Immune System
Should You Avoid All Infections?
Not every infection is harmful—in fact, infections strengthen our immune system and protect against autoimmune disease. The hygiene hypothesis explains why pathogen exposure in childhood is essential.
Immune System
Not every infection is harmful—in fact, infections strengthen our immune system and protect against autoimmune disease. The hygiene hypothesis explains why pathogen exposure in childhood is essential.
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Modern humans often live in complete disconnection from reality. Without understanding the context in which they have evolved and to which they are evolutionarily adapted.
Should you avoid all infections?
Example: Today, the prevailing message among some scientists and experts who reach many people through (social) media is that every infection should be avoided.
Because: "Every infection causes harm." It depletes us, in other words. That this is simply untrue, we have demonstrated repeatedly and convincingly in our blog ([source no longer available]).
In fact, it was recently shown that immunity to a typical common cold virus (Human Coronavirus OC43) in adulthood depends on how robustly immunity was built in early childhood.
The researchers found that this, in turn, also appears to protect against "the" coronavirus in adulthood through cross-reactivity.
But this requires an infection or exposure to the pathogen. Parents who lock their children at home because they fear every infection—believing that every infection causes harm—deny their children the opportunity to build long-term immunity.
Moreover, French star immunologist Jean-François Bach laid out in an elegant essay published in 2018 in the most prestigious journal of immunology that it is known that "autoimmune diseases are prevented by infection with various bacteria, viruses, and parasites in various experimental models."
Autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases, allergies, asthma, every form of immune dysregulation—today increasing at an unfathomable and perhaps unprecedented rate. No coincidence.
Researchers have categorized this under the term "hygiene hypothesis," which—as Bach explains—is not actually a hypothesis at all, but rather … well, an established relationship.
How little "dirt" (bacteria and the like) we encounter today compared to earlier becomes clear when you ask yourself the simple question of how people used to live without a refrigerator. It only became commonplace in the 1960s.
On "Food Before, During, and After the War," you can read Horst Rübenkamp. In 2016, he published a piece with this title in the ZeitZeugenBörse Mülheim an der Ruhr. Fascinating!
Since milk could not be kept cool, a mobile milkman came daily with his horse-drawn wagon. "People bought the milk they consumed that day." And then you read:
"It still happened in summer that the milk would sour or curdle and become unusable. Long-lasting milk, as is common today, was not yet known."
Bread, too, was baked only once a month, "without molding." The "secret recipe" can only be guessed at.
If you place yourself in these scenarios, you'll develop a sense of how very differently we live today. For us, preservation is paramount. In practically every product, you find preservatives, and milk is treated so that it cannot contain any pathogens.
In the past, exposure to all kinds of germs must have been far more pronounced. Eating three-week-old bread? The already-curdled milk in summer? And today we must rediscover the importance of pro- and prebiotics for our health.
Is bread after three weeks still the bread we know today? Or have the lactic acid and yeast cultures already broken down problematic components in the wheat, the way it happens with sourdough or after longer dough fermentation?
You should consider this question against the backdrop that by now several wheat components have been researched that demonstrably make people sick. One example is α-amylase-trypsin inhibitors (ATI).
These are digestive-resistant proteins—they are researched, among others, by Professor Dr. Dr. Schuppan from Mainz. In animal studies, he has shown that these ATIs induce inflammation, insulin resistance, and fatty liver disease, making animals fatter and metabolically sick.
Specifically in "tiny amounts," as they occur in a conventional diet in our world. But … modern wheat flour has nothing to do with our modern diseases, of course ;-)
This was the topic of a recent blog post by us.
Speaking of bread and flour. Humans have eaten these only since the "neolithic revolution." In the Wikipedia article on this, you read that neolithic revolution is a controversial term, as it suggests an abrupt transition. By now, we know that the shift from hunter-gatherer life to agriculture took place slowly.
That said, one should bear in mind "that these merely 5,000 years are opposed by a very long period of the old and middle stone age of at least 2.5 million years (0.2 %)."
Revealing lines. For here it states that we only slowly became an agricultural society 5,000 years ago, while we lived as hunters and gatherers for "at least" 2.5 million years—that is, in 99.8% of our development as human beings.
Without wheat and flour. And we still must keep debating whether the wheat-flour diet in Western societies is "beneficial" for health … Modern humans: Often without a sense of reality, see the opening lines.
