8 ms·

Scientists sniffing out the Western allergy epidemic

59 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

rsync 12y ago
What is the state of the cleanliness theory these days ? What state of proposed-debunked-revisited is that in ? The narrative that one could be raised in too clean of an environment which then leads to an immune system on a hair-trigger is a sensible and compelling one, but I wonder how accepted it is in 2014 ?
- sp332 12y ago
  It looks like the broadcast covering the latest research will be at 21:00 GMT here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g507y http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g507y
- ambler0 12y ago
  Looks like it's alive and well to me. The "Old Friends" hypothesis by Rook mentioned in the article appears to be from 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
- glaugh 12y ago
  I read "Epidemic of Absence", a science journalist's survey of the research, telling of individual stories, and speculation about where the field could go. Super interesting. My takeaway was that there's clearly stuff happening here, but the research is still very much in its infancy, so it's hard to be too confident about any one claim. http://smile.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies-Autoimmune-ebook/dp/B0061P2L5U http://smile.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Aller...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 12y ago
Children born without cesarean sections? Check. Children nursed by mother for months after birth? Check. Children played outside in dirt and wild plants every day? (Largely) check. Had living plants at home? (Occasionally) check. But the children in my parents' families (including eleven who were brought up on a farm) and the children in my birth family and the children I now have (and their cousins in another country) still have quite a few problems with allergies. There surely is some family history involved in our susceptibility to allergies, as well as childhood environmental factors from our upbringing. Learning about the environmental factors is helpful, especially for understanding whole-country-scale epidemiological trends, but full understanding of the causes and treatments of allergies will have to come from studies with genetically sensitive designs.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Use of antibiotics was a big one too.
  - voidlogic 12y ago
    I also wonder about modern soaps being much better at killing harmless bacteria then traditional animal fat bar soap? Think about all the liquid hand soap, shampoo, etc that is everywhere. The purpose of soap used to be more solvent then germ killer.
    - graeme 12y ago
      I use Savon de Marseille at home for this reason. It's a variant of traditional olive oil soap. Aleppo soap or any of the other Mediterranean olive oil soaps should work just as well.
      - voidlogic 12y ago
        In case anyone is interested here is making soap from animal fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7rFk7IxT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7rFk7IxT8 You can also make the lye yourself by saving your stove/fireplace ashes and mixing in water.
        freehunter 12y ago
        How many people have wood burning stoves or fireplaces (and actually use them)? Most fireplaces I see these days are gas, same with stoves.
        voidlogic 12y ago
        I can't speak for other places, but its very common in rural Wisconsin/Minnesota; myself and every one of my neighbors have some form of wood heat, usually in addition to propane. We were glad we had it when propane hit $6.50/gal this winter, up from $1.75/gal the previous summer. I get requests from people all the time to harvest dead wood on my land they can see from the road. http://www.greenwoodusa.com/blog/2011/10/wood-the-fastest-growing-heating-fuel-in-the-united-states/ http://www.greenwoodusa.com/blog/2011/10/wood-the-fastest-gr...
chrismealy 12y ago
Sample size of 1, but I quit eating sugar two months ago and my allergies (or allergy-like symptoms) are almost gone. That's after a lifetime of a stuffed up nose and frequent sinus infections. The weird thing is my nose cleared up after around 5 days, but the sinus headache lasted another two weeks. My hunch is that I'm prone to fungal infections, but who knows.
- rsl7 12y ago
  I know several people who have had allergies disappear after a major diet change. My dad, on the other had, is suffering increasingly from allergies in his advanced age (>70) and refuses to even consider the notion that diet has anything to do with it, and won't even experiment.
- josephjrobison 12y ago
  Agree with you, and here's another sample size of 1. My nose and sinuses only get stuffed up when I eat anything more than a small amount of dairy, my body is guaranteed to feel run down and susceptible to common cold/flu when I have large amounts of sugar. Combo of many other things maybe, but those two things I know for sure.
