I don’t know enough to comment on the Hygiene / Old Friends hypothesis, but anecdotally it seems like almost everyone I know now has an allergy or autoimmune disorder of some sort.
After giving birth, my sister suddenly developed something similar to celiac disease (but not quite the same; I don’t think doctors ever figured out exactly what it is) to where she can’t eat grains and a few other types of food as well. I used to get eczema occasionally, but now it seems to have morphed into a permanent rash that continuously moves to different locations over my body. And my wife had food allergy testing done a couple of years ago due to constant stomach pain and has now eliminated chocolate, seafood, peaches, and many other foods from her diet.
It’s bizarre. We really need to figure out what’s going on before everyone has a diet prepared by their pharmacist alongside all of the pills needed to cope with their autoimmune pain.
Sad to say, the fecal-oral cycle of infection remains common in the USA, with the most common areas of spread being restaurants although hospitals were sadly guilty of this until recently. And for any gastrointestinal illness in the USA, the single most common cause is Helicobacter pylori. Back in the 1980s and 1990s researchers mostly associated Helicobacter pylori with ulcers, but since then the research has expanded to show it produces a wide range of symptoms. It is a serious illness, even if you never develop an ulcer. And it so contagious that you can get it simply by kissing someone. And it is shockingly prevalent, with more than 20% of the public having it. It is always the first thing that should be checked when someone has weird gastrointestinal issues. The good news is that it is easy to cure: 14 days of antibiotics cures the disease in 96% of patients.
When people walk into a restaurant - fast food, slow food - especially before COVID, do you see people go to the bathroom to wash their hands before the meal? That never happens.
I've never seen it happen either - and I live in Poland, though I haven't seen it in my various visits to China, Germany and the UK either. Who actually does go into the restaurant bathroom specifically to wash their hands before the meal?
Three simple habits that have (anecdotally) cut down on colds for me:
* wear a mask in crowded environments where showing my face doesn't buy me anything (I don't wear one at work, but do at the grocery store or airport)
* wash hands before eating (or at least use hand sanitizer)
* grip the exit handle of the bathroom with a paper towel and dispose of it on exit
Not exactly double blind demonstrated but low cost and this year has been much better than last (which may also be due to my immune system having caught back up, too, so YMMV)
I do - it just makes sense if you are riding public transport or touching stuff that isn’t as clean as you’d think. Like your phone, wallet, keys, backpack, shoe laces, pant pockets, etc. Not obsessively, but if I haven’t washed my hands in a few hours or feel they are dirty I wash them before eating.
Spanish here. I do it all the time. I even carry a small bottle of alcohol in case I go to a place where I can't wash my hands first.
I would say most people do wash their hands here, however I have seen everything. From people not washing them to people using the toilet, not washing them, and then sitting on the table for lunch.
I usually carry a bottle of hand sanitizer to clean my hands before meals. I started doing this even before the pandemic, to avoid getting sick with the common cold.
A good number of people do this in my city: when I go on public transit, I see a fair number of commuters with a hand sanitizer bottle clipped to their bag with a carabiner. Many people also have a bottle in their pockets or purse.
So true. The thing that always shocked me outside of the US was the inverse. The habit to clean hands soap or just a moist towel but then the lack of soap and sanitation in the restrooms.
It's a thing in our household. Everyone washes hands before eating. When we go to restaurants, we order, then take turns washing hands. I guess it depends on where in the U.S.
Most people can take 14 days of an oral antibiotic without significant long-term adverse consequences.
As of 15 years ago, according to my doctor, while on the antibiotic, sacchromyces boulardi is the best probiotic to take to try to minimize the risk of adverse consequences.
Both can be true, antibiotics can cause substantial side effects in some people and most people will be fine. Still sucks if you are not one of those most people.
On the other hand, we're discovering that certain antibiotics can be very useful in treating specific GI conditions.
Rifaximin, and antibiotic designed to stay in your gut, has been approved for treating specific types of IBS. When it works it can induce remission for months or longer.
Story time: I went through a dark and stressful period of my life when I was in my teens. After I mostly got over the issues, I went on a vacation with a friend and his family. At one point in the vacation, I ended getting some kind of food poisoning from shellfish that apparently no one else who at the same meal got. Anyway, I eventually recovered in a few days, but it seemed as though I never fully recovered. I had frequent GI issues for literal years.
I sometimes wonder if the intense stress and whatnot that I had experienced prior some how made me more susceptible to whatever illness I happened to succumb to? No way to truly know, I suppose.
After various specialists and unhelpful treatments for what was later deemed to be "IBS", I was recommended to try something by my GP. He gave me some antibiotic (this was 15 years or so ago) it may have been that one -- Rifaximin -- I know it started with an "R." Anyway, my GP warned me that he came across it in some research, and would be willing to give a try, but I was not to get my hopes up.
I took the antibiotics for 14 days. Towards the end of the regiment, I was starting to have symptoms far worse than normal, but I pushed through. 15 years or so later, I basically have no issues at all. Whatever the drug was it was like a freaking miracle cure.
Antibiotics seem to be underused for GI issues, anecdotally I’ve experienced a dramatic reduction (even elimination) of some GI issues when using antibiotics (Z-pack) for unrelated infections (a course followed by quality probiotics like Visibiome).
Have a family member being treated for Helicobacter pylori right now! He was very worried it was cancer as the symptoms seemed to align. Interestingly he is allergic to penicillin which is complicating the treatment.
I became allergic to Yellow 6 randomly. I would get extreme abdominal pain, even went to the ER a couple times and got a CT scan once due to the severity of the pain. I broke out in hives, tongue would swell, etc. I eventually figured it out after having a reaction to Cheese Doritos but not Cool Ranch (the only ingredient difference was Yellow 6). I tested it on some other foods with Yellow 6 and confirmed it.
So I stayed away from it for a couple years, then decided to cautiously try some Doritos again, and no reaction. Today, I'm not allergic to yellow 6 at all.
I have a hypothesis based on my own experiences that this can happen from accumulating something in the body faster than it can be cleared. Could you have been continuously ingesting yellow 6 for a while, to the point that it crossed some threshold?
