10 ms·

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 di

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 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.

ransom1538 2y ago
IHMO An old myth, I believe: Your immune system needs something to fight, otherwise, it starts finding problems that aren't.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Less of an old myth and more like well accepted scientific fact: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0675-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0675-0 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.
- DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  I had an allergist tell me about a study that supported this idea recently : Introduction of pig whipworm eggs into the digestive tract of IBS patients reduced symptoms for a some patients. Pretty fascinating actually. 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/PMC3149054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/
  - bink 2y ago
    As I understood it the reason why some parasites can have beneficial impact on some autoimmune disorders is because they have evolved the ability to suppress the immune system, not because they overwork the immune system. But I've really only heard of this being a thing with IBS.
- ein0p 2y ago
  I had terrible grass and pollen allergies until I started mowing my own lawn and gardening without gloves. Exposure therapy is a thing. It works at least for some people.
- consteval 2y ago
  What you're referring to is inflammation and is real but kind of misunderstood. 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.
legohead 2y ago
I became allergic to Yellow 6 randomly. I would get extreme abdominal pain, even went to the ER a couple times and got a CT scan once due to the severity of the pain. I broke out in hives, tongue would swell, etc. I eventually figured it out after having a reaction to Cheese Doritos but not Cool Ranch (the only ingredient difference was Yellow 6). I tested it on some other foods with Yellow 6 and confirmed it. 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.
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  I have a hypothesis based on my own experiences that this can happen from accumulating something in the body faster than it can be cleared. Could you have been continuously ingesting yellow 6 for a while, to the point that it crossed some threshold?
  - newaccount74 2y ago
    Allergies seem to come and go. My partner developed allergies against many local fruits in her early twenties, to the point where she could barely eat any fresh fruits without her lips and throat swelling up; but most of them subsided in her 30ies and she can now eat almost all fruits again with only minor irritations for some.
    - iLoveOncall 2y ago
      Fruit allergies can actually be pollen allergies because the pollen contaminates the fruit. If your partner moved to a different areas which has trees she's not allergic to, or just eats fruits produced from somewhere else than she used to, that may simply be the reason.
    - legohead 2y ago
      You ever get that itch in the roof of your mouth, and you use your tongue to kind of scrape/scratch the roof of your mouth? After I started paying attention to food allergies from this Yellow 6 thing, I noticed I would get this mouth-itch from certain fruits and nuts. Watermelon, almonds, and oranges. Super minor in the grand scheme of things, but never knew this itch was due to an allergy -- just thought it happened randomly. That is one thing that has yet to go away, but I can live with it at least.
jasonvorhe 2y ago
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 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.
- fwip 2y ago
  Most GMOs are safe, with the possible exception of those that produce their own insecticide, and overspraying of herbicides on crops GMO'd to be more herbicide-resistant.
  - jasonvorhe 2y ago
    I don't trust any of the GMO vendors.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      So you grow your own food from identity preserved seeds sourced from a vendor that has no association with GMOs? If you buy commercial products, the non-GMO seeds are unquestionably being sourced from the very same GMO vendors, and thus can't be trusted either.
      - jasonvorhe 2y ago
        I grow some of my own food (salads, zucchini, Hokkaido, potatoes, etc) in my garden but it's nowhere near self-sufficiency. All of my seeds as well as my garden are completely GMO free. I've been growing the last few seasons by solely relying on my own seeds though.
        2y ago
lkrubner 2y ago
Sad to say, the fecal-oral cycle of infection remains common in the USA, with the most common areas of spread being restaurants although hospitals were sadly guilty of this until recently. And for any gastrointestinal illness in the USA, the single most common cause is Helicobacter pylori. Back in the 1980s and 1990s researchers mostly associated Helicobacter pylori with ulcers, but since then the research has expanded to show it produces a wide range of symptoms. It is a serious illness, even if you never develop an ulcer. And it so contagious that you can get it simply by kissing someone. And it is shockingly prevalent, with more than 20% of the public having it. It is always the first thing that should be checked when someone has weird gastrointestinal issues. The good news is that it is easy to cure: 14 days of antibiotics cures the disease in 96% of patients.
- klysm 2y ago