  - raamdev 12y ago
    Another sample size of 1 (so I guess that makes us a sample size of 2): I had eczema from 6 months old until 18 years old, and asthma from 13 years old to 18 years old. The asthma was bad enough that walking up a flight of stairs winded me. When I moved out of home at 18, both my eczema and asthma _disappeared_. Doctors had no explanation. I eventually realized that one major thing that changed in my diet was milk: I had unintentionally stopped drinking milk when I moved out home. (We consumed gallons of milk every week growing up: good for the bones!) After several months of no milk, no eczema for the first time in my life, and my asthma all cleared up, I drank 1/2 a cup of whole milk to test my theory. Within minutes my body felt sick. The next day I _was_ sick, and it took several weeks before my body felt normal again. When I avoid dairy, my body feels better.
    - 12y ago
ars 12y ago
Terrible "study". Why compare to some traditional tribe? The number of confounding variables is incredibly high. Why not to compare to their neighbor without allergies? That might actually teach you something.
- 7952 12y ago
  >> Why compare to some traditional tribe? Because it is interesting? Maybe allergy is complicated and you cannot learn everything with a single study of your next door neighbor!
  - ars 12y ago
    No, it's not interesting actually. It's completely useless. The stated goal is to learn about allergies. The method used has nothing whatsoever to do with the goal.
- rwallace 12y ago
  Actually it's your proposed comparison that's useless. If you and your neighbor are both exposed to the same bad environmental conditions and you get sick and your neighbor doesn't, that's probably a matter of luck in the genetic lottery, which you can't do anything about. To isolate the environmental conditions - stuff you can do something about - you have to compare a population exposed to one environment with another population exposed to another environment, which is what they are doing.
dbbolton 12y ago
A bit of a tangent, but it's really a shame that triclosan use is still so ubiquitous in the United States. It does way more harm than good. Only one state (Minnesota) has actually taken a stance toward limiting its public use, which won't even go into effect for another three years.
phkahler 12y ago
I cured my asthma. After my first attack the doctor put me on inhaled steroids - this is a lifelong treatment that has some side effects. He said my lung function was that of an 84 year old (I was 43). I found that magnesium helped, and later learned that Iodine can be beneficial too. I started taking both daily as well as reducing my BMI from ~33 down to ~29. I had the lungs retested after going off meds for a few weeks and they "functioned above average". So I'm off the meds and feel great. On a related note, I used to get sick pretty much every year and was the first in the house to get things. Since I started the iodine a year ago, I have not had so much as a cold, while my family got a couple bad things over the winter. This is more anecdotal than the asthma of course, as that's a thing you can test where catching stuff is more random.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  How did you reduce your BMI? That's not an insignificant loss of weight and it might have been the big factor rather than the supplements. I've found that my asthma is bad when I don't exercise. If I do cardio for a few weeks there is a noticeable improvement.
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >> How did you reduce your BMI? Diet and exercise. But prior to that, I found magnesium took the edge off the asthma consistently. It is a broncho-dilator so this made perfect sense (it's also a vaso-dilator so that had some interesting side effects). The Iodine link is less solid, but after several minor indicators I ran across this: http://thyroid.about.com/library/derry/bl10.htm http://thyroid.about.com/library/derry/bl10.htm and some other great reading. This lead me to start taking kelp regularly, which helped stabilize my blood sugar and other things (that's another story, but very conclusive). Only after all that did I start to exercise and lose weight, and after months of that I got the asthma rechecked. For a while in there I took Lugol's iodine quite regularly too in the hope of reducing cholesterol - which it is supposed to do - but it didn't work for me. I had my thyroid tested (TSH, T4) before and after that phase though, so I can confirm that taking Iodine does not (for me) screw up the thyroid as is widely believed. My triglycerides went from ~300 to 160 though. My wife also used Lugol's to significantly heal a surgical scar - almost eliminated it. Iodine is wonderful, unfortunately the folks who promote it sound like an infomercial, but it truly is amazing stuff. I had to find all the papers and abstracts myself to cut through the hype.
