[Xcelerate]

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.

[lkrubner]

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.

[renegade-otter]

The one thing that shocked me after moving to the States was how no one washed their hands before meals. It's just not a thing.

[tomlue]

weird, I've lived in the US most of my life and I think pretty much everyone washes their hands?

[renegade-otter]

When people walk into a restaurant - fast food, slow food - especially before COVID, do you see people go to the bathroom to wash their hands before the meal? That never happens.

[TeMPOraL]

I've never seen it happen either - and I live in Poland, though I haven't seen it in my various visits to China, Germany and the UK either. Who actually does go into the restaurant bathroom specifically to wash their hands before the meal?

[twoWhlsGud]

Three simple habits that have (anecdotally) cut down on colds for me:

* 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)

[sickblastoise]

I do - it just makes sense if you are riding public transport or touching stuff that isn’t as clean as you’d think. Like your phone, wallet, keys, backpack, shoe laces, pant pockets, etc. Not obsessively, but if I haven’t washed my hands in a few hours or feel they are dirty I wash them before eating.

[otikik]

Spanish here. I do it all the time. I even carry a small bottle of alcohol in case I go to a place where I can't wash my hands first.

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.

[Tade0]

I'm Polish and I do - so do some of my friends. Typically right after ordering, before even the beverages have a chance to arrive.

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

[dyauspitr]

I usually go wash my hands once I’ve ordered at a sit down restaurant.

[_pfco]

I usually carry a bottle of hand sanitizer to clean my hands before meals. I started doing this even before the pandemic, to avoid getting sick with the common cold.

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.

[renegade-otter]

After COVID, yes, that is true. People take it more seriously now (although things seem to be snapping back).

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.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> When people walk into a restaurant

No, we order first and then do it.

[EricE]

Especially after touching menus - which are almost never washed!

[infecto]

So true. The thing that always shocked me outside of the US was the inverse. The habit to clean hands soap or just a moist towel but then the lack of soap and sanitation in the restrooms.

[slowmovintarget]

It's a thing in our household. Everyone washes hands before eating. When we go to restaurants, we order, then take turns washing hands. I guess it depends on where in the U.S.

[rincebrain]

It's nominally a thing, but a lot of people don't do it.

I was certainly raised to do it.

[justinclift]

That sounds pretty gross really. :(

[klysm]

Unfortunately, antibiotics can fuck up your gut in other ways.

[hollerith]

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]

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]

Yes, it still sucks, but so do uncontrolled chronic bacterial infections.

[Talinx]

I have never been given a probiotic while getting an antibiotic.

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

[tim333]

Studies say dunno: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190124-is-it-worth-taki...

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

[hollerith]

When this happened (again about 15 years ago) I was taking a very long course of antibiotics.

[Aurornis]

On the other hand, we're discovering that certain antibiotics can be very useful in treating specific GI conditions.

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.

[hirvi74]

Story time: I went through a dark and stressful period of my life when I was in my teens. After I mostly got over the issues, I went on a vacation with a friend and his family. At one point in the vacation, I ended getting some kind of food poisoning from shellfish that apparently no one else who at the same meal got. Anyway, I eventually recovered in a few days, but it seemed as though I never fully recovered. I had frequent GI issues for literal years.

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.

[justinclift]

If you have medical records (ie at the doctors office, etc), then maybe you can ask them about it the next time you visit the doctor?

[radicaldreamer]

Antibiotics seem to be underused for GI issues, anecdotally I’ve experienced a dramatic reduction (even elimination) of some GI issues when using antibiotics (Z-pack) for unrelated infections (a course followed by quality probiotics like Visibiome).

The positive changes seem sticky!

[fancyswimtime]

Have a family member being treated for Helicobacter pylori right now! He was very worried it was cancer as the symptoms seemed to align. Interestingly he is allergic to penicillin which is complicating the treatment.

[idunnoman1222]

What’s to stop you from Just getting it again two days later?

[lkrubner]

Just like respiratory infections, some people get it multiple times, and have to be treated multiple times.

[legohead]

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]

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?

[legohead]

I wasn't ingesting it any more than a regular person -- but I was surprised to find out how many foods use Yellow 6. It's more orange than yellow. It's also banned in several countries. It used to be in Kraft Mac and Cheese but they replaced their artificial colors with natural ones, which is nice.

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.

[newaccount74]

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.

[legohead]

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.

[iLoveOncall]

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.

[SkyPuncher]

I’m dealing with a similar thing with poultry right now. If I eat it too frequently, it gives me ridiculous, flu and allergy-like symptoms. However, now that I’ve basically eliminated it from my diet, I can eat it on occasion without much issue.

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

[unlikelytomato]

I am very close to the same conclusion. Every time I travel, things return to normal. I always eat chicken at home and never when I travel. I tried eliminating everything else I could think of because chicken was such a reliable staple for me for so many years. My symptoms seem more mild. mostly GI and not much systemic presentation

[Grimblewald]

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.