I wasn't ingesting it any more than a regular person -- but I was surprised to find out how many foods use Yellow 6. It's more orange than yellow. It's also banned in several countries. It used to be in Kraft Mac and Cheese but they replaced their artificial colors with natural ones, which is nice.
One thing I wondered while being allergic to it, was how much could I take before triggering the reaction. It ended up being extremely little. A single dorito chip would set it off. After that, I just cut it out of my diet completely.
Another weird thing is the reaction would last about 45 minutes exactly every time. I'd be sitting on the toilet bent over in agony, watching the clock.
Allergies seem to come and go. My partner developed allergies against many local fruits in her early twenties, to the point where she could barely eat any fresh fruits without her lips and throat swelling up; but most of them subsided in her 30ies and she can now eat almost all fruits again with only minor irritations for some.
You ever get that itch in the roof of your mouth, and you use your tongue to kind of scrape/scratch the roof of your mouth?
After I started paying attention to food allergies from this Yellow 6 thing, I noticed I would get this mouth-itch from certain fruits and nuts. Watermelon, almonds, and oranges. Super minor in the grand scheme of things, but never knew this itch was due to an allergy -- just thought it happened randomly. That is one thing that has yet to go away, but I can live with it at least.
Fruit allergies can actually be pollen allergies because the pollen contaminates the fruit. If your partner moved to a different areas which has trees she's not allergic to, or just eats fruits produced from somewhere else than she used to, that may simply be the reason.
I’m dealing with a similar thing with poultry right now. If I eat it too frequently, it gives me ridiculous, flu and allergy-like symptoms. However, now that I’ve basically eliminated it from my diet, I can eat it on occasion without much issue.
It took me forever to figure out because poultry is often a filler meat.
I am very close to the same conclusion. Every time I travel, things return to normal. I always eat chicken at home and never when I travel. I tried eliminating everything else I could think of because chicken was such a reliable staple for me for so many years. My symptoms seem more mild. mostly GI and not much systemic presentation
We use a lot more preservatives now than we used to. We typically dont mill grain locally anymore for example, but grain is a near perfect fungal substrate, so we have to douse it in all sorts of antifungal agents so that the grain survives shipping to the phillipines and then the flour needs protection on its journey to whatever country it is going to. (warning, anecdata) Most people i know who have non coeliac gluten intolerance, tolerate gluten just fine. They can eat seitan made using locally milled / grown grain just fine. Seitan is almost pure gluten. The gluten isnt the issue for these folks, myself included. Our over-reliance on pesticides/herbicides/fungicides is, in my opinion, a very plausible explanation that appeared roughly the same time as this spike in issues.
My friend also developed almost continuous eczema for the past couple of years, and tried cutting out a large variety of foods from her diet to see what might be causing it.
Everything failed. And then, one day her normal brand of shampoo (which she had been using for 5+ years, and is advertised for sensitive skins) ran out, and she didn't get a chance to buy it for a couple of weeks. To her surprise, no eczema during those weeks! She changed her shampoo brand, and her eczema problems are gone, at least for now.
My point is, if you are trying to selectively eliminate things from your diet/lifestyle to figure out the trigger of your eczema, don't ignore things that you have been using for years before your eczema started.
I use to get the flu 1 or 2 times a year. I started going out in more crowded areas, going to pub, etc, and I haven't had a cold or flu in 4 years.
I don't know the article knows as much as they think they do about health, because using muscles also damages them. I been nursing a bicep injury for the last 4 months.
I get its not a prefect analogy, but nothing is, else it would be the same thing
I don't think people should go licking railings, but total avoidance of germs is quite harmful. that's a fact.
I did this for covid. The second my vaccine kicked in I dropped all precautions and started staying indoors with as many people as possible for as long as possible, basically trying to never go a day without a small exposure. I’ve tested for infection a number of times and a university study tested my antibodies periodically for a year and I’ve never had a detectable case. Continuous exposure to small amounts of the virus seems to have kept me more free from infection than those that took significant precautions. I’m not just reckless, I used to have severe OCD, so living carefully with lots of precautions is actually more dangerous for me than the virus.
So, another anecdote: I have COVID right now. I have had a bunch of self tests at home, and have tested myself every single time I have had any kind of cold or fever.
Despite me getting on a crammed bus every morning and afternoon to go working in the same room as about 80 other people 4 days a week I didn't get COVID (that I know of) until now.
Sometimes we are just lucky. Maybe the vaccine worked better-than-average for us. Maybe the route of infection works less well for us. Maybe we had it without noticing it at all
I also live in a large city, in TX, so I most definitely had regular exposures.
Whether asymptomatic or not infected at all seems like a distinction without a difference. Either way I didn’t miss work, vacations, or get noticeably harmed. The whole point of my strategy was to expose my immune system to germs it was well equipped to fight off quickly and expose it continuously so I didn’t encounter it after it had mutated too much to be recognized.
I’m well aware of the pitfalls of anecdata, I just thought my approach was different enough from what most people did to be worth sharing. There will be no studies to test my strategy, so all we can have is my anecdotes.
Been collecting for a while. Latest success was supplementing with a probiotic specifically for oxolates. Prepare the gut with l-glutamine and silicea if you go that route
Have you tried taking an anti-acid or acids reducer?
I was getting a rough depression after eating certain foods. My/my doctors current hypothesis is my liver was producing too much bile acid and triggering a condition known as bile acid malabsorption. This would basically wipe my gut out. I couldn’t absorb nutrients correctly so my mood and energy levels would drop.
I now know it lasts a few days if I goof up my diet, but it use to appear chronic since I was basically triggering it daily.
antacids just made my body ramp up making more bile. I eventually started taking betaine HCL, which helps when I have reflux or pain in the stomach. Seemingly a lot of bugs survive the stomach acid these days. Started taking the betaine when I went on carnivore diet and saw undigested meat in the stools.
