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/PMC1856386/

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.

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.

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.

One thing I wondered while being allergic to it, was how much could I take before triggering the reaction. It ended up being extremely little. A single dorito chip would set it off. After that, I just cut it out of my diet completely.

Another weird thing is the reaction would last about 45 minutes exactly every time. I'd be sitting on the toilet bent over in agony, watching the clock.

It took me forever to figure out because poultry is often a filler meat.

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.

I don't necessarily think this is the case, at least the US. It's time consuming and expensive to get testing done without an actual diagnosis, even with healthcare. Taking the time off or spending the money on allergy testing just isn't going to take command of the budget over necessities or more serious healthcare needs.

You're right about the rest of it though, but IMO the systemic issues with money in politics prevents anything from being done about it at the moment, and I don't know what it would take to push the working class into a general strike or revolt.

Realistically, this and seed oils are the only place you are going to really encounter GMOs. If you are avoiding such processed food anyway...

> GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic.

If you really must binge on the junk food and are concerned about any GMO content, why are you paying extra for organic? Why not just buy non-GMO products?

I think that is hard, since non-GMO can still contain GMO. Organic is a bit stricter, but I think also not 100% GMO free.

(Personally, I don't care about GMO, but organic)

This is inaccurate - the other day I wanted to get some cookies for a child - label said sugar content was like 25%, that's insane. I have baked cookies myself, you don't need that much sugar to get decent tasting cookies, they are not suppose to be junk food. it's everywhere, not just chocolates, even in bread.

It better be a malevolent conspiracy, because if not, then it's suicidal stupidity of our species.

Like the average bread meant to be highly appealing to the consumer isn't also junk food? Again, the only real sources of GMO products you are apt to find out there are corn-based (HFCS) and seed oils (soybean and canola). While you can make bread with those products, that doesn't mean you need to.

I think we can agree that there are breads that wouldn't be considered junk food, but they also wouldn't contain GMOs, because the ingredients typically used to make that type of bread literally have no GMO option anyway. (Yes, there was once a GMO wheat in the lab, but never became commercially available.)

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.

Goes without saying. It’s rare to find GMO vegetables even commercially (only zucchini and potatoes even could be), let alone in a garden.

But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about ensuring the GMO vendors haven’t ever touched the seed. How are you ensuring provenance as to avoid the trust issues?

If you're trying to do a "reflections on trusting trust" reference, well, this is the real world. You might not ever be 100% sure that something is what it says it is (you might be a brain in a jar!), but it's usually better to get it from the guy you trust than the guy you don't.

Of course, at least within some margin of contamination. Identity preserved allows no more than 0.5% contamination, which is the best in the biz. But, the problem is that the earlier commenter didn't trust GMO vendors, not GMOs themselves. As in: Non-GMOs from a GMO vendor are equally untrustworthy. Hell, even a hat with a GMO vendor's logo on it is untrustworthy according to that commenter.

Unless you're sticking to food that doesn't have GMOs to begin with (which, to be fair, is almost all food!), you're going to be searching high and low to find a vendor that doesn't also dabble in GMOs.

Yup, there are people who subscribed to the system and there are people that opted out.

I don't even try to explain to people anymore. If I did I am pretty sure there would be a downvote frenzy and then Dan might even get pinged.

All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.

I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.

I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.

Don't be so sure. We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals.

"our gluttonous foodie culture."

Our which one? Obesity is a global problem, not a specifically American one. You will meet a lot of obese people in Brasilian favelas or rural Serbia, not exactly places that have "foodie culture".

"Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024"

I am not trying to discourage you, but the main stumbling stone with obesity is not losing the weight, but keeping it off for years. Your comment would carry a lot more weight (pun intended) if you lost that weight in 2020 and kept it off until today.

Opinion: nothing. Our hunger/satiety signals are normal and evolutionarily advantageous. What changed was the access, and composition, of food.

Food is tasty. Like really tasty these days. High fat, sugar, salt. And it's super duper easy to get. This stuff is designed to perfect target your brain and make you say "mmm".

You wanting to eat more makes sense because these foods are highly, or over, nutritious. Cavemen didn't have fried chicken, they barely had chicken - they had nuts. This wanting to eat more and more is evolutionarily advantageous. Because you don't know when your next meal is. You should be greedy, eat as much as you can and as often as you can. I mean, look at dogs. Give them infinite access to foods and they will eat themselves to death. Sure we're smarter but much of this stuff is at a level below the brain.

