The biggest factor for me was having kids. After I moved out of my parents' (my mom was an administrator of a preschool, so I think she brought home lots of fun germs), I didn't even get a cold for 3-4 years. I wouldn't say I did anything other than basic hygiene (hand washing after bathroom breaks, etc) to prevent getting sick during that time.

Then I started having kids. I've spent most of the cooler seasons with at least mild cold symptoms ever since. It's been like clockwork that every year for the last 8 years, everyone in the house gets a "stomach bug" around February; including 2020.

No surprise to me, this past year no one in the house (of five) has had anything besides allergy symptoms. This February was the first in 8 years that I didn't find myself spending an evening on the toilet with constant diarrhea. I don't want to go back to normal.

I think junk food place in general is actually more hygienic.

Might be. It also spans to occasional food trucks every now and then, which i would probably not call super clean (though can't claim to know either). "IF a food is tasty, you probably don't want to know under what conditions it's prepared" is something i believe in (but don't necessarily seek for - ie if somewhere is disturbingly unclean, i would probably skip, but otherwise don't care).

> IF a food is tasty, you probably don't want to know under what conditions it's prepared

I was in Bangalore (India) some time ago and everybody and their dog tells you not to eat the street food there, especially not the dairy products!

First thing our host (friend and former flatmate) brought us to was a street merchant with some dairy sweets :-)

Definitely surviorship biased ... but we ate a lot of street foot while we were there and have not gotten sick. I guess it's fine if you don't go to the super rancid places.

I've worked a variety of jobs. I tend to a lot of mild upper respiratory infections I recover from easily enough.

The only things I could ever really link were routine public transit use. Or when I worked in a bar. When those were true I got sick a lot more than when they weren't.

I'd imagine it has more to do with ventilation, maybe?

Yes well, I would hope if you've learned nothing during this pandemic it's that there is no one-size-fits-all immune system. Some 20 year olds are dying from COVID, others are barely noticing they have symptoms.

All suggestions are de facto "anecdata". What works for me, may not work for you. I used to get "food poisoning" once a year or so, but haven't ever since I stopped eating out. That you are more resilient to whatever food born illnesses I was encountering, does not invalidate my own experience.

That's exactly what i said.

I am actually in the "exposing yourself to decent variations of microbes is actually good for your long term health" camp. Not everyone can do that, of course, especially the immunocompromised. I get that.

You are telling your experience as if it's one size fits all. It's not. There is a reasonable case to actually exposing kids and one's self to microbes early on. Similar story for food allergies - exposing kids early on actually helps them not have those allergies, for example.

Anyway, like i said, not one size fits all, which is what I was against at in your argument. You made it sound like it was.

> You are telling your experience as if it's one size fits all.

No, I'm not. I'm telling my experience exactly as it has been... my experience. One should not have to preface all of their comments with "this is my experience". That's de facto implied if you remove qualifiers like "this study indicates [1]" or "its been proven [1]", etc.

I said you can do a lot. You an do a lot. Whether it works for you or not, is entirely dependent on your own immune system.

You read it as something else here and that's on you. I have been clear in this thread to point out that there are differences in how we all deal with illness. This is what worked, FOR ME.