Vitamin D (or lack of it) plays a vital and huge factor:
"A prospective study of dietary intake of vitamin D found women with daily intake above 400 IU had a 40% lower risk of MS. [53] In a study among healthy young adults in the US, White men and women with the highest vitamin D serum levels had a 62% lower risk of developing MS than those with the lowest vitamin D levels. [54]"
"Another prospective study in young adults from Sweden also found a 61% lower risk of MS with higher serum vitamin D levels; [55] and a prospective study among young Finnish women found that low serum vitamin D levels were associated with a 43% increased risk of MS. [56] In prospective studies of persons with MS, higher vitamin D levels have been associated with reduced disease activity and progression. [57,58]"
"Collectively, the current evidence suggests that low vitamin D may have a causal role in MS and if so, approximately 40% of cases may be prevented by correcting vitamin D insufficiency. [59] This conclusion has been strengthened substantially by recent evidence that genetically determined low levels of vitamin D predict higher risk of multiple sclerosis."
"While this may largely be due to genetic differences, some studies suggest that T1D rates are lower in sunnier areas. Early evidence suggesting that vitamin D may play a role in T1D comes from a 30-year study that followed more than 10,000 Finnish children from birth: Children who regularly received vitamin D supplements during infancy had a nearly 90% lower risk of developing type 1 diabetes than those who did not receive supplements. [61]"
"A prospective study among healthy young adults in the US found that White individuals with the highest levels of serum vitamin D had a 44% lower risk of developing T1D in adulthood than those with the lowest levels. [63]"
"The Vitamin D and Omega 3 trial (VITAL), a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial following more than 25,000 men and women ages 50 and older, found that taking vitamin D supplements (2,000 IU/day) for five years, or vitamin D supplements with marine omega-3 fatty acids (1,000 mg/day), reduced the incidence of autoimmune diseases by about 22%, compared with a placebo. Autoimmune conditions observed included rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, polymyalgia rheumatica, and autoimmune thyroid diseases (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Graves’ disease). [80]"
It is one of the reasons I agreed to get pets. Kids growing up in households with pets have fewer allergies.
I wasn't prepared for how much I'd fall in love with him though.
Some of my fondest memories are of my son playing with our dog. At night my dog would sleep by the feet of my son, and if he woke up he would simply turn around and use my dog as a pillow. I found them sleeping like that or spooning a couple of times a week.
Our dog made our house dirty in about the same way a two year old would, but more spread out. His fur was 10cm long and would dispense dirt, soil, bugs, small branches and so on for several hours after a walk despite us literally vacuuming him.
Exactly, anecdotes, with a healthy portion of the Availability and Confirmation Heuristics.
We already know that women are more susceptible to auto-immune responses and that pregnancy is one of the reasons for that disparity between the sexes (carrying a foreign invader for 9 months plays with the expression of immunity genes in a manner that occasionally - rarely, at a population level - backfires.) And we know that the risk for an autoimmune "malfunction" rises with age. Thus there will obviously be random clusters of people, with more women who've given birth and and average age that skews older than, say, 30 - to which you unfortunately seem to belong - where there are more autoimmune responses than the average population.
What's funny is that in response to this post there are multiple posts each suggesting their own conspiracy. I wonder if this actually points to something, or it too is a just random noise.
When I was getting my immunology PhD, the prevailing thought about the prevalence of autoimmune disease in women was that estrogen promoted B cell survival, leading to more anti-self B cells from being removed.
> average age that skews older than, say, 30 - to which you unfortunately seem to belong
Haha, unfortunately you would be correct.
> in response to this post there are multiple posts each suggesting their own conspiracy. I wonder if this actually points to something, or it too is a just random noise.
After I posted my original comment full of personal anecdotes, I thought “It’s always my useless posts that get the most responses.” Checking HN later in the day confirmed my suspicion.
As a data scientist, there are certain fields of study concerning the physical world that overwhelm me with the vast number of baseless and likely wrong theories within them: psychology, sociological, and medicine. Basically any field that attempts to study the human body or mind.
We likely have sufficiently advanced ML and inference techniques by this point to discover the true root causes of allergies and autoimmune disease (and all disease for that matter), but unfortunately this is a case where the problem is the data, not the algorithm.
We have no reasonable system in place to accurately collect, process, and store vast amounts of observational health data. And beside the data quality concerns, the privacy implications of attempting to store all of that sensitive data securely are mind-boggling.
Nevertheless, with observations from billions of people, it seems like even simple techniques could extract a lot of signal from the noise, which is just too difficult with the tiny number of low sample, high variance RCT studies we currently use. When you’re trying to predict causation from one or a few variables, it’s simple. When you’re considering thousands of variables at once, it’s next to impossible.
> it seems like even simple techniques could extract a lot of signal from the noise, which is just too difficult with the tiny number of low sample, high variance RCT studies we currently use.
On the other hand, RCTs gather relatively well-conditioned data. And we have enough study power across them that we end up with a lot of statistically significant, real findings.... that still have effect sizes that aren't clinically meaningful.
We even know about things with large effect sizes that are controlled by a few variables, that are rare enough that it's hard to find the patients that they apply to.
And, of course, correlation ain't causation: if we used your system and found a bunch of things, we'd still need to figure out how to reduce them down enough to be something we could test before advising practitioners to do things a certain way.
I had an allergist tell me about a study that supported this idea recently :
Introduction of pig whipworm eggs into the digestive tract of IBS patients reduced symptoms for a some patients. Pretty fascinating actually.
I was seeing the allergist for my eczema and he asked me if I experienced symptom relief when traveling abroad, which I did in Honduras. He thought I may have been exposed to a parasite there that diverted my overactive immune response. go figure.
As I understood it the reason why some parasites can have beneficial impact on some autoimmune disorders is because they have evolved the ability to suppress the immune system, not because they overwork the immune system. But I've really only heard of this being a thing with IBS.
Excess calorie intake causes chronic inflammation, which gradually causes a plethora of other problems. There's also autoimmune conditions as a consequence of viral infections, so many of that from covid in recent years.
I had terrible grass and pollen allergies until I started mowing my own lawn and gardening without gloves. Exposure therapy is a thing. It works at least for some people.
What you're referring to is inflammation and is real but kind of misunderstood.