  Unfortunately, antibiotics can fuck up your gut in other ways.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Most people can take 14 days of an oral antibiotic without significant long-term adverse consequences. As of 15 years ago, according to my doctor, while on the antibiotic, sacchromyces boulardi is the best probiotic to take to try to minimize the risk of adverse consequences.
    - cjbgkagh 2y ago
      Both can be true, antibiotics can cause substantial side effects in some people and most people will be fine. Still sucks if you are not one of those most people.
      - hollerith 2y ago
        Yes, it still sucks, but so do uncontrolled chronic bacterial infections.
    - Talinx 2y ago
autokad 2y ago
I use to get the flu 1 or 2 times a year. I started going out in more crowded areas, going to pub, etc, and I haven't had a cold or flu in 4 years. 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.
- TexanFeller 2y ago
  I did this for covid. The second my vaccine kicked in I dropped all precautions and started staying indoors with as many people as possible for as long as possible, basically trying to never go a day without a small exposure. I’ve tested for infection a number of times and a university study tested my antibodies periodically for a year and I’ve never had a detectable case. Continuous exposure to small amounts of the virus seems to have kept me more free from infection than those that took significant precautions. I’m not just reckless, I used to have severe OCD, so living carefully with lots of precautions is actually more dangerous for me than the virus.
  - bjoli 2y ago
    So, another anecdote: I have COVID right now. I have had a bunch of self tests at home, and have tested myself every single time I have had any kind of cold or fever. Despite me getting on a crammed bus every morning and afternoon to go working in the same room as about 80 other people 4 days a week I didn't get COVID (that I know of) until now. Sometimes we are just lucky. Maybe the vaccine worked better-than-average for us. Maybe the route of infection works less well for us. Maybe we had it without noticing it at all
    - EricE 2y ago
      PCR tests also love to give false positives...
      - 2y ago
istultus 2y ago
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 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.
- dillydogg 2y ago
  When I was getting my immunology PhD, the prevailing thought about the prevalence of autoimmune disease in women was that estrogen promoted B cell survival, leading to more anti-self B cells from being removed.
- Xcelerate 2y ago
  > 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.
aszantu 2y ago
https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum 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
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  Have you tried taking an anti-acid or acids reducer? 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.
  - graeme 2y ago
    What did you do to resolve the problem?
    - metadat 2y ago
      As OP alluded to, I think they take antacids.
      - SkyPuncher 2y ago
        Yes, that’s exactly what I take. Generic, Pepcid.
  - aszantu 2y ago
    antacids just made my body ramp up making more bile. I eventually started taking betaine HCL, which helps when I have reflux or pain in the stomach. Seemingly a lot of bugs survive the stomach acid these days. Started taking the betaine when I went on carnivore diet and saw undigested meat in the stools.
Grimblewald 2y ago
We use a lot more preservatives now than we used to. We typically dont mill grain locally anymore for example, but grain is a near perfect fungal substrate, so we have to douse it in all sorts of antifungal agents so that the grain survives shipping to the phillipines and then the flour needs protection on its journey to whatever country it is going to. (warning, anecdata) Most people i know who have non coeliac gluten intolerance, tolerate gluten just fine. They can eat seitan made using locally milled / grown grain just fine. Seitan is almost pure gluten. The gluten isnt the issue for these folks, myself included. Our over-reliance on pesticides/herbicides/fungicides is, in my opinion, a very plausible explanation that appeared roughly the same time as this spike in issues.
photon_lines 2y ago
Vitamin D (or lack of it) plays a vital and huge factor: "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]" Source: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-d/ https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-d/
bjoli 2y ago
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 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.
- schwartzworld 2y ago
  Short haired dogs don’t have this problem. My greyhound is pretty much self-cleaning.
  - bjoli 2y ago
    But then you get those short little hairs everywhere, not to mention having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :)
    - schwartzworld 2y ago
      > having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :) HAVE to? Dressing them up is one of my favorite parts.
Geste 2y ago
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/S0161475400900721 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01614... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_effects_in_vaccinated_versus_unvaccinated_children_with_covariates_for_breastfeeding_status_and_type_of_birth https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_ef...
tsycho 2y ago
My friend also developed almost continuous eczema for the past couple of years, and tried cutting out a large variety of foods from her diet to see what might be causing it. 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.