radicalbyte 12y ago
EDIT: it turns out that my memory was faulty, the research was into light chains, which is related to inflammatory conditions (http://www.jni-journal.com/article/S0165-5728(09)00012-5/abstract http://www.jni-journal.com/article/S0165-5728(09)00012-5/abs...). The research on fine particles is this (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1743-8977-7-35 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1743-8977-7-35), which a friend gave me. Guess I read too much crap. Sorry! My wife was involved (Masters thesis) in some primary research into the causes of asthma / other allergies involving the respiratory system. It was experimental research (which involved lab mice, iirc), not statistical. Her results showed that fine particles of a certain size caused damage that would cause respiratory problems (i.e. asthma). Luckily in Europe at least there regulations are getting stronger over time; that's why we're all driving cars with catalytic converters and filters.
voidlogic 12y ago
>But generations before did not suffer from this epidemic, so what is it that's making us so allergic in our modern world? How do we know this is true? I always assumed some middle aged lady in 1803 had just the same problems with ragweed as any of us. In absence of contrary evidence, this of course is the logical assumption. If we are talking about things like eczema and asthma, I'm more inclined to believe this, but I'd still like to see some evidence.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Forgive the long post - I still am missing some clarity. 1. Holier than thou / positive thinking This just irks me : "I breast feed, therefore I am better than you" is the short hand I can give. It smacks of the same rather arrogant and unforgiving Oprah-style idea that you can have good things happen to you by positive thinking (as opposed to selection bias) and therefore if bad things happen to you it's your fault for not being positive enough. It is closely linked to the faulty thinking that leads people to turn off their mobile charger before getting on an airplane. 2. Bacteria is not a grey goo The theory seems to be we have destroyed our bacterial ecosystems and this will have some effect. - it seems a very likely and good theory. Except that instead of making the leap to "1/3 of us have wiped out bacteria X, or bacterial group Y" we leap to "good Bacteria and bad bacteria" and we should somehow replace it with other peoples fecal matter. I will go with Tokenadult on this - or perhaps one step further. My conjecture is one set of bacteria is responsible for the allegen protection (probably one set per allergen) and that may well have a genetic jigsaw component to match. This is a wildly complicated picture to assemble and will be quite provable. Add in the next most likely cause - some hitherto unnoticed poison we are throwin around like fire retardants, and there is a lot of research to be done. 3. The causes don't seem to match the sufferers Obese != allergic. Sedentary != allergic. At least use tobacco smoking and lung cancer correlation rates as our gold standard here. Maybe we do (I am lacking the google-fu to find it) but I will be amazed if every obese sedentary Caesarian born anti-biotic taking person is allergic to pollen - in fact I would bet there is a large and worthwhile study to be done for those that aren't. 4. The comparisons are apples to oranges - I think. I was struck by the 1/3 of us westerners and 1/1500 of those hunter gathers statistic. That's an enormous gulf - how did they test these hunter gathers for asthma? Did they ask their GPs? Apart from glimmers of point number 1 (noble savages) I am amazed at the vast spread there. As those people and their children start to get eaten By the modern world perhaps we could take samples ... But overall I worry that we blame our "lifestyle" as if we forgot to unplug the mobile charger, and use it as a chance to demonise those who do not meet our cultural standards, and idolise those who would rather swap asthma for our maternity care.
M2Ys4U 12y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned paracites/worms. Areas of the world where worm infection is prevalent and the areas of the world where allergies/autoimmune diseases are prevalent have almost no overlap. There is even evidence to suggest that infection by certain larvae can actually alleviate certain conditions (like inflammatory bowel disease) although this research is at a very early stage and carries risk (you certainly shouldn't try it as a DIY solution, for sure!).

