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Comment by jdblair | Hacker News Reader

When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.

Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.

A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.

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In the 1930s American lawn care guides would tout volunteer herbs as a benefit of lawns. Today we call them "weeds" and spend a crazy amount of effort, money, and chemicals into eradicating them

If we had always had this attitude towards "weeds", we wouldn't have turned the weedy Brassica oleracea into cabbage, broccoli, kale, collard greens, etc.

In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.

lawns are a disaster from an environmental, cultural, and water-use sense.

When I was growing up in eastern Europe in 80s, older folks in rural areas with various joint ailments would daily gather stinging nettles with gloves and then literally whip themselves on the affected places.

Maybe it was just natural suppressant of pain or anti-inflammatory remedy, certainly no expectation to fix joints themselves (that even current medicine often can't fix) but nobody normal would go through such experience daily if there would be results.

fwiw a lot of us are trying to bring that knowledge back. I'm currently in the process of replacing as much of my grass as possible with creeping thyme, because it's nice underfoot, smells good and doesn't need mowed.

> and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies.

Is there any research backing up this folk remedy? Asking for a partner and multiple family members with severe seasonal allergies

Mechanically it’s probably the same as allergy exposure therapy(https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/08/1168714...), which comes in a lot of varieties including oral/digestion.

It’s effective in a clinical setting and honestly too dangerous to recommend in home settings without several layers of precautions.

But, in theory, highly specialized exposures to particular local allergies would be more effective than most of the clinical studies. And that’s what I would expect is driving the folk remedy.

Worth noting, almost all of the treatments like this are VASTLY more effective when done at younger ages. But they are also even more dangerous. So please speak to an allergist first and don’t do stuff you just read online.

Some research suggests it works, some research concludes it is no better than placebo. :shrug:

Eh, good enough for me. Pretty sure placebo won't cut it with the severe allergy of my family members so we can just try and see.

(if it does have an effect then I wouldn't be surprised if it also matters if the nettles were regionally sourced or not - IIRC there were some studies suggesting that that mattered for the effectiveness of honey helping with seasonal allergies or not)

My SO swears raw milk helped for this. Sourced locally it contained local allergens and helped with seasonal allergies.

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