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"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right? I feel like it's fairly well documented

by rtpg 1y ago

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right? I feel like it's fairly well documented that good hygiene is a win for humanity as a whole, so I have some skepticism for generally saying "well let the kids eat dirt". We did that for centuries already! The thing I'm a bit curious about is how the research on peanut allergies leading to the sort of uhhh... cynic's common sense take ("expose em early and they'll be fine") is something that we only got to in 2015. Various allergies are a decently big thing in many parts of the world, and it feels almost anticlimactic that the dumb guy take here just applied, and we didn't get to that. Maybe someone has some more details about any basis for the original guidelines

dist-epoch 1y ago
> "well let the kids eat dirt" I always think about how animals eat - basically their food is never clean and always mixed with dirt. Evolution dealt with this problem since forever.
- pletnes 1y ago
  And most of them die young.
  - dist-epoch 1y ago
    But mostly not because of what they have eaten.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      Citation needed.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- jojobas 1y ago
  You have to balance the future immune system with current dysentery.
- eviks 1y ago
  And one of the ways evolution dealt with this problem is evolving intelligence the can then tell you to improve hygiene practices to reduce the "natural" death rate
- exe34 1y ago
  Yes, evolution kills the weak. I don't think you're saying "let them die"?
- maccard 1y ago
  My dog will eat literal street crap at the first opportunity. She’ll also just throw it up on the carpet 2 hours later if she’s not feeling it. Not sure that’s a really an improvement.
- array_key_first 1y ago
  Most animals die. Most babies die, too, until medicine and hygiene.
- vharuck 1y ago
  >Evolution dealt with this problem since forever. For humans, that solution may have been 9-month gestation periods and two-decade fertility windows. A solution, to be sure, but not very desirable.
- rtpg 1y ago
  Plenty of stuff is poison to animals as well as humans! Lots of animals get sicknesses and like parasites from everything they eat. Like with humans, though, animals have immune systems which help. This is the trouble with food hygiene arguments: you can eat "dangerous" food and 99% of the time be fine. But it's still good for people to not roll the dice on this stuff, even with a 1% hit rate. We eat food 3 times a day, so that's potentially 9 very adverse events per year! "Yeah I get food poisoning once every month or two" is a thing that some people live through, and I do not believe they enjoy it. I have not have food poisoning for a very long time, and appreciate it a lot.
CDRdude 1y ago
A justification I read once is that the human immune system evolved to deal with a certain amount of pathogens. If you don’t have enough exposure to pathogens, the immune system still tries to do its job, but winds up attacking non-pathogens.
birksherty 1y ago
> Various allergies are a decently big thing in many parts of the world Maybe we live in bubbles. I am from Asia. I have only seen people need to be taken to emergency hospital in American tv shows for any allergies. Here I've never seen it in my whole life and didn't even know allergy can be this dangerous. We don't have peanut allergy too. First time even I saw it in TV, I was very confused. Allergies do exists here, but "not to the extent" like what I've seen in American TV shows or heard online. Only thing I remember is people need to take medicine for to allergy from venomous caterpillar hairs, they mistakenly touched those. And stung by honey bees, wasp etc.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  It makes for good TV. I think only a couple hundred Americans die a year from anaphylaxis. And many of those are from medication allergies.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  If it makes you feel better I’m nearly 50 and I have never in my life heard of people needing to take allergy medication for mistakenly touching caterpillar hairs.
  - birksherty 1y ago
    That one incident was serious, the person slept over a caterpillar getting stung all over body. Here all caterpillars have venom in hair. Personally I've touched many times by mistake, but didn't have to take medicine, the itchiness & swelling goes away within a hour.
- wil421 1y ago
  Or maybe the prevalence of peanut allergies is really low. A quick google search says Asians populations have more allergies to buckwheat, royal jelly, and edible bird nests from swiftlets. Shellfish is still one of the highest allergies anywhere.
  - birksherty 1y ago
bob1029 1y ago
> "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right? I'm pretty sure it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
  No, it is not in any way a universal principle. The counterexample is Lead. A little lead in the diet does not make you stronger.
  - maccard 1y ago
    Only a sith deals in absolutes. Nobody is suggesting you go and add some heavy metals to your corn flakes (except you).
    - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
      Well they are, if they're suggesting that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is anything beyond a catchy saying.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
      > (except you) The post that I am responding to does in fact deal in absolutes by asserting that "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a natural law. Please don't troll by attributing that to me. My more detailed take on this is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45653240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45653240 It is in response to someone else who is dealing in absolutes. It seems pretty common, actually. Must be a lot of Sith around today.
  - waterhouse 1y ago
    More generally regarding poisons, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism . TLDR: YMMV. "Mithridatism is not effective against all types of poison. Immunity is generally only possible with biologically complex types which the immune system can respond to. Depending on the toxin, the practice can lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body. Results depend on how each poison is processed by the body." "A minor exception is cyanide, which can be metabolized by the liver. The enzyme rhodanese converts the cyanide into the much less toxic thiocyanate.[12] This process allows humans to ingest small amounts of cyanide in food like apple seeds and survive small amounts of cyanide gas from fires and cigarettes. However, one cannot effectively condition the liver against cyanide, unlike alcohol. Relatively larger amounts of cyanide are still highly lethal because, while the body can produce more rhodanese, the process also requires large amounts of sulfur-containing substrates." Our immune, metabolic, and other systems are built to be adaptable, and some things are easy to adapt to, but other things are difficult or impossible for them to adapt to.
tim333 1y ago
>only got to in 2015 I think a lot of the delay is it took a while for people to realise there was a problem. The perhaps excessive hygiene thing didn't really get going till the 1960s and so you didn't really see the rise in allergies till a couple of decades after, then maybe scientists started figuring it like in the 90s and then it takes a while to get proven enough to recommend to parents?
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
What doesn't kill you postpones the inevitable. Sometimes it makes you stronger, often it makes you weaker. E.g. if your arms get amputated you're extremely unlikely to break your bench press personal best afterwards.
mwigdahl 1y ago
Speaking as someone who has had a lot of experience talking with doctors in poorly-understood clinical situations over the years, most doctors display a need to establish informational authority over their patients. So if the "dumb guy" take is "just expose the kids, they'll adapt to it", in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary (and maybe even with it) the average doctor is going to _reflexively_ take the opposite position, because that shows that you (or the conventional wisdom) were wrong. There are exceptions, and they are either the ones that just don't care at all, or they're the best docs you'll ever find.
marcosdumay 1y ago
> "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It comes from a philosopher, talking about something that is completely not related to health-care, and ironically a strong criticism claiming that people that say things like that are stupid by one of the people most vilified in history by being misunderstood when claiming that things are stupid.

