is-being-too-clean-actually-making-you-sick

[Ianab]

Article from the local paper. 


Is being 'too clean' actually making you sick? | Stuff.co.nz


Makes a lot of sense that trying to live in a sterile environment creates problems with your immune system etc. The balance seems to be the food safety and specific parasites etc that WILL make you sick. But a bit of dirt and dog slobber is probably good for you. 

[Cedarman]

Have not tried to find out, but do kids growing up in a rural farm environment have fewer problems as adults with allergies and other sickness affecting them than kids growing up in suburbs or do they have more problems?. 

[firefighter ontheside]

I believe whole heartedly in being somewhere in the middle.  We used to use anti-bacterial soap and then found out that was not good for a person to use it all of the time.  Kills too many beneficial bacteria.

[thecfarm]

Go back and live 100 years ago and eat what they did. 

[Ianab]

Have not tried to find out, but do kids growing up in a rural farm environment have fewer problems as adults with allergies and other sickness affecting them than kids growing up in suburbs or do they have more problems?.

Research and anecdotal evidence suggests less problems for farm kids. Same goes for families with pets (cats / dogs etc) in the house. It's suggested that having something relatively harmless trains the immune system to work as it should, and not get triggered by random things that it shouldn't respond to. (allergies)

Of course you need basic cleanliness and food safety etc, but we aren't designed to live in a sterile bubble.

[barbender]

 You guys need to work around septic pumpers and maintenance people. Mithing will touch their immune system!😂

I remember working on septic systems with my Grandpa. He'd be doing a repair on an existing pipe, bare handed, and reach up and get a smoke out of his pocket. Put it in his mouth and light it😬

He had a pocket knife that got used for everything from scraping a burr off the inside of a pipe (not just new ones) to cutting cheese and bronschwiegert for lunch sandwiches😬

I've seen other guys stick a tape measure down into a tank full of effluent, squeegee the tape off with their bare fingers, and then wipe their fingers on their pants🤢🤢

Watch out for those septic guys. Their immune systems are untouchable, but don't let them make you a sandwich- your immune system may not be up to it😬🤢🤮

[Texas Ranger]

Back in the polio days it was primarily an urban problem, then spread, in my non-medical opinion that country kids were exposed to the world and their immune system was stronger than the city kids.

[thecfarm]

I must be a DanG dirty man.
I don't get sick much.  ;D

[B.C.C. Lapp]

I cut logs for an old guy that skidded logs with a team of mules.   He was 74 and still logging.  Was a diabetic and needed an insulin shot a couple times a day.   Id find his syringes, not used ones, one he was going to use that day, on the muddy floor of his pickup rolling around with tools and beer cans and stuff.  Then hed give himself the shot with out even cleaning his arm.  Tough old guy, never sick, would work me into the ground.  How he never got an infection from those shots I dont know.

[bluthum]

If there is ever a movement for not being too clean I'd need be a good candidate for being their poster child.

[beenthere]

Subject line is prolly true.. stomach can't handle anything with germs on it.  Back in the day, growing up on the farm there was little or no washing hands between eating, smoking, picking apples dropped on the ground, and the list goes on and on. Can't believe I chewed my fingernails down to barely visible while being around cows, pigs, chickens, horses, and all that comes with them. Wasn't sickly either.

[mike_belben]

Family sickness has caused me to spend the last few years of my life in furious research, and i can say that there is basically no dispute in the literature that the immune system is activated and strengthened by exposure, the earlier the better.  Rich apartment kids have allergies that poor dirt crawlers dont, and so forth.  And yes i have welded on a septic pumper tank.  I have also unbolted the back hatch to rake out the tampons and gravels that accumulate in a septic pumper.  If my diet is right, i dont get sick. I have kissed active covid on the mouth a few times now.

The more you "sterilize" the more you are eliminating the colonized beneficial bacteria that keep pathogenic bacteria in check.  So if you dont want e.coli, streptococcus, salmonella, etc in your gut.. just consume what kills them.  Lactobacillus species. 

Thats your acidic/sour stuff. Fermented pickles, kraut, yogurt, vinegar type things. 

"Sick" is often the absorption through our epithelial lining, of small quantities of acute toxin secreted by a growing quantity of gram negative pathogenic bacteria we are colonized by.  Doritos and ice cream doesnt have much lactobacillus to offer your microbiome.

[Don P]

I hope everyone is on the mend or mended Mike.
If I'm remembering right in WWI it was the farm kids who had not been exposed to the sicknesses of large groups. They were the ones getting sick. There's a balance in there somewhere. I think I'm remembering right that a couple of the goals of the CCC program were to teach large groups of men to work together and build up their immunity together before we went into another looming world war.