59 points by k-mcgrady 12y ago

rsync 12y ago

What is the state of the cleanliness theory these days ? What state of proposed-debunked-revisited is that in ? The narrative that one could be raised in too clean of an environment which then leads to an immune system on a hair-trigger is a sensible and compelling one, but I wonder how accepted it is in 2014 ?

sp332 12y ago
It looks like the broadcast covering the latest research will be at 21:00 GMT here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g507y http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g507y
ambler0 12y ago
Looks like it's alive and well to me. The "Old Friends" hypothesis by Rook mentioned in the article appears to be from 2003. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
glaugh 12y ago
I read "Epidemic of Absence", a science journalist's survey of the research, telling of individual stories, and speculation about where the field could go. Super interesting. My takeaway was that there's clearly stuff happening here, but the research is still very much in its infancy, so it's hard to be too confident about any one claim. http://smile.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Allergies-Autoimmune-ebook/dp/B0061P2L5U http://smile.amazon.com/Epidemic-Absence-Understanding-Aller...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tokenadult 12y ago

Children born without cesarean sections? Check. Children nursed by mother for months after birth? Check. Children played outside in dirt and wild plants every day? (Largely) check. Had living plants at home? (Occasionally) check. But the children in my parents' families (including eleven who were brought up on a farm) and the children in my birth family and the children I now have (and their cousins in another country) still have quite a few problems with allergies. There surely is some family history involved in our susceptibility to allergies, as well as childhood environmental factors from our upbringing. Learning about the environmental factors is helpful, especially for understanding whole-country-scale epidemiological trends, but full understanding of the causes and treatments of allergies will have to come from studies with genetically sensitive designs.

Houshalter 12y ago
Use of antibiotics was a big one too.
- voidlogic 12y ago
  I also wonder about modern soaps being much better at killing harmless bacteria then traditional animal fat bar soap? Think about all the liquid hand soap, shampoo, etc that is everywhere. The purpose of soap used to be more solvent then germ killer.
  - graeme 12y ago
    I use Savon de Marseille at home for this reason. It's a variant of traditional olive oil soap. Aleppo soap or any of the other Mediterranean olive oil soaps should work just as well.
    - voidlogic 12y ago
      In case anyone is interested here is making soap from animal fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7rFk7IxT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7rFk7IxT8 You can also make the lye yourself by saving your stove/fireplace ashes and mixing in water.
      - freehunter 12y ago
        How many people have wood burning stoves or fireplaces (and actually use them)? Most fireplaces I see these days are gas, same with stoves.
        voidlogic 12y ago
        I can't speak for other places, but its very common in rural Wisconsin/Minnesota; myself and every one of my neighbors have some form of wood heat, usually in addition to propane. We were glad we had it when propane hit $6.50/gal this winter, up from $1.75/gal the previous summer. I get requests from people all the time to harvest dead wood on my land they can see from the road. http://www.greenwoodusa.com/blog/2011/10/wood-the-fastest-growing-heating-fuel-in-the-united-states/ http://www.greenwoodusa.com/blog/2011/10/wood-the-fastest-gr...

chrismealy 12y ago

Sample size of 1, but I quit eating sugar two months ago and my allergies (or allergy-like symptoms) are almost gone. That's after a lifetime of a stuffed up nose and frequent sinus infections. The weird thing is my nose cleared up after around 5 days, but the sinus headache lasted another two weeks. My hunch is that I'm prone to fungal infections, but who knows.

