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Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders
- ubertakter 7y agoI can see the webloids headlines now: "Should you eat dirt: Newly discovered fatty acid 10Z-HA helps cure burnout!" /sigh If only it were so easy.
- rb808 7y agoI'm waiting for my dirt supplements.
- codr7 7y agoYou're joking, but in Germany you can buy several different grades of so called healing soil for different uses in many regular super markets. I take a tea spoon dissolved in water about once a week, which seems to help my system work more smoothly.
- unicornporn 7y agoWhich system? More smoothly?
- codr7 7y agoIt's difficult to pin-point these things, especially from the inside. I have Psoriasis since 30 years back, which in turn has something to do with a stressed immune system, which in turn depends on intestinal and stomach health. Drinking the healing soil improves the condition a lot for me, as does dissolving it in oil and rubbing into the skin.
- unicornporn 7y agoGlad it helps. :)
- ScottFree 7y agoEdit: no jokes on HN. Got it.
- andrewl 7y agoFecal transplants are still going on, and are showing good effectiveness for certain serious problems, like C. diff infections: Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile New England Journal of Medicine 2013 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037 There are plenty of more recent articles as well.
- beMoreSERIOUS 7y agoWHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS, SHITLORD? FUN AND GAMES? GET BACK TO YOUR SIDE HUSTLE.
- kyoob 7y agoAnxious? Eat dirt!
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI wonder if there's a correlation between rural kids anxiety.
- RyJones 7y agoPica? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
- ojosilva 7y agoCopyediting your headline a bit with the latest trends in linkbaiting: Cure burnout by eating this disgusting thing. Or... You never thought eating dirt would be a cure for this. And etc. The linkbaity headline should convey a riddle to be truly effective webtrash.
- m3kw9 7y agoMaybe the hidden reason gardening is a viewed as a reason peeps live longer
- mcfunk 7y agoIf soil indeed has anti-inflammatory properties, that would make a whole lot of sense.
- mjevans 7y agoI'd be more likely to believe (at least part of) the effect is caused by giving the natural defense systems of the body something actually foreign to 'attack'. Sort of like regular training exercises and legal explosives/fireworks days give a more controlled and thus safer expression of pressure relief, training, and general readiness inspection. PS: Related to the fireworks I mentioned, I'm for having local fire departments provide basic fire knock back training with basic safety gear (bucket of water and hose) that should be required when they're in use. We focus way too much on black and white bans rather than enforcing responsible consumption.
- Technoego 7y agoAnecdotally, I'm reminded that for constipation, Gandhi followed Adolf Just’s prescription of applying to the abdomen a bandage of clean earth moistened with cold water and spread like a poultice on fine linen. This I applied at bedtime, removing it during the night or in the morning, whenever I happened to wake up. It proved a radical cure.
- gridlockd 7y agoYou see, Mrs. Teacher, when he told these kids to "eat dirt" it was really just sound nutrition advice. #plausibledeniability
- camjohnson26 7y agoOff topic but does anyone else automatically filter out any headline that has "may" in it? Literally anything can be true if you add "may". Eating dirt may cause cancer. Eating dirt may cure cancer. Earth may sit on the back of a giant, invisible tortoise. It feels like a lazy way to pump out blog articles when there's no real information available.
- fghtr 7y ago"In scientific and academic language, may is often used to talk about typical occurrences - things that can happen in certain situations." https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/22134/can-could-vs-may-might-expressing-typical-occurrences https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/22134/can-could-vs-m...
- casefields 7y agoI would love a huge study done on say NY Times/Wapo and a few other sources and going back through their science reporting through 2000-2010. Focusing on articles like this and see if how wrong/right they were. Or, if it's so inconclusive, that we really shouldn't be letting scientists push out their work willy nilly without establishing better data/proof. Science journalists seem to take these education PR departments at their word a bit too often.
- Stronico 7y agoI'm working on something to track stuff like that. What would you consider evidence of a study being disproved?
- ZeroFries 7y agoMay usually means 'has some evidence behind it'. Heuristic: the probability of it being true should be high enough to be worth talking about.