[mike_belben]

Yeah thatd still fit.  The farm kids didnt get hay fever because of immune exposure to it, but wouldnt have immunity to the things the city boys did.  The city boys get hayfever and country boys get chicken pox, that sorta thing.  Like columbus bringing his cooties to the new world. 

[chet]

Gotta disagree on da hay fever. I might have been the exception, but grew up on a working farm, and had nasty hay fever.

[SwampDonkey]

And farmer's lung is a disease off a farm where there is moldy dusty hay.

I know of lots of country kids who got polio. They are my parents generation. It would often infect every kid in the family. Don't know the stats on that. My parents knew one family with 3 infected and another with 4 infected with it. So it's far from rare cases. In 1953 at it's peek in Canada, there was 9000 cases and 500 deaths from polio. The population was under 15M. 1 in 1600 people had it.

TB was often found in cattle which is spread to humans by breathing air nearby live or recent dead infected cows or raw milk from infected cows.

The amount of dust you had to breath on the back of a potato planter in the dry spring air around here was something awful. No one rides on them any more. You was always covered in dust. Darn lucky if you didn't get some kind of respiratory disease, but never knew anyone who had. Must be clean dirt. :D

[Southside]

There is a difference between a microbe and silica and asbestos being blown all around you for 10 hours at a time. 

[Ianab]

For sure. The bodies immune system tries to protect you from bacteria and viruses, and "learns" by being exposed to them.  It doesn't protect you from toxins and environmental hazards (smoke / dust / asbestos etc),  The body has other mechanisms to try and protect you from that sort of thing, but they can be overwhelmed by too much pollen / dust etc, and don't handle asbestos dust at all well. Likewise if you let your food get contaminated with botulism, it's the toxin that bacteria have produced in that food that affects you, rather than an infection of your body.


And it has problems if you are exposed to a completely new pathogen that you have never met before, like polio. If you contract polio and survive, THEN your immune system can recognise it in the future, and protect you next time. Problem is that a lot of victims didn't survive (or were crippled), until vaccines were developed that could train the immune system to recognise the virus, before you were actually exposed to the real thing.

[SwampDonkey]

The soil is full of bacteria and fungus spores to hitch a ride on that field soil dust. It's just got to be something your body can't deal with, that's all it takes.

[Ianab]

Or simply the amount of dust (and microbes etc) getting into your lungs overwhelms them. If your lungs can't clear themselves of foreign crud, then you develop pneumonia or worse. Coal miners / sawmill workers can all suffer from similar conditions. Your immune system can't really protect you from that sort of environmental hazard, that's where you need air filtration / dust extraction etc

[SwampDonkey]

 Be very few using them on farm operations if there are. You need more than that anyway because it's in your eyes, ears and your cloths is full of it riding that contraption. The guy in his air conditioned tractor cab hasn't much to complain about, except having to clean the cab filter with an air hose 3 or 4 times a week. :D Spring planting is the worst time, everything is bone dry usually in mid and late spring.

[SwampDonkey]

I see it's been studied, organic dust exposure in potato processing environments. One study suggests antigens of Agromyces ramosus, Alcaligenes faecalis, Thermoactinomyces vulgaris and Penicillium citrinum should be considered as potential occupational allergens, probably stimulating an adverse immunopathological reaction in exposed potato processing workers.

That just a quick search and not specific to riding a potato planter. But if you road a planter, you're probably working inside a potato warehouse all winter. ;)

[beenthere]

Yeah thatd still fit.  The farm kids didnt get hay fever because of immune exposure to it, but wouldnt have immunity to the things the city boys did.  The city boys get hayfever and country boys get chicken pox, that sorta thing.  Like columbus bringing his cooties to the new world.

As a farm kid, I enjoyed the farm life.. but the hay fever was my nemesis.. be it in the haymow, stacking hay/straw bales on the wagon behind the baler, shoveling oats, or spreading straw for bedding. Wasn't until I went to college and got out of the hay, straw, and oat dust that I could experience breathing in air without wheezing 24/7. Sorry to dispute your theory Mike.

[Bert]

I grew up on a farm, sawmill, and took vacations fairly regularly to destinations including city's with my family. Had/have hayfever, allergies, chicken pox, strep throat, covid, flu... Still at it! For me, rest not diet is key.

Edit- aside from Gluten. Bread makes my back hurt.

[mike_belben]

! For me, rest not diet is key.

Edit- aside from Gluten. Bread makes my back hurt.

Mine too, and its all i ate for like 40 years.  I used to say id never had indigestion.. turns out id never not had it.  My wife got diabetes from a gluten and dairy allergy but never popped for them on allergen panels.  We found it with a continuous glucose monitor.  With 99% insulin resistance score her glycemic control of a sprite is just fine.  Any dairy or gluten would spike crash spike crash all day long with hives diarrhea etc.


Fun fact.  Clostridium botulinum bacteria FLOURISHES wherever glyphosate is used.