If you want to reduce inflammation you should exercise regularly. This seems obvious but, to me, people will come up with conspiracy after conspiracy to explain this. But the basics - moving a bunch - work really well. The American Lifestyle is progressively more and more sedentary, and we're blaming our woes on sunscreen or something.
Most people aren't actually interested in knowing what's going on. But one can find out. Even if one isn't conspiracy minded, it's quite obvious that oligarchs, their multinational companies and governments couldn't give a single fuck about normal people.
PFAS and microplastics everywhere, rises in autoimmune diseases as well as allergies and Alzheimer's. Addictive amounts of sugar in a lot of food. GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic.
None of these people actually care about us. If we don't get an understanding of what's healthy and how to get rid of all of this artificial poison we're probably going to end up in the Idiocracy timeline.
> Most people aren't actually interested in knowing what's going on.
I don't necessarily think this is the case, at least the US. It's time consuming and expensive to get testing done without an actual diagnosis, even with healthcare. Taking the time off or spending the money on allergy testing just isn't going to take command of the budget over necessities or more serious healthcare needs.
You're right about the rest of it though, but IMO the systemic issues with money in politics prevents anything from being done about it at the moment, and I don't know what it would take to push the working class into a general strike or revolt.
Most GMOs are safe, with the possible exception of those that produce their own insecticide, and overspraying of herbicides on crops GMO'd to be more herbicide-resistant.
I grow some of my own food (salads, zucchini, Hokkaido, potatoes, etc) in my garden but it's nowhere near self-sufficiency. All of my seeds as well as my garden are completely GMO free. I've been growing the last few seasons by solely relying on my own seeds though.
Goes without saying. It’s rare to find GMO vegetables even commercially (only zucchini and potatoes even could be), let alone in a garden.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about ensuring the GMO vendors haven’t ever touched the seed. How are you ensuring provenance as to avoid the trust issues?
There are many places you can get food and seeds that are verified to be non-GMO.
If you're trying to do a "reflections on trusting trust" reference, well, this is the real world. You might not ever be 100% sure that something is what it says it is (you might be a brain in a jar!), but it's usually better to get it from the guy you trust than the guy you don't.
> There are many places you can get food and seeds that are verified to be non-GMO.
Of course, at least within some margin of contamination. Identity preserved allows no more than 0.5% contamination, which is the best in the biz. But, the problem is that the earlier commenter didn't trust GMO vendors, not GMOs themselves. As in: Non-GMOs from a GMO vendor are equally untrustworthy. Hell, even a hat with a GMO vendor's logo on it is untrustworthy according to that commenter.
Unless you're sticking to food that doesn't have GMOs to begin with (which, to be fair, is almost all food!), you're going to be searching high and low to find a vendor that doesn't also dabble in GMOs.
Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024, you are highly under estimating the devastation of our gluttonous foodie culture.
All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.
I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.
I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.
Don't be so sure. We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals.
"our gluttonous foodie culture."
Our which one? Obesity is a global problem, not a specifically American one. You will meet a lot of obese people in Brasilian favelas or rural Serbia, not exactly places that have "foodie culture".
"Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024"
I am not trying to discourage you, but the main stumbling stone with obesity is not losing the weight, but keeping it off for years. Your comment would carry a lot more weight (pun intended) if you lost that weight in 2020 and kept it off until today.
> We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals
Opinion: nothing. Our hunger/satiety signals are normal and evolutionarily advantageous. What changed was the access, and composition, of food.
Food is tasty. Like really tasty these days. High fat, sugar, salt. And it's super duper easy to get. This stuff is designed to perfect target your brain and make you say "mmm".
You wanting to eat more makes sense because these foods are highly, or over, nutritious. Cavemen didn't have fried chicken, they barely had chicken - they had nuts. This wanting to eat more and more is evolutionarily advantageous. Because you don't know when your next meal is. You should be greedy, eat as much as you can and as often as you can. I mean, look at dogs. Give them infinite access to foods and they will eat themselves to death. Sure we're smarter but much of this stuff is at a level below the brain.
For all of human history I'm sure this functionality was a very good thing. Now that we have food surplus... not anymore. And to top it off, for the first time ever, we don't need to move to live. People are sedentary. So we don't even offset this effect with movement.
It seems to me the human brain/body is incompatible with modern human life. We're broken. We're exploitable by addiction at every turn. The solution might be to change our brains. Ozempic seems to help a lot - less drinking and smoking too.
I 100% agree - I just wanted to add that processed food also plays a huge role. Our ancestors didn't eat canned fish dipped in high calorie oils or snacks / junk food with no fiber. White bread is used commonly throughout many households but whole-grains are a lot healthier. Eating food which has a high degree of high fructose corn-syrup or sugar with no added fiber has a detrimental effect on health and is not something that our bodies are used to. The high-glycemic index spikes our bodies go through when you combine these factors does a ton of damage to our health and yes - I believe it does have a role in triggering auto-immune reactions. Type 1 diabetics as an example are diabetic due to their own immune systems falsely labelling the pancreas beta-cells as enemies and triggering an auto-immune response -- the reason I believe this happens is due to the high-inflammatory reaction our pancreas go through when we eat extremely highly processed foods (i.e. high sugar / glycemic index items with high insulin spikes & lacking fiber). I don't have a lot of data to prove any of this - so this is my hypothesis but I can confirm that ever since I started staying away from processed foods, I've been in amazing health and I feel much better than when I was slightly over-weight and consuming processed junk.
The interesting thing is that Vietnamese food is really tasty (I love it at least), but Viet Nam is something like 2 per cent fat. And they don't suffer from shortages of food.
Vietnamese people in Czechia are also usually thin, even though they make more than average money, being either business owners or skilled professionals. The contrast with Czechs is visible.
Probably not, since carbs have always been the easiest food to get and they didn't have this problem. Protein, and especially meat, was always rare and a minority of diet. But greens, fruits, nuts (ish, they have fat) are plentiful.
Realistically, this and seed oils are the only place you are going to really encounter GMOs. If you are avoiding such processed food anyway...
> GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic.
If you really must binge on the junk food and are concerned about any GMO content, why are you paying extra for organic? Why not just buy non-GMO products?
