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Educate Your Immune System

nytimes.com

11–20 of 113 posts

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#11
post #6
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…

Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time.

> Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time.

The evidence for this is not clear. Actual research is needed, and such research is complex, expensive, and unfortunately potentially political. This article describes a very nice A/B experiment for this one autoimmune condition but makes no general claims.

But outside these few cases we don't know. One factor is reporting. Do poor kids in India suffer fewer allergies or are they simply dwarfed by the other problems -- or just not reported? How do various cultures report and recognize allergies? Did feudal serfs suffer hay fever from close contact with all those grass proteins and pollens or did they develop immunity? Who knows?

It does seem to appear that certain allergies (e.g. tree nut) are on the rise in the US, but the rate is not restricted to urban populations. But if kids have any symptoms they are isolated from nuts just in case, so surely the rate is overstated in the legitimate interest of keeping kids safe (though unnecessary restriction has its own problems). And other "allergies" can be fashionable (e.g. gluten response) which both helps and hurts those with legitimate problems.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#12
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…

Hospitals are not sterile, let any uncooked food, air etc. The idea that most things a germ free is really far off base. A more likely consideration is the massive amounts of pollution people deal with.

Consider people lose 0.5 to 1.5 pounds of dead skin a year. That's a great food source for a huge range of micro organisms and it shows up anywhere people wonder around.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#13
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that the reason people get sick is because they are infected. Increasing population density will clearly lead to more transmissions, especially in cities.

Actually, TFA makes the case that people living in developed societies are not infected early enough in life, which makes their immune systems vulnerable in the long run.

@verroq is correct though, but that is a different subject than the one of the article.

(Infectious) diseases generally spread more easily in higher population density. That's basic epidemiology, more contacts = opportunities, but it's of course more complicated than one single statement, disease spread models need a lot more variables than just population density to make useful predictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_host_density

http://pai.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PAI-1293-DISEASE_c... (PDF)

http://www.britannica.com/science/infectious-disease/Populat...

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#14
post #9
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 used to eat raw meat. Now I never get food poisoning

[deleted]

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#15
> After three years, 16 Finnish children and 14 Estonian children had these antibodies; only four Russian children did.

I am not a statistician, but wouldn't this be underpowered relative to what you would need to draw a solid conclusion?

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#16

> After three years, 16 Finnish children and 14 Estonian children had these antibodies; only four Russian children did. I am not a statistician, but wouldn't this be underpowered relative to what you would need to draw a solid conclusion?

Depends on effect size and variance.

https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/FactorsInfl...

A study with low power is perfectly alright for an exploratory study that is not meant to prove anything but to check if it's worthwhile to spend a lot of resources on an idea in the first place.

http://lynn-library.libguides.com/researchmethods/researchme...

> 1. Exploratory research generally utilizes small sample sizes and, thus, findings are typically not generalizable to the population at large.

> 2. The exploratory nature of the research inhibits an ability to make definitive conclusions about the findings.

> ...

The problem is when exploratory studies make it to the media and people confuse them with studies meant to settle questions rather than just raise them.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#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 store mice with lab mice, and the lab mice will eventually increase the number of B cells, but you lose about 20% of them.

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