- trilinearnz 7y agoReminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- r00fus 7y agoI was once participated in a diet program where I was given some pills to eat to suppress my appetite (in addition to other generic mediterranean diet principles). Being skeptical, I immediately scanned the ingredients and they all seemed like harmless/filler so I figured it was some placebo to placate those who needed pills as a confidence/mechanic. However, upon taking the pills for a few days, I did notice a marked decrease in appetite. Re-examining the ingredients, the first one was "silica". Sand. Dirt. I've since come to the belief that our modern diet is too clean, and we are evolved to eat some amount of dirt - even if it's inhaled, so we may need to reintroduce some to control weight/allergies/disorders. That dirt also contains other beneficial ingredients other than silica doesn't surprise me one bit.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y agoThis is interesting, but my nonscientific counter might be: What if "dirt" is harmful, and causes your body to degrade appetite in attempt to overcome the irritants? I agree we've evolved perhaps, but sometimes modern is better (e.g. portion control). Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite?
- CptFribble 7y ago> Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite? This is something that most people don't understand, given that we live in a world where food is cheap and plentiful. As many people who have gone through fasting-based diets have discovered, there's a difference between "I'm hungry" and "I need calories, I'm getting weak and tired." Learning that difference is how you discover the actual amount of food your body requires, not just checking off three meals per day. The feeding patterns of our ancestors were very far from "eat as much as you want all the time with no physical effort required," and that was normal for 15,000+ years, so it'll probably take longer than the 100-200 or so since industrial food production began for our brains and bodies to adjust to the new normal. That, or we'll just have to start teaching our kids about cravings vs hunger vs actual food-need.
- RickS 7y ago
- basil23 7y agoAre you honestly taking this site seriously? One that lists no staff? It's clearly a manipulative site using sourced content to build an audience before easing into its own content to drive its agenda.
- kouh 7y agoThis could explain why some people pick and eat nasal mucus (a dirt colloid) when anxious
- phkahler 7y agoThe wikipedia page on this bacteria says it is not pathogenic and when fed live to mice their maze solving performance increased. If it's not pathogenic to humans, why haven't they tried it with people? With all the rage about gut bacteria an experiment like this seems obvious.
- colechristensen 7y agoHuman trials are expensive and involve a whole lot of being careful beyond "the wikipedia page says it's fine so let's do it!" Part of that being careful often involves mice.
- phkahler 7y agoClinical trials are expensive. Trying something on yourself is not. I'm not advocating any of us do that. But if the mouse researchers actually believe it's not harmful and believe their own results, why wouldn't they do an ad-hoc experiment on themselves?
- zeofig 7y agoI'll try anything to improve my maze solving performance!
- giardini 7y agoThis is old news (circa 2002) and was published widely under the subject heading of "The Dirt Vaccine". Here's a link to "The Edge" series on this topic: "The Dirt Vaccine (Bacteria and Health) 2002": http://emro.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=1059 http://emro.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=1059 Google for "the dirt vaccine" for more: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+dirt+vaccine&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=the+dirt+vaccine&ie=UTF-8&oe...
- ianai 7y agoAs a vegan, I’m not surprised. We all have to get our vitamin b12 from functional food because it would otherwise naturally occur on the foods we eat from bacteria. Our foods are sterile and thus the bacteria never deposit b12 for us. There’s probably much more we don’t know about.
- Aromasin 7y agoI remember reading a study a while back about the B12 found in unfiltered river water being sufficient for maintaining healthy levels in humans. It would be interesting to see a human study on this - albeit not useful for most people, as river water in most places if very much contaminated. Also for something more anecdotal, I worked as a labourer on a couple of farms for a while (which had a lot to do with why I went vegan...), and the animals had to be supplemented to the teeth to get sufficient vitamins and minerals. My guess is this was because their feed was all from processed grains and legumes, and their water came from the filtrated mains system.
- SmokeGS 7y agoThis paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05253-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05253... indicates IL6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleukin_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleukin_6) is down regulated in ex vivo tests (outside animal, cell cultures) and specifically 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid may be related with PARa signaling in mice so this is pretty cool. I hope they get some similar results with humans.