The US does not appear define a specific threshold – best effort only, but I believe the EU allows 0.9% contamination in organic crops. The identity preserved program only allows 0.5%, so that's theoretically a better bet than organic, if you had some reason to care.
This is inaccurate - the other day I wanted to get some cookies for a child - label said sugar content was like 25%, that's insane. I have baked cookies myself, you don't need that much sugar to get decent tasting cookies, they are not suppose to be junk food. it's everywhere, not just chocolates, even in bread.
It better be a malevolent conspiracy, because if not, then it's suicidal stupidity of our species.
> it's everywhere, not just chocolates, even in bread.
Like the average bread meant to be highly appealing to the consumer isn't also junk food? Again, the only real sources of GMO products you are apt to find out there are corn-based (HFCS) and seed oils (soybean and canola). While you can make bread with those products, that doesn't mean you need to.
I think we can agree that there are breads that wouldn't be considered junk food, but they also wouldn't contain GMOs, because the ingredients typically used to make that type of bread literally have no GMO option anyway. (Yes, there was once a GMO wheat in the lab, but never became commercially available.)
> Most people aren't actually interested in knowing what's going on. But one can find out. Even if one isn't conspiracy minded, it's quite obvious that oligarchs, their multinational companies and governments couldn't give a single fuck about normal people.
Yup, there are people who subscribed to the system and there are people that opted out.
I don't even try to explain to people anymore. If I did I am pretty sure there would be a downvote frenzy and then Dan might even get pinged.
>We can see that not all obstacles make you stronger. Destroy the cartilage in your knee, and it may never fully recover, since cartilage doesn’t grow back. //
I'm not a medic but I recall this being disproven or shown to be at least partially a myth a few years ago - https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/humans-have-salam... from 2020, for example. Researchers showed that ankle cartilage is younger than knee- and younger still than hip cartilage. Indicating that it grows back in ankles relatively quickly.
As the article says, analogies can mislead us, but this didn't inspire confidence.
I could probably dismiss it if the article weren't about being scientifically precise and dispelling myths relating to human biology.
Good piece, but the title is misleading too as the conclusion appears to be "it's complicated; yes and no".
Also runners have great knee cartilage compared to sedentary people, despite the myth.
>Using motion capture and sophisticated computer modeling, the study confirms that running pummels knees more than walking does. But in the process, the authors conclude, running likely also fortifies and bulks up the cartilage, the rubbery tissue that cushions the ends of bones.
That's mixing up repeated increased stress from running and "destroyed" from the parent comment. Those are different things.
Same situation with resistance training lightly damaging and rebuilding muscles over time and actually tearing a large part of a muscle which leaves lasting damage.
Why this way of looking at cartilage is a misconception is explained in the study cited by the top level comment. Cartilage in different parts of the body has been shown to be different ages, indicating that it rejuvenates and that there there isn't just a single set of good or bad cartilage.
It's long been believed that an ACL rupture requires surgery as the ligament does not have sufficient blood flow to repair on its own. But then a recent study showed that in a significant percentage of people who suffer ACL ruptures and elect not to have surgery the ligament eventually repairs itself on its own.
I know that people can function and even be high-level athletes without an ACL, but I haven't heard of non-surgical repairs outside of specific inteventions (holding the leg at a fixed angle for a few weeks following an injury). I'd be keen to read about this if you have links?
Ah I think I misread the gp comment - I thought there was research about ACLs repairing 'on their own', this looks like the case I've seen where putting the joint at a fixed angle leads to repair.
This is an excellent article. Too many people believe that kids getting colds will help their immune system get stronger. In reality, getting sick is almost never beneficial.
The information about the hygiene hypothesis and how it is really more about "old friends" is also very important and not widely understood. Many don't know about the hygiene hypothesis at all and those who do usually interpret it incorrectly.
Kids getting colds allows them to develop immunity to some of the hundreds of endemic upper respiratory viruses that constantly circulate throughout the human population. They're going to get infected with many of them sooner or later, so better to get it over with sooner. This protects them later in life when their immune systems are less effective.
I haven't seen any research to support that contention -- rather, everything I've seen suggests you don't get coronaviruses like colds once off, so you don't "get it over with". Instead, they can weaken your immune system and these viruses can stay around for years, as discussed in the article.
The article is a mix of half-truths and speculation with a few random facts sprinkled in. It doesn't represent any sort of scientific consensus. Don't take it too seriously.
Infections with typical rhinoviruses and coronaviruses build adaptive immunity to those viruses (as well as those that are genetically similar). This typically reduces the severity of subsequent infections. They didn't stay around for years.
When we talk about things that "strengthen" or "weaken" the immune system that's really an oversimplification. There's a lot more going on in the complete system.
You say the article isn't fully truthful. Where are your sources to back up your claims? What are your credentials? Or are you just pulling it out of thin air?
> Some people compare the immune system to a muscle
To reiterate something from a recent discussion on air purifiers [0], if your body is a civilization of cells then activating the adaptive immune system is like unleashing Skynet [1] to stop a potential zombie apocalypse.
Even if Skynet reliably wins, you're losing at least a few cities as glowing craters, and each time you're rolling the dice hoping that not too many of the murder-bots go rogue before you can make them self-destruct or go back into storage. You definitely do not want to slam that big red button just because of one police report of a human biting another human, or a report that a bunch of people with green skin are marching down the road, etc.
As we studying the adaptive immune system, we keep discovering safety-interlocks and subtle feedback loops, which presumably evolved because our relatives without them simply tore themselves apart a bit too often.
My "unpopular opinion" is that in 100 years, people will consider it very strange that most of the population was permanently infected with a bunch of viruses like EBV/HSV/CMV/HPV and nobody cared or did anything about it.
This is only "unpopular" because you are giving no actionable thing for people to do. People do care. But there is virtually nothing that can be done about a lot of these. We can take efforts to stop the spread, and indeed we do. But at large, it is there and there is little you can do.
So it isn't strange. In the same way that we don't consider it strange that 100 years ago, virtually every human had parasites. It is only the last 40 or so years that most of the meat you can buy at a grocery store doesn't. And if you are still buying "wild caught" fish, it is almost certainly with parasites.