rsl7 12y ago
I know several people who have had allergies disappear after a major diet change. My dad, on the other had, is suffering increasingly from allergies in his advanced age (>70) and refuses to even consider the notion that diet has anything to do with it, and won't even experiment.
josephjrobison 12y ago
Agree with you, and here's another sample size of 1. My nose and sinuses only get stuffed up when I eat anything more than a small amount of dairy, my body is guaranteed to feel run down and susceptible to common cold/flu when I have large amounts of sugar. Combo of many other things maybe, but those two things I know for sure.
- raamdev 12y ago
  Another sample size of 1 (so I guess that makes us a sample size of 2): I had eczema from 6 months old until 18 years old, and asthma from 13 years old to 18 years old. The asthma was bad enough that walking up a flight of stairs winded me. When I moved out of home at 18, both my eczema and asthma _disappeared_. Doctors had no explanation. I eventually realized that one major thing that changed in my diet was milk: I had unintentionally stopped drinking milk when I moved out home. (We consumed gallons of milk every week growing up: good for the bones!) After several months of no milk, no eczema for the first time in my life, and my asthma all cleared up, I drank 1/2 a cup of whole milk to test my theory. Within minutes my body felt sick. The next day I _was_ sick, and it took several weeks before my body felt normal again. When I avoid dairy, my body feels better.
  - 12y ago

ars 12y ago

Terrible "study". Why compare to some traditional tribe? The number of confounding variables is incredibly high. Why not to compare to their neighbor without allergies? That might actually teach you something.

7952 12y ago
>> Why compare to some traditional tribe? Because it is interesting? Maybe allergy is complicated and you cannot learn everything with a single study of your next door neighbor!
- ars 12y ago
  No, it's not interesting actually. It's completely useless. The stated goal is to learn about allergies. The method used has nothing whatsoever to do with the goal.
rwallace 12y ago
Actually it's your proposed comparison that's useless. If you and your neighbor are both exposed to the same bad environmental conditions and you get sick and your neighbor doesn't, that's probably a matter of luck in the genetic lottery, which you can't do anything about. To isolate the environmental conditions - stuff you can do something about - you have to compare a population exposed to one environment with another population exposed to another environment, which is what they are doing.

dbbolton 12y ago

A bit of a tangent, but it's really a shame that triclosan use is still so ubiquitous in the United States. It does way more harm than good. Only one state (Minnesota) has actually taken a stance toward limiting its public use, which won't even go into effect for another three years.

phkahler 12y ago

I cured my asthma. After my first attack the doctor put me on inhaled steroids - this is a lifelong treatment that has some side effects. He said my lung function was that of an 84 year old (I was 43). I found that magnesium helped, and later learned that Iodine can be beneficial too. I started taking both daily as well as reducing my BMI from ~33 down to ~29. I had the lungs retested after going off meds for a few weeks and they "functioned above average". So I'm off the meds and feel great. On a related note, I used to get sick pretty much every year and was the first in the house to get things. Since I started the iodine a year ago, I have not had so much as a cold, while my family got a couple bad things over the winter. This is more anecdotal than the asthma of course, as that's a thing you can test where catching stuff is more random.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
How did you reduce your BMI? That's not an insignificant loss of weight and it might have been the big factor rather than the supplements. I've found that my asthma is bad when I don't exercise. If I do cardio for a few weeks there is a noticeable improvement.
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> How did you reduce your BMI? Diet and exercise. But prior to that, I found magnesium took the edge off the asthma consistently. It is a broncho-dilator so this made perfect sense (it's also a vaso-dilator so that had some interesting side effects). The Iodine link is less solid, but after several minor indicators I ran across this: http://thyroid.about.com/library/derry/bl10.htm http://thyroid.about.com/library/derry/bl10.htm and some other great reading. This lead me to start taking kelp regularly, which helped stabilize my blood sugar and other things (that's another story, but very conclusive). Only after all that did I start to exercise and lose weight, and after months of that I got the asthma rechecked. For a while in there I took Lugol's iodine quite regularly too in the hope of reducing cholesterol - which it is supposed to do - but it didn't work for me. I had my thyroid tested (TSH, T4) before and after that phase though, so I can confirm that taking Iodine does not (for me) screw up the thyroid as is widely believed. My triglycerides went from ~300 to 160 though. My wife also used Lugol's to significantly heal a surgical scar - almost eliminated it. Iodine is wonderful, unfortunately the folks who promote it sound like an infomercial, but it truly is amazing stuff. I had to find all the papers and abstracts myself to cut through the hype.

