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Educate Your Immune System

nytimes.com

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Re: Educate Your Immune System

#71

Post by esolyt »

emptybits wrote: post #61
baldfat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults? P.S. I love cheese and will forever eat it but I don't drink milk.

When presented with milk, many adult mammals (including some humans) will drink it. Humans are simply better than most at getting their way with other species -- this is the primary difference, is it not? For example, I have seen apparently healthy and non-starving adult black bears, some dogs, and cats happily consume cow milk if it is available. There are pros and cons to it, for sure, but there is clearly nutritio…

> healthy and non-starving adult black bears, some dogs, and cats happily consume cow milk if it is available.

How does that prove milk is good for us? Or for them?

Non-starving animals and humans can also enjoy the taste of junk food, we don't judge junk food's nutritional value based on that.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#72

Post by baldfat »

pingec wrote: post #60
baldfat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults? P.S. I love cheese and will forever eat it but I don't drink milk.

What exactly is your point? There are many things people eat and do that other mammals don't.

Milk is not necessary for humans. AKA kids must be given milk everyday in our schools for them to be healthy.

Its a treat and not a requirement.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#73

Post by reitanqild »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #33
ellyagg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not scientifically useful This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).

But beyond being a humblebrag, it's also bordering on a just-world view of the universe that's basically superstition. Without reference to a larger dataset, the inference "I"m never sick because I played in the woods and ate weird stuff. If you get sick a lot, it's partially your fault because you didn't do that." could easily be replaced with "I'm never sick because I prayed to the right god every day. If you get s…

Don't know exactly where to leave this comment but:

could it be that some of the cases we see are linked to the nocebo (I think this is the word, opposite of placebo) effect?

People who are used to dirt knows that they'll handle this alright because they always have lived in these conditions? While people who grew up in cleaner conditions get tricket into a bad feedback loop where any sign of anything wrong gets amplified by the brain and fed back to the autonomous part of the nervous system? (I happily admit I'm on thin ice here.)

Placebo and nocebos are pretty strong effects. Recently we had an incident where a number of postal workers were sent to hospital with rashes after having handled a suspect package which contained white powder. The powder later turned out to be flour.

I have also managed to get, and cure myself from side effects by 1. Reading about the side effects and experience them first hand. 2. Get rid of them immediately once I could proove to myself that they were related to me thinking I had taken my pills, while they were actually still on the countertop.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#74

Post by lmm »

baldfat wrote: post #72
pingec wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is your point? There are many things people eat and do that other mammals don't.

Milk is not necessary for humans. AKA kids must be given milk everyday in our schools for them to be healthy. Its a treat and not a requirement.

Drinking milk has been around for more than long enough for (some of) us to have evolved dependence on it. Not saying that we have, but "other animals get by without it" is not a slam-dunk case.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#75

Post by lmm »

kome wrote: post #2

Nice little article! And it confirms my anecdotal evidence, so it feels good. ;) I had a wild childhood: it happened to me to eat hamster food from his cage, eating dirt, eating sand, raw tomatoes directly from the plant, drinking waters from random streams; drinking raw milk without boiling it few minutes after milking it by hand, eating raw eggs, and when I wasn't in school, like during the summer, I had one shower…

I mostly stayed inside and played games, everything was kept clean, I bathed every day, all food was prepared very strictly (mother was a professional). And I never get sick. Anecdotes prove nothing.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#76

Post by harry_corn »

esolyt wrote: post #71
emptybits wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When presented with milk, many adult mammals (including some humans) will drink it. Humans are simply better than most at getting their way with other species -- this is the primary difference, is it not? For example, I have seen apparently healthy and non-starving adult black bears, some dogs, and cats happily consume cow milk if it is available. There are pros and cons to it, for sure, but there is clearly nutritio…

> healthy and non-starving adult black bears, some dogs, and cats happily consume cow milk if it is available. How does that prove milk is good for us? Or for them? Non-starving animals and humans can also enjoy the taste of junk food, we don't judge junk food's nutritional value based on that.

When a predator eats a pregnant prey animal they will consume its milk.

It doesn't happen very often but it could still contribute more than we think.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#77

Post by Mz »

The scientists had periodically sampled the children’s microbes, and when they looked back at this record, they discovered that the microbiome of children who developed the disease changed in predictable ways nearly a year before the disease appeared. Diversity declined and inflammatory microbes bloomed. It was as if a gradually maturing ecosystem had been struck by a blight and overgrown by weeds.

I wonder if they looked at antibiotic use. Wealthier countries often have better medical access. Perhaps it isn't that poor countries are "dirtier" so much as that when kids do get ill, they are less likely to get nuke-em-from-orbit antibiotics, use of which is known to have a scorched earth effect on the gut. The gut is about 70 percent of the immune system.

I really dislike the hygiene hypothesis. I have reversed a lot of the symptoms of my so called auto immune disorder in part by staying impeccably clean and avoiding exposure to germs as best I can. To me, this "a dirtier world is better for you" line of reasoning just does not make sense. It would make a great deal more sense to me if the conclusion was that casual use of antibiotics does egregious harm to the biome in the gut, from which some people never recover. Modern doctors are perfectly happy to prescribe antibiotics and I don't think I have ever had one tell me that I need to consume yogurt afterwards to foster healing of the damaged gut biome.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#78

Post by powertower »

baldfat wrote: post #57
dTal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that eating dairy at all is a relatively modern invention (post-agriculture), I suspect not. Is there any evidence at all for the beneficial effect of bioactive dairy products on the gut microbiome, beyond yoghurt commercials for middle-aged women?

Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults? P.S. I love cheese and will forever eat it but I don't drink milk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb__daXOQJ0

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#79

Post by etangent »

ivm wrote: post #59
etangent wrote: post #50

A wild hypothesis here. One thing I noticed in "pre-Western" diets that's absent from modern ones is unpasteurized dairy. All milk sold in Western countries is pasteurized (treated thermally to kill most of its bacteria). If you leave on a shelf, it will remain unspoiled for quite a long time compared to unpasteurized, but when it does spoil, it becomes completely undrinkable, with foul smell. Unpasteurized milk, on…

I lived most of my life in St.Petersburg and was spending each summer vacation in the country side near Karelia. Homemade soured milk is nowhere as popular as kefir from stores. Also all the shelf milk is pasteurized, you need to know a cow owner to get raw milk.

It's possible that kefir contains the necessary bacteria, or that children at an early age have exposure to them through kefir.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#80

Post by [deleted] »

jonlucc wrote: post #19

Interesting parallel study I saw recently: Autoimmune disease rodent models don't translate well to the clinic, so an academic group tried to look for reasons. They found that normal, healthy humans have far more memory B cells than lab mice, which may be a major factor. So they looked at wild mice and pet store mice. Wild mice had a lot of memory B cells, but pet store mice had the most. They found you can house pet…

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