What is strange is thinking that people didn't care about parasites. People care. But there is shockingly little most can do to change it.
" you are giving no actionable thing for people to do"
As far as an actionable thing goes, my N == 1 experience says that regular nasal rinsing reduces both frequency and severity of various common colds a lot.
I used to be down with sore throat, running nose and light to moderate cough some 5-6 times a year, since I was a kid until my early 40s. Once I started with the flushing, it all went away. Nowadays, about twice a year I "catch" something, which means a single night of chills and sweating, and in the morning I am fine again. The mucous membranes seem to be no longer susceptible. No sore throat ever etc.
I'm not clear that that is in the same vein as what the parent post meant?
That said, this is an interesting suggestion to follow my post. It literally only works if you have access to clean, probably distilled, water supply. If you don't, you are also introducing a path for some serious problems into your sinuses in the form of parasites.
"access to clean, probably distilled, water supply"
A good antibacterial filter + boiling that filtered water just to be sure goes a long way. That equipment is nontrivial, but for someone in a developed economy, usually affordable. Probably cheaper than being sick often, because even European welfare states often won't give you anything for first days of sickness.
You are correct that boiling it can probably help a lot. You then have to store it in a clean spot for it to cool to a temperature you can use, of course. Something that probably relies more on modern technology than makes sense.
Almost certainly, but you're forgetting one thing - hindsight. We can look back a hundred years from today and say that treatments back then were very misguided (and possibly even barbaric). Knowledge and science advance with time.
A modern example that is easy to visualize (unlike internal parasites) might be head-lice: There's a reason powdered wigs were very popular a few hundred years ago.
Only some viruses work this way, HIV is an example. This is a good article on endogenous retroviruses [1], that is viruses that work by integrating themselves into host DNA (a retrovirus) and made it into germline cells (eggs and sperm, the endogenous part).
And to clarify for those reading this, HIV is not passed from mom to baby via inhereted genome, but as a blood borne illness in pregnancy, during birth, or in breastmilk.
The cells infected by these viruses don't form the sperm and eggs, so no. But a great portion of our genomes is thought to come from old viruses (which actually may be used immunologically!)
There have been attempts to make vaccines for some of those, and a lot haven't worked yet (apart from HPV for which it has been done very successfully).
I hope with mRNA vaccines perhaps we will eventually get effective EBV and HSV vaccines, which will be big given (for example) EBV's links to multiple sclerosis.
Governments were doing something about it until all the fifth dentists* got amplified by “journalists” in the “media” we now recognize are mostly just wannabe influencers playing pundit drumming up clicks.
* "4 out of 5 dentists agree" except it's more like the 50th dentist, given research consensus
With HPV, the Government here (Australia) partially funded the research that led to an HPV vaccine (Gardisil) that helps prevent a bunch of cancers and now all school children here get it for free... So it does happen, just slowly...
Accurate, especially with a hindsight bias. I suspect in the hundred years they would have largely forgotten that they couldn't really do much about it beyond say, shingles vaccinations. Sort of like how we'd facepalm at pre-germ theory medicine and all of the things "obviously" done wrong.
I'm confused about some of the implications regarding crowd infections.
Certainly for some of these -- say, Chicken Pox -- we know that early and controlled exposure is preferable to a first case later in life. And that the cycle of herd immunity in survivors leads to endemicity and less deadly strains.
It seems like both things can be true: it's best not to get infections at all, but if you live in a world where you will get infected, doing so early and outside a correlated epidemic can be advantageous. And, while our immune system evolved for a different social density, it still plays a critical role in mitigating the long-term collective impact of crowd infections.
We used to think that "early and controlled exposure is preferable to a first case later in life" for chicken pox, but AFAICT that's no longer widely accepted in most western countries. Chicken pox in children can lead to serious complications in some cases, including bacterial skin infections, pneumonia, and encephalitis. The virus remains dormant in the body and can reactivate later in life as shingles. Now that there's an effective 2-shot vaccine, that's the recommended approach.
It's actually a lot more interesting than what the article explains here. The immune system essentially goes through a process of hypermutation and can be compared to a hashmap which is populated during the first few years of one's life. After that the hashmap is essentially frozen. This is why early immunization is very important because being exposed to mild pathogens when young helps one's immune system recognize and deal with similar pathogens later in life. The immune system only gets worse over time which is why eventually most viral infections overwhelm the immune system and either cause death or cancer.
That eventually can be over 100 years sometimes? Can you point to some research about immunity being much stronger acquired early on?
For some vaccines boosters are needed anyway.
I guess I'm cool coming out and saying it. Out of curiosity I bought some helminths online and infected myself. I was inspired to do it after reading a book called An Epidemic of Absence.
I can't say a whole lot -- positive or negative -- came from it, but it was easy to do and inexpensive. So even though the article says you shouldn't try it at home, I did. I consider it safe. I'm not a doctor, I just read a lot of PubMed, so take that for what it's worth.
>Our immune systems evolved for a different world (that didn’t involve 100,000 global flights per day).
Googling how it was then:
>Around 12,000 years ago and earlier, life expectancy was about 33 years. Infections, such as diarrheal diseases that led to starvation and dehydration, were the leading cause of death, accounting for about 75% of deaths.
Similar to the "old friends" theory, I personally thought the issue with allergies and parasites suppressing allergies as a "calibration issue". Where evolution effectively set the dominant immune-systems to what would be hypersensitive in an environment without parasites order to compensate for parasites immuno-suppressing to protect themselves. Sort of like how sickle cell anemia genes were selected for its malaria resistance, in spite of how bad it is to be born with two copies of the gene.
Bacterial does, viral does not appear to. I am a survivor of bacterial meningitis and sepsis at eight months and fortunately do not experience any known side effects. However, the IQ effect is sobering.
> Comparing the immune system to a muscle that gets stronger with use is overly simplistic and, in many cases, inaccurate.
But a vaccine does something analogous: it "exercises" the immune system (hopefully harmlessly) to strengthen it for when real pathogens are encountered.
