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.
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.
It took me forever to figure out because poultry is often a filler meat.
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 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.
This isn’t the argument being made in the article.
I lost this battle long ago, didn't I...
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
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.
"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]"
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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".
>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-running-won...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
* "4 out of 5 dentists agree" except it's more like the 50th dentist, given research consensus
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.
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.
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.
so the modern stuff is not so bad really.
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.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
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.
Although it's way more complicated than that and there are exceptions, but it's still a real phenomenon.
Community deworming increases Th1 cytokines https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098677/
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.
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?
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.
Bacterial viruses may have been involved in the evolution of nuclei https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j....
The adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates itself probably wouldn't be around if a virus hadn't infected the gametes of our fishy ancestors https://www.nature.com/articles/29457 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686171/
More likely is that there is a critical time window during the development of the immune system when it is trained not to react to most bacteria (which are passed on from the mother's vaginal microbiota and harmed by cesarian sections and early antibiotic use). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904599/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464665/
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/
Removing selective pressure from pathogens can actually lead to less virulent strains. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30100182/
That may be why the body spends considerable resources feeding the microbiota at a slow pace using by secreting mucus which contains a large amount of sugars, but which are attached using an extreme amount of diverse linkages so that one bacteria cannot sweep the field and take over. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1134114/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-023-00468-3
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_dark_matter
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
Doesn't this categorically mean cartilage injuries never fully recover because the cartilage doesn't grow back?
"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."
read more: "Beyond resilience: towards antifragility?" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13108278257209181...
------
And see the -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
"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."
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.
"Current research suggests that several mechanisms, such as molecular mimicry, epitope spreading, and bystander activation, can cause viral-induced autoimmunity."
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...