by rtpg 1y ago

dist-epoch 1y ago

> "well let the kids eat dirt" I always think about how animals eat - basically their food is never clean and always mixed with dirt. Evolution dealt with this problem since forever.

pletnes 1y ago
And most of them die young.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  But mostly not because of what they have eaten.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Citation needed.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
jojobas 1y ago
You have to balance the future immune system with current dysentery.
eviks 1y ago
And one of the ways evolution dealt with this problem is evolving intelligence the can then tell you to improve hygiene practices to reduce the "natural" death rate
exe34 1y ago
Yes, evolution kills the weak. I don't think you're saying "let them die"?
maccard 1y ago
My dog will eat literal street crap at the first opportunity. She’ll also just throw it up on the carpet 2 hours later if she’s not feeling it. Not sure that’s a really an improvement.
array_key_first 1y ago
Most animals die. Most babies die, too, until medicine and hygiene.
vharuck 1y ago
>Evolution dealt with this problem since forever. For humans, that solution may have been 9-month gestation periods and two-decade fertility windows. A solution, to be sure, but not very desirable.
rtpg 1y ago
Plenty of stuff is poison to animals as well as humans! Lots of animals get sicknesses and like parasites from everything they eat. Like with humans, though, animals have immune systems which help. This is the trouble with food hygiene arguments: you can eat "dangerous" food and 99% of the time be fine. But it's still good for people to not roll the dice on this stuff, even with a 1% hit rate. We eat food 3 times a day, so that's potentially 9 very adverse events per year! "Yeah I get food poisoning once every month or two" is a thing that some people live through, and I do not believe they enjoy it. I have not have food poisoning for a very long time, and appreciate it a lot.