[tsycho]

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.

[autokad]

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.

[voisin]

> total avoidance of germs is quite harmful

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

[TexanFeller]

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]

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]

PCR tests also love to give false positives...

[BobAliceInATree]

Maybe, but it's only really an issue if there's low-prevalence of covid at the moment of testing (bayesian probability).

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

[bjoli]

I am pretty sure it is the opposite. I used antigen tests which are less reliable.

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

[croes]

Rarely, false negatives are way more likely than false positives.

[BobAliceInATree]

How do you know you're being continuously exposed with "small amount"?

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.

[TexanFeller]

I also live in a large city, in TX, so I most definitely had regular exposures.

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.

[psd1]

Sorry to be that guy, but: _biceps_

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

[aszantu]

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]

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.

[aszantu]

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.

[SkyPuncher]

Aw man, that’s a pain.

[aszantu]

but I'll add your suggestion to the repo when I touch it next time, seems like a good pointer in possible conditions

[graeme]

What did you do to resolve the problem?

[metadat]

As OP alluded to, I think they take antacids.

[SkyPuncher]

Yes, that’s exactly what I take. Generic, Pepcid.

[iamthejuan]

Probiotics is also that comes first in to my mind.

[photon_lines]

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/

[bjoli]

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]

Short haired dogs don’t have this problem. My greyhound is pretty much self-cleaning.

[bjoli]

But then you get those short little hairs everywhere, not to mention having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :)

[schwartzworld]

> having to dress your dog every time it goes below freezing :)

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

[istultus]

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]

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]

> 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.

[mlyle]

> 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.

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.

[ransom1538]

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

[DontchaKnowit]

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/PMC1856386/

[bink]

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.

[moffkalast]

Less of an old myth and more like well accepted scientific fact: 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.

[ein0p]

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]

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.

[jasonvorhe]

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.

[Root_Denied]

> Most people aren't actually interested in knowing what's going on.

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.

[jasonvorhe]

I didn't mean individual diagnosis but research about the broad spectrum of literally poisonous shit being packaged and sold as if it was nothing.

[fwip]

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]

I don't trust any of the GMO vendors.

[fwip]

You know what, that's totally fair. I also do not trust them. I suppose I tend to assume the capacity for deception on this scale is rather limited.

[randomdata]

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]

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.

[randomdata]

> as well as my garden are completely GMO free.

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?

[paretoer]

Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024, you are highly under estimating the devastation of our gluttonous foodie culture.

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.

[inglor_cz]

"I am pretty sure research would back this up"

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.

[consteval]

> We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals

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.

[photon_lines]

I 100% agree - I just wanted to add that processed food also plays a huge role. Our ancestors didn't eat canned fish dipped in high calorie oils or snacks / junk food with no fiber. White bread is used commonly throughout many households but whole-grains are a lot healthier. Eating food which has a high degree of high fructose corn-syrup or sugar with no added fiber has a detrimental effect on health and is not something that our bodies are used to. The high-glycemic index spikes our bodies go through when you combine these factors does a ton of damage to our health and yes - I believe it does have a role in triggering auto-immune reactions. Type 1 diabetics as an example are diabetic due to their own immune systems falsely labelling the pancreas beta-cells as enemies and triggering an auto-immune response -- the reason I believe this happens is due to the high-inflammatory reaction our pancreas go through when we eat extremely highly processed foods (i.e. high sugar / glycemic index items with high insulin spikes & lacking fiber). I don't have a lot of data to prove any of this - so this is my hypothesis but I can confirm that ever since I started staying away from processed foods, I've been in amazing health and I feel much better than when I was slightly over-weight and consuming processed junk.

[inglor_cz]

The interesting thing is that Vietnamese food is really tasty (I love it at least), but Viet Nam is something like 2 per cent fat. And they don't suffer from shortages of food.

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.

[arde]

It's probably the carbs.

[consteval]

Probably not, since carbs have always been the easiest food to get and they didn't have this problem. Protein, and especially meat, was always rare and a minority of diet. But greens, fruits, nuts (ish, they have fat) are plentiful.

[jasonvorhe]

I don't understand the reply, tbh. I didn't imply that people in the West tend to eat too much.

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

[randomdata]

> Addictive amounts of sugar in a lot of food.

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?

[lukan]

"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)

[randomdata]

The US does not appear define a specific threshold – best effort only, but I believe the EU allows 0.9% contamination in organic crops. The identity preserved program only allows 0.5%, so that's theoretically a better bet than organic, if you had some reason to care.

[ClumsyPilot]

> If you really must binge on the junk food

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.

[randomdata]

> it's everywhere, not just chocolates, even in bread.

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.)

[ciceryadam]

Sugar is not only addictive and harmful, it's also a preservative. It's cheap to add and provides longer shelf life.

[therein]

> 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.

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.

[Geste]

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/S01614...

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

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

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