ransom1538 2y ago

IHMO An old myth, I believe: Your immune system needs something to fight, otherwise, it starts finding problems that aren't.

moffkalast 2y ago
Less of an old myth and more like well accepted scientific fact: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0675-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0675-0 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.
DontchaKnowit 2y ago
I had an allergist tell me about a study that supported this idea recently : Introduction of pig whipworm eggs into the digestive tract of IBS patients reduced symptoms for a some patients. Pretty fascinating actually. 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/PMC3149054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/
- bink 2y ago
  As I understood it the reason why some parasites can have beneficial impact on some autoimmune disorders is because they have evolved the ability to suppress the immune system, not because they overwork the immune system. But I've really only heard of this being a thing with IBS.
ein0p 2y ago
I had terrible grass and pollen allergies until I started mowing my own lawn and gardening without gloves. Exposure therapy is a thing. It works at least for some people.
consteval 2y ago
What you're referring to is inflammation and is real but kind of misunderstood. 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.

legohead 2y ago

I became allergic to Yellow 6 randomly. I would get extreme abdominal pain, even went to the ER a couple times and got a CT scan once due to the severity of the pain. I broke out in hives, tongue would swell, etc. I eventually figured it out after having a reaction to Cheese Doritos but not Cool Ranch (the only ingredient difference was Yellow 6). I tested it on some other foods with Yellow 6 and confirmed it. 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.

ifyoubuildit 2y ago
I have a hypothesis based on my own experiences that this can happen from accumulating something in the body faster than it can be cleared. Could you have been continuously ingesting yellow 6 for a while, to the point that it crossed some threshold?
- newaccount74 2y ago
  Allergies seem to come and go. My partner developed allergies against many local fruits in her early twenties, to the point where she could barely eat any fresh fruits without her lips and throat swelling up; but most of them subsided in her 30ies and she can now eat almost all fruits again with only minor irritations for some.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    Fruit allergies can actually be pollen allergies because the pollen contaminates the fruit. If your partner moved to a different areas which has trees she's not allergic to, or just eats fruits produced from somewhere else than she used to, that may simply be the reason.
  - legohead 2y ago
    You ever get that itch in the roof of your mouth, and you use your tongue to kind of scrape/scratch the roof of your mouth? After I started paying attention to food allergies from this Yellow 6 thing, I noticed I would get this mouth-itch from certain fruits and nuts. Watermelon, almonds, and oranges. Super minor in the grand scheme of things, but never knew this itch was due to an allergy -- just thought it happened randomly. That is one thing that has yet to go away, but I can live with it at least.

jasonvorhe 2y ago

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 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.

fwip 2y ago
Most GMOs are safe, with the possible exception of those that produce their own insecticide, and overspraying of herbicides on crops GMO'd to be more herbicide-resistant.
- jasonvorhe 2y ago
  I don't trust any of the GMO vendors.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    So you grow your own food from identity preserved seeds sourced from a vendor that has no association with GMOs? If you buy commercial products, the non-GMO seeds are unquestionably being sourced from the very same GMO vendors, and thus can't be trusted either.
    - jasonvorhe 2y ago
      I grow some of my own food (salads, zucchini, Hokkaido, potatoes, etc) in my garden but it's nowhere near self-sufficiency. All of my seeds as well as my garden are completely GMO free. I've been growing the last few seasons by solely relying on my own seeds though.
      - 2y ago

lkrubner 2y ago

Sad to say, the fecal-oral cycle of infection remains common in the USA, with the most common areas of spread being restaurants although hospitals were sadly guilty of this until recently. And for any gastrointestinal illness in the USA, the single most common cause is Helicobacter pylori. Back in the 1980s and 1990s researchers mostly associated Helicobacter pylori with ulcers, but since then the research has expanded to show it produces a wide range of symptoms. It is a serious illness, even if you never develop an ulcer. And it so contagious that you can get it simply by kissing someone. And it is shockingly prevalent, with more than 20% of the public having it. It is always the first thing that should be checked when someone has weird gastrointestinal issues. The good news is that it is easy to cure: 14 days of antibiotics cures the disease in 96% of patients.