CDRdude 1y ago

A justification I read once is that the human immune system evolved to deal with a certain amount of pathogens. If you don’t have enough exposure to pathogens, the immune system still tries to do its job, but winds up attacking non-pathogens.

birksherty 1y ago

> Various allergies are a decently big thing in many parts of the world Maybe we live in bubbles. I am from Asia. I have only seen people need to be taken to emergency hospital in American tv shows for any allergies. Here I've never seen it in my whole life and didn't even know allergy can be this dangerous. We don't have peanut allergy too. First time even I saw it in TV, I was very confused. Allergies do exists here, but "not to the extent" like what I've seen in American TV shows or heard online. Only thing I remember is people need to take medicine for to allergy from venomous caterpillar hairs, they mistakenly touched those. And stung by honey bees, wasp etc.

ChadNauseam 1y ago
It makes for good TV. I think only a couple hundred Americans die a year from anaphylaxis. And many of those are from medication allergies.
mock-possum 1y ago
If it makes you feel better I’m nearly 50 and I have never in my life heard of people needing to take allergy medication for mistakenly touching caterpillar hairs.
- birksherty 1y ago
  That one incident was serious, the person slept over a caterpillar getting stung all over body. Here all caterpillars have venom in hair. Personally I've touched many times by mistake, but didn't have to take medicine, the itchiness & swelling goes away within a hour.
wil421 1y ago
Or maybe the prevalence of peanut allergies is really low. A quick google search says Asians populations have more allergies to buckwheat, royal jelly, and edible bird nests from swiftlets. Shellfish is still one of the highest allergies anywhere.
- birksherty 1y ago

bob1029 1y ago

> "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It's not actual natural law though, right? I'm pretty sure it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation

SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
No, it is not in any way a universal principle. The counterexample is Lead. A little lead in the diet does not make you stronger.
- maccard 1y ago
  Only a sith deals in absolutes. Nobody is suggesting you go and add some heavy metals to your corn flakes (except you).
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    Well they are, if they're suggesting that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is anything beyond a catchy saying.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    > (except you) The post that I am responding to does in fact deal in absolutes by asserting that "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a natural law. Please don't troll by attributing that to me. My more detailed take on this is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45653240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45653240 It is in response to someone else who is dealing in absolutes. It seems pretty common, actually. Must be a lot of Sith around today.
- waterhouse 1y ago
  More generally regarding poisons, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism . TLDR: YMMV. "Mithridatism is not effective against all types of poison. Immunity is generally only possible with biologically complex types which the immune system can respond to. Depending on the toxin, the practice can lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body. Results depend on how each poison is processed by the body." "A minor exception is cyanide, which can be metabolized by the liver. The enzyme rhodanese converts the cyanide into the much less toxic thiocyanate.[12] This process allows humans to ingest small amounts of cyanide in food like apple seeds and survive small amounts of cyanide gas from fires and cigarettes. However, one cannot effectively condition the liver against cyanide, unlike alcohol. Relatively larger amounts of cyanide are still highly lethal because, while the body can produce more rhodanese, the process also requires large amounts of sulfur-containing substrates." Our immune, metabolic, and other systems are built to be adaptable, and some things are easy to adapt to, but other things are difficult or impossible for them to adapt to.

tim333 1y ago

>only got to in 2015 I think a lot of the delay is it took a while for people to realise there was a problem. The perhaps excessive hygiene thing didn't really get going till the 1960s and so you didn't really see the rise in allergies till a couple of decades after, then maybe scientists started figuring it like in the 90s and then it takes a while to get proven enough to recommend to parents?

SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago

What doesn't kill you postpones the inevitable. Sometimes it makes you stronger, often it makes you weaker. E.g. if your arms get amputated you're extremely unlikely to break your bench press personal best afterwards.

mwigdahl 1y ago

Speaking as someone who has had a lot of experience talking with doctors in poorly-understood clinical situations over the years, most doctors display a need to establish informational authority over their patients. So if the "dumb guy" take is "just expose the kids, they'll adapt to it", in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary (and maybe even with it) the average doctor is going to _reflexively_ take the opposite position, because that shows that you (or the conventional wisdom) were wrong. There are exceptions, and they are either the ones that just don't care at all, or they're the best docs you'll ever find.

marcosdumay 1y ago

> "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement. It comes from a philosopher, talking about something that is completely not related to health-care, and ironically a strong criticism claiming that people that say things like that are stupid by one of the people most vilified in history by being misunderstood when claiming that things are stupid.