For all of human history I'm sure this functionality was a very good thing. Now that we have food surplus... not anymore. And to top it off, for the first time ever, we don't need to move to live. People are sedentary. So we don't even offset this effect with movement.

It seems to me the human brain/body is incompatible with modern human life. We're broken. We're exploitable by addiction at every turn. The solution might be to change our brains. Ozempic seems to help a lot - less drinking and smoking too.

Vietnamese people in Czechia are also usually thin, even though they make more than average money, being either business owners or skilled professionals. The contrast with Czechs is visible.

I'm actually baffled that anything I mentioned would be considered "completely meaningless".

A good number of people do this in my city: when I go on public transit, I see a fair number of commuters with a hand sanitizer bottle clipped to their bag with a carabiner. Many people also have a bottle in their pockets or purse.

I would go out to lunch with mu coworkers and I would give out everyone wet wipes because I was the only one who had them, specifically for this.

I would say most people do wash their hands here, however I have seen everything. From people not washing them to people using the toilet, not washing them, and then sitting on the table for lunch.

My father would wash hands after petting a dog even, so I guess it's his germophobia that set the standard in my household.

* wear a mask in crowded environments where showing my face doesn't buy me anything (I don't wear one at work, but do at the grocery store or airport)

* wash hands before eating (or at least use hand sanitizer)

* grip the exit handle of the bathroom with a paper towel and dispose of it on exit

Not exactly double blind demonstrated but low cost and this year has been much better than last (which may also be due to my immune system having caught back up, too, so YMMV)

No, we order first and then do it.

I was certainly raised to do it.

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.

Seems like a good idea. Is that a common thing? Does the evidence support this?

Personally I try to take some biotic food - yoghurt and the like

Rifaximin, and antibiotic designed to stay in your gut, has been approved for treating specific types of IBS. When it works it can induce remission for months or longer.

I sometimes wonder if the intense stress and whatnot that I had experienced prior some how made me more susceptible to whatever illness I happened to succumb to? No way to truly know, I suppose.

After various specialists and unhelpful treatments for what was later deemed to be "IBS", I was recommended to try something by my GP. He gave me some antibiotic (this was 15 years or so ago) it may have been that one -- Rifaximin -- I know it started with an "R." Anyway, my GP warned me that he came across it in some research, and would be willing to give a try, but I was not to get my hopes up.

I took the antibiotics for 14 days. Towards the end of the regiment, I was starting to have symptoms far worse than normal, but I pushed through. 15 years or so later, I basically have no issues at all. Whatever the drug was it was like a freaking miracle cure.

The positive changes seem sticky!

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.

This isn’t the argument being made in the article.

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

But it's also easy to test multiple times, and often enough the symptoms will confirm it.

I did not mean to confirm the parent, but give a version that is similar but probably just chance.

You don't.

You probably haven't been exposed at all, or you're one of the lucky asymptomatic people.

For example, I live in a major city, and am constantly around people post-vaccine. Yet I've had Covid 3x since them.

You can't draw the conclusion you're making from your behavior in public, as there's so many other likely possibilities.

Whether asymptomatic or not infected at all seems like a distinction without a difference. Either way I didn’t miss work, vacations, or get noticeably harmed. The whole point of my strategy was to expose my immune system to germs it was well equipped to fight off quickly and expose it continuously so I didn’t encounter it after it had mutated too much to be recognized.

I’m well aware of the pitfalls of anecdata, I just thought my approach was different enough from what most people did to be worth sharing. There will be no studies to test my strategy, so all we can have is my anecdotes.

I lost this battle long ago, didn't I...

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.

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.

On the other hand, RCTs gather relatively well-conditioned data. And we have enough study power across them that we end up with a lot of statistically significant, real findings.... that still have effect sizes that aren't clinically meaningful.

We even know about things with large effect sizes that are controlled by a few variables, that are rare enough that it's hard to find the patients that they apply to.

And, of course, correlation ain't causation: if we used your system and found a bunch of things, we'd still need to figure out how to reduce them down enough to be something we could test before advising practitioners to do things a certain way.

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

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.

"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/

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.

HAVE to? Dressing them up is one of my favorite parts.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01614...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_ef...

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.