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Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

rachel.fast.ai

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Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#141

Post by randomdata »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #91
randomdata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Addictive amounts of sugar in a lot of food. 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?

> If you really must binge on the junk food 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'…

> 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.)

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#142

Post by schwartzworld »

bjoli wrote: post #128
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

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…

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 t…

Short haired dogs don’t have this problem. My greyhound is pretty much self-cleaning.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#143

Post by schwartzworld »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #33
Mistletoe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/well/move/why-run…

Is that causative though? Or do people with great cartilage simply enjoy running more because it isn't as painful?

Any exercise is going to be uncomfortable if you haven’t conditioned yourself.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#144

Post by Xcelerate »

istultus wrote: post #68
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#145

Post by paretoer »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #12
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

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…

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 u…

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.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#146

Post by lav42 »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #50

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…

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.

Are you talking specifically about long-COVID?

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#147

Post by Geste »

Xcelerate wrote: post #4

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…

It's due to our lifestyle, 100%. I know some don't like to trust the science, but may the downvotes come :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01614...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_ef...

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#148

Post by jmull »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #44

Why would this co-evolution history with parasites have only started with Homo Sapiens ?

It wouldn't and I don't think they are really trying to say that it did.

It's just that you have to start your analysis somewhere, and, obviously, our own evolutionary branch (i.e. homo sapiens) is the most relevant.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#149

Post by francisofascii »

nradov wrote: post #112
modeless wrote: post #26

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.

Yeah, but many of the viruses mutate rapidly, so the immunity gained from a cold virus from years ago won't help much today.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#150

Post by dyauspitr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
renegade-otter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I usually go wash my hands once I’ve ordered at a sit down restaurant.
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