So between vaccines, and natural immunities developed by exposure to and recovering from a disease, the "getting stronger with use" comparison is generally correct.
But it isn't the "exercising" of the immune system that provides the benefit, it's training it to recognize a new virus. If that could be done without a huge immune response it would be just as effective. The immune system isn't any stronger after a vaccination, it's just smarter. Presumably exposing the immune system to several unrelated viruses provides no benefits as to how it can deal with the target virus.
unlikely you could achieve that given that vaccine manufacturers purposely add adjuvants to annoy your immune system to in turn create a stronger immune response for higher antibody titers, which last longer.
Very much disagree with the implication that helminths will help very much for these conditions. While not a commonly known treatment in the 'medical sphere' it's is very commonly known in the 'patient community spheres' and from the patient run studies it does not appear to have a particularly strong effect. It does appear to help some people so it's hard to rule it out but that could easily be noise. Those who did report a benefit were most often in the less impaired category and those same people tend to benefit from a wide variety of treatments that are generally ineffective on those of use who are more impaired.
This post reads like someone who has just discovered the world of ME/CFS/LongCovid (post viral) /ToxicMold/POTs/SIBO/IBS/Lymes/hEDS/Graves/Hashimotos/MS/Lupus etc. etc. As a lifer I have seen many people enter the space and go through this exact same early stage of discovery.
What I really think it is; it's genetic, various types of generalized anxiety disorders with their associated auto-immune conditions with the most common being Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos. These genetic predispositions are made worse by diet and lifestyles and triggered by all manner of stressors.
On how to treat it, Low Dose Naltrexone is a good step one, then meds for dysautonomia, TUDCA, 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM), and then finally I think Low Dose Semaglutide < 0.1mg per week is going to be huge for auto-immune. It's early stages but few things have appeared more promising in the patient community. It worked wonders for me and a few other people I know. Everyone is different but those are in my opinion a good place to for someone starting.
Helminths did not work for me the several times I tried it and have not worked for anyone that I have personally known that has tried it which to date is around ~10pp. But I do believe the people who do say it has worked for them but I don't count them unless I knew them prior due to the issue of selection criteria biases.
When you administer helminths to yourself there is no guarantee that they are going to the right spot in your body, etc. which explains why everyone responds differently.
What is it you're suffering from?
Do you have references / communities / guides?
I have Ulcerative Colitis which I got around 2018 and it seems well managed.
Since my first COVID infection, I ended up with repetitive thoughts, short term memory problems, difficulty focusing, light sensitivity, fatigue ...
It got better but it seems that seasonal allergies re-trigger some kind of cascading inflammation and I've been useless for most of the summer.
Mine is ME/CFS from hEDS made worse by the covid vaccine. Patient led 'research' I'm talking about is done off the books in private chat groups / discords / telegram - so nothing is published. That's a double edged sword - but given the slow pace of normal medical research we just couldn't wait. Given that it's grey / black market these groups, the ones that survive, are extremely private.
Those listed conditions are a set of overlapping clusters that have a lot in common. Some of the listed conditions do have distinguishing comorbidities. The things you listed does appear squarely in the shared comorbidities and not in any of the distinguishing comorbidities - so it could be any number of things. The Ulcerative Colitis does increases the likelihood that it's hEDS which is already the highest likely predisposition @ ~2% of general population and higher for the HN population and even higher again for physics people (not the published figures of 1/50K, 1/15K, or the 1/500 which I consider to be incorrect due to the incorrect assumptions for disease state thresholds in the diagnostic tests).
Probably the best lens to look at it would be through the lens of dysautonomia which is a balance of a not well understood by the vast majority of doctors yet reasonably well understood by a few doctors - enough to be able to find decent information in medical research. My preferred meds for treatment of dysautonomia are modafinil and amitriptyline and these meds also act as immunomodulators - the same thing the helminths are supposed to help with. Modafinil can exacerbate gastro issues so in my view people who have those issues should focus on amitriptyline first (at the sleep aid doses not the depression doses). And googling it now it does appear that amitriptyline is indeed a known treatment for Ulcerative Colitis.
That's how I get my data, well at least substantively check some of my data. Behavioral analytics a.k.a big anecdata. With great care and restraint it is possible to extract useful information from a large amount of biased sources - just can't publish it unless you want to spend the rest of your life arguing with people who argue for a living and do little else (academics).
With enough data it's possible to disambiguate between genetically linked behaviors and learned behaviors because of the different diffuse patterns through disparate populations. The summary is that behavior and intelligence is absolutely dominated by genes, there is really only a 13% residual - so on a nature vs nurture spectrum the nurture is less than 13%.
The stronger the selection criteria bias on intelligence the more likely a RCCX gene variant (SNPs) will be selected, specifically TNXB (burnout / ME/CFS), C4 (schizophrenia), and CYP21A2 (generalized anxiety disorder).
You may wonder why this doesn't come up in GWAS studies - usually there is an assumption of independence of SNPs due to the idea that most SNPs are very old and genetic drift has been sufficient to provide this independence. Since these individual SNPs are so behaviorally impactful there a strong sexual selection bias that takes place so those assumptions don't hold and thus the math is bunk. I could spend forever talking about the incompetence of medical research.
Dr Jessica Eccles is probably doing the best research where she talks about the shocking 'overrepresentation' of Generalized Hypermobility Disorders (GHD) in the Long Covid populations. In my view the only difference between GHD and hEDS is the number and severity of TNXB SNPs, so while 2% of the population are impacted most of those are only mildly impacted. The co-occurrence of multiple TNXB SNPs is much higher random chance - again from the aforementioned sexual selection biases. In general researchers into such conditions assume TNXB SNPs are far too common to cause such a rare disease, the thing is that it's not a rare disease - just rarely diagnosed and surfaces in a variety of complex ways that look completely different to the untrained eye.
You can get a Deep Whole Genome Sequence for ~ $280 from dantelabs and then you'll know for sure.
The Old Friends hypothesis doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Viruses did not come around much later than bacteria and parasites, and definitely before the adaptive immune system.