klysm 2y ago
Unfortunately, antibiotics can fuck up your gut in other ways.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Most people can take 14 days of an oral antibiotic without significant long-term adverse consequences. As of 15 years ago, according to my doctor, while on the antibiotic, sacchromyces boulardi is the best probiotic to take to try to minimize the risk of adverse consequences.
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    Both can be true, antibiotics can cause substantial side effects in some people and most people will be fine. Still sucks if you are not one of those most people.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Yes, it still sucks, but so do uncontrolled chronic bacterial infections.
  - Talinx 2y ago

autokad 2y ago

I use to get the flu 1 or 2 times a year. I started going out in more crowded areas, going to pub, etc, and I haven't had a cold or flu in 4 years. 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.

TexanFeller 2y ago
I did this for covid. The second my vaccine kicked in I dropped all precautions and started staying indoors with as many people as possible for as long as possible, basically trying to never go a day without a small exposure. I’ve tested for infection a number of times and a university study tested my antibodies periodically for a year and I’ve never had a detectable case. Continuous exposure to small amounts of the virus seems to have kept me more free from infection than those that took significant precautions. I’m not just reckless, I used to have severe OCD, so living carefully with lots of precautions is actually more dangerous for me than the virus.
- bjoli 2y ago
  So, another anecdote: I have COVID right now. I have had a bunch of self tests at home, and have tested myself every single time I have had any kind of cold or fever. Despite me getting on a crammed bus every morning and afternoon to go working in the same room as about 80 other people 4 days a week I didn't get COVID (that I know of) until now. Sometimes we are just lucky. Maybe the vaccine worked better-than-average for us. Maybe the route of infection works less well for us. Maybe we had it without noticing it at all
  - EricE 2y ago
    PCR tests also love to give false positives...
    - 2y ago

istultus 2y ago

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 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.

dillydogg 2y ago
When I was getting my immunology PhD, the prevailing thought about the prevalence of autoimmune disease in women was that estrogen promoted B cell survival, leading to more anti-self B cells from being removed.
Xcelerate 2y ago
> 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.

aszantu 2y ago

https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum 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

SkyPuncher 2y ago
Have you tried taking an anti-acid or acids reducer? 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.
- graeme 2y ago
  What did you do to resolve the problem?
  - metadat 2y ago
    As OP alluded to, I think they take antacids.
    - SkyPuncher 2y ago
      Yes, that’s exactly what I take. Generic, Pepcid.
- aszantu 2y ago
  antacids just made my body ramp up making more bile. I eventually started taking betaine HCL, which helps when I have reflux or pain in the stomach. Seemingly a lot of bugs survive the stomach acid these days. Started taking the betaine when I went on carnivore diet and saw undigested meat in the stools.

Grimblewald 2y ago

We use a lot more preservatives now than we used to. We typically dont mill grain locally anymore for example, but grain is a near perfect fungal substrate, so we have to douse it in all sorts of antifungal agents so that the grain survives shipping to the phillipines and then the flour needs protection on its journey to whatever country it is going to. (warning, anecdata) Most people i know who have non coeliac gluten intolerance, tolerate gluten just fine. They can eat seitan made using locally milled / grown grain just fine. Seitan is almost pure gluten. The gluten isnt the issue for these folks, myself included. Our over-reliance on pesticides/herbicides/fungicides is, in my opinion, a very plausible explanation that appeared roughly the same time as this spike in issues.

photon_lines 2y ago

Vitamin D (or lack of it) plays a vital and huge factor: "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]" Source: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-d/ https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-d/

bjoli 2y ago

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 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.

schwartzworld 2y ago
Short haired dogs don’t have this problem. My greyhound is pretty much self-cleaning.
- bjoli 2y ago
  But then you get those short little hairs everywhere, not to mention having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :)
  - schwartzworld 2y ago
    > having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :) HAVE to? Dressing them up is one of my favorite parts.

Geste 2y ago

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/S0161475400900721 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01614... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_effects_in_vaccinated_versus_unvaccinated_children_with_covariates_for_breastfeeding_status_and_type_of_birth https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_ef...

tsycho 2y ago

My friend also developed almost continuous eczema for the past couple of years, and tried cutting out a large variety of foods from her diet to see what might be causing it. 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.