radicalbyte 12y ago

EDIT: it turns out that my memory was faulty, the research was into light chains, which is related to inflammatory conditions (http://www.jni-journal.com/article/S0165-5728(09)00012-5/abstract http://www.jni-journal.com/article/S0165-5728(09)00012-5/abs...). The research on fine particles is this (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1743-8977-7-35 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186%2F1743-8977-7-35), which a friend gave me. Guess I read too much crap. Sorry! My wife was involved (Masters thesis) in some primary research into the causes of asthma / other allergies involving the respiratory system. It was experimental research (which involved lab mice, iirc), not statistical. Her results showed that fine particles of a certain size caused damage that would cause respiratory problems (i.e. asthma). Luckily in Europe at least there regulations are getting stronger over time; that's why we're all driving cars with catalytic converters and filters.

voidlogic 12y ago

>But generations before did not suffer from this epidemic, so what is it that's making us so allergic in our modern world? How do we know this is true? I always assumed some middle aged lady in 1803 had just the same problems with ragweed as any of us. In absence of contrary evidence, this of course is the logical assumption. If we are talking about things like eczema and asthma, I'm more inclined to believe this, but I'd still like to see some evidence.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

Forgive the long post - I still am missing some clarity. 1. Holier than thou / positive thinking This just irks me : "I breast feed, therefore I am better than you" is the short hand I can give. It smacks of the same rather arrogant and unforgiving Oprah-style idea that you can have good things happen to you by positive thinking (as opposed to selection bias) and therefore if bad things happen to you it's your fault for not being positive enough. It is closely linked to the faulty thinking that leads people to turn off their mobile charger before getting on an airplane. 2. Bacteria is not a grey goo The theory seems to be we have destroyed our bacterial ecosystems and this will have some effect. - it seems a very likely and good theory. Except that instead of making the leap to "1/3 of us have wiped out bacteria X, or bacterial group Y" we leap to "good Bacteria and bad bacteria" and we should somehow replace it with other peoples fecal matter. I will go with Tokenadult on this - or perhaps one step further. My conjecture is one set of bacteria is responsible for the allegen protection (probably one set per allergen) and that may well have a genetic jigsaw component to match. This is a wildly complicated picture to assemble and will be quite provable. Add in the next most likely cause - some hitherto unnoticed poison we are throwin around like fire retardants, and there is a lot of research to be done. 3. The causes don't seem to match the sufferers Obese != allergic. Sedentary != allergic. At least use tobacco smoking and lung cancer correlation rates as our gold standard here. Maybe we do (I am lacking the google-fu to find it) but I will be amazed if every obese sedentary Caesarian born anti-biotic taking person is allergic to pollen - in fact I would bet there is a large and worthwhile study to be done for those that aren't. 4. The comparisons are apples to oranges - I think. I was struck by the 1/3 of us westerners and 1/1500 of those hunter gathers statistic. That's an enormous gulf - how did they test these hunter gathers for asthma? Did they ask their GPs? Apart from glimmers of point number 1 (noble savages) I am amazed at the vast spread there. As those people and their children start to get eaten By the modern world perhaps we could take samples ... But overall I worry that we blame our "lifestyle" as if we forgot to unplug the mobile charger, and use it as a chance to demonise those who do not meet our cultural standards, and idolise those who would rather swap asthma for our maternity care.

M2Ys4U 12y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned paracites/worms. Areas of the world where worm infection is prevalent and the areas of the world where allergies/autoimmune diseases are prevalent have almost no overlap. There is even evidence to suggest that infection by certain larvae can actually alleviate certain conditions (like inflammatory bowel disease) although this research is at a very early stage and carries risk (you certainly shouldn't try it as a DIY solution, for sure!).