomach in each leg. ;)

I like your theory. It would be interesting to see a group of biology students debate the merits of such a theory and how they might prove or disprove such a theory.

I'm sure there are some game theory problems lurking there.

> We keep sanitizing our environment - which is an outlier's outlier relative to the history of the species - and we keep getting more ill, more autoimmune diseases, more allergies, etc

There are many sickness that basically don't exist anymore or are very rare, but used to be normal in the past.

Fair enough. But at what cost? Have sickness been mitigated, or have we simply traded some for others? Is over-sanitization a balloon grab?

Things that use your body to reproduce are difficult to “limit” such that you guarantee “minor exposure”. Instead, you’re gambling that your immune system can mount a response quickly enough to “limit” the illness. Perhaps the benefit of making your immune system mount a response is that it’s now “trained”. (This is of course the basic concept behind a vaccine: “train” the immune system and “limit” the risk of serious illness.)

Gambling? That what...my lifelong way of living is going to suddenly kill me? I don't think so.

Again, the species developed in a less than sterile environment, and suddenly we're going to clean that up and there are no unintended consequences?

People are chugging soda and eating over-processed food are...worried about flushing the toilet? Let's weigh the risks here.

> Again, the species developed in a less than sterile environment

Yes, and early death from disease was incredibly common.

The discovery of penicillin is estimated to have saved over 200 million lives.

Early death from what? When?

fwiw, if we keep doling out antibiotics as we are, we'll be happy with only losing 200 million.

So again, are we making gains or grabbing a balloon?

> Early death from what? When?

I literally said "early death from disease". Do you need me to enumerate specifically which diseases penicillin was able to treat?

Your comments reek of survivorship bias. Just because we're alive today doesn't mean things weren't terrible before. Imagine how different the 14th century could have been if we had antibiotics to treat the bubonic plague.

Nonetheless, mentioning penicillin is entertaining, but that's not within the scope of questioning the over-sterilization of our daily living environment.

You've gone hyperbolic to make a point - typical ofmn HN - that simply doesn't apply. It doesn't address the question. That question is - again - is too clean a good thing? (Hint: probably not).

Thanks for taking the time. But please, let's stay on topic. Thanks.

> which is an outlier's outlier relative to the history of the species

So is living in houses

Homes? That's part of the sanitizing. We're not sleeping on dirt. We're showering daily, sometimes more. Etc.

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