There's more and more evidence that one person's commensal bacteria can be someone else's pathogen, and that we should really think about it as a "lock and key" with your immune system rather than categorizing bacteria as inherently good or bad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5300855/
Another rarely mentioned complication though is that the successful immune response itself likely selects for more pathogenic microbes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/
You cannot really withhold food from bacteria, they will just eat you. But if you give them a slow trickle of sugar, you remove their reason to invade you (which is is at a risk to themselves). I personally think this concept can be applied to wars and immigration, but anyway..
Why are viruses more likely to cause autoimmune diseases than parasites? Probably because viruses go inside us and set of (Th1) intracellular responses , whereas parasites set of extracellular responses (Th2). You're probably more likely to be tricked into attacking yourself when you are fighting off something inside yourself than something outside your cells.
The "old friends" hypothesis is not that parasites evolved to be beneficial to us. They're not literally our friends, that's why "old friends" is in scare quotes. It's that the immune system evolved in an environment where parasites were omnipresent, and it malfunctions in an environment where they are entirely absent.
For example, the IgE protein present in peanut allergy is part of the parasite-fighting machinery of the immune system. It's not supposed to be reacting to food. But when there are no parasites to fight, it doesn't just become dormant as we would like.
However the original article talks about 'peaceful' commensals and links to this post (https://rachel.fast.ai/posts/2024-04-25-microbiome-1/), with the example that "friendly" microbes may not trigger your immune system if they leak into your bloodstream because they 'look similar' to your pancreatic cells.
While critical during the development of the immune system, this idea that there are certain actually 'friendly' or peaceful bacteria is less and less supported by the literature, and overstated to the point of probably being harmful. Even probiotic strains can be harmful if your immune system is overloaded or incapacitated.
Strong immune avoidance or induction of tolerance outside of the critical window is a strategy often used by pathogens to escape host defenses.
> The Old Friends hypothesis doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Viruses did not come around much later than bacteria and parasites, and definitely before the adaptive immune system, so why aren't there "commensal viruses" which fight off parasites for us?
Viruses are even harder to study than bacteria, which are already very difficult because most of them can't be cultured in a lab [1], so we just haven't studied them that much. It's a lot easier to study viruses that cause a disease because we know what to look for. The gut virome [2] alone is likely to contain a lot of commensal viruses that help us fight off parasites but our understanding is in its infancy.
Sorry I edited my comment before I saw your response. I agree in general, and we may find commensal viruses. It's not crucial to the argument though so I removed it.
I'm (genuinely--I don't know enough to pretend this is a knock-down argument) curious how this characterization of "crowd" illnesses fits with reports that Covid was extensively circulating in deer (not known for congregating in indoor spaces with poor ventilation). https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/08/29/...
If its surviving in deer longer than it would in a human, then all calculus about the virus is different either way. There wouldn't be a need to conform that data to this observation.
"The immune system is an example of antifragility in the natural world since an effective response is only produced in the presence of an antigen threat, but the response leaves the body better able to respond in future. The presence of an antigen activates the immune response, which not only deals with the immediate challenge through the innate immune system in the short term and long term through the adaptive immune system but also provides ongoing protection against this and similar future threats through the immunological memory of B cells. In other words, exposure to an invading antigen leaves the body stronger than before, so the stressor has created a benefit that was neither present nor possible before it occurred."
"Variolation was the method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual, in the hope that a mild, but protective, infection would result. Only 1–2% of those variolated died from the intentional infection compared to 30% who contracted smallpox naturally. Variolation is no longer used today. It was replaced by the smallpox vaccine, a safer alternative. This in turn led to the development of the many vaccines now available against other diseases."
Other than norovirus and salmonella most foodborne illness isn't infection, it's intoxication from metabolic byproducts that need time to accumulate to sufficient levels.
The biggest risk here is either a chemical contaminant from a non-foodsafe cleaning product on your floor, or a physical one like a small shard of broken glass sticking to it.
Interesting that in one of the cited studies the authors are not afraid to claim that viral infections may cause autoimmune diseases, despite the fact that the potential mechanisms they list could also apply to vaccines.
"Current research suggests that several mechanisms, such as molecular mimicry, epitope spreading, and bystander activation, can cause viral-induced autoimmunity."
Autoimmune responses are well known with some vaccines and some conditions, such as GBS. Most real experts know that vaccines carry all sorts of risks. It's the general public that is mostly unaware and would find this sort of thing surprising. It's the whole "safe" vs "generally safe" thing.
GBS is the autoimmune response to many vaccines. In a lot of ways, it's similar to having a stroke in as far as people have to relearn how to do many things, sometimes down to relearning how to walk.
>Most real experts know that vaccines carry all sorts of risks
And that's why all the real experts made sure to properly communicate the risks vs benefits of the Covid vaccine in an age, sex, and dose-stratified fashion, right? Oh wait...
The real experts in the fields I know well don't tend to spend much time communicating with others about their expertise, especially to the layman. Why would the real experts in this particular field be any different?
The high level of insanity of public debate made people shut up. I know at least one immunologist who quit Twitter fairly early on in the pandemic because of it. Doing health communication has hazards of its own.
Why would they be afraid? These are well-worn paths of research. I doubt anyone would be censored for referring to the vaccine-related injuries in 1976 and the proposed pathogenesis mechanisms, including molecular mimicry.
When a virus replicates inside your cells, it sets off alarms that as a result of sensing of viral nucleic acid signatures in your cells (i.e. MAVS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_antiviral-signal...). A vaccine, unless it is a live attenuated vaccine (these are rare) does not set off the same alarms since you don't actually get viral nucleic acids in your cells.
After giving birth, my sister suddenly developed something similar to celiac disease (but not quite the same; I don’t think doctors ever figured out exactly what it is) to where she can’t eat grains and a few other types of food as well. I used to get eczema occasionally, but now it seems to have morphed into a permanent rash that continuously moves to different locations over my body. And my wife had food allergy testing done a couple of years ago due to constant stomach pain and has now eliminated chocolate, seafood, peaches, and many other foods from her diet.
It’s bizarre. We really need to figure out what’s going on before everyone has a diet prepared by their pharmacist alongside all of the pills needed to cope with their autoimmune pain.