Another Take on Inflammation

Diet and Nutrition
1

I know everybody’s talking about gluten these days, but here’s another take on inflammation and allergies.

"…Your great-grandparents faced infectious diseases that hardly threaten you today: tuberculosis, polio, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, tapeworm, hookworms. But there’s also a long list of modern illnesses that your great-grandparents barely knew: asthma, eczema, hay fever, food allergies, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis. The coincidence of the rise in these “inflammation” diseases, characterized by an overactive immune system, with the decline of infection is almost certainly not a coincidence.

Natural experiments in recent decades support the idea that while modern hygiene defeats infection, it also promotes allergy and autoimmunity. Finns isolated in an impoverished Soviet province had more parasites and fewer allergies than Finns in Finland. Swedes in clean Stockholm had three times as much asthma as Estonians in smoky Estonia. Ethiopians and Gambians got allergies when they lost their intestinal worms. Growing up on a farm greatly cuts allergy risk.

In a remarkable new book, “An Epidemic of Absence,” Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.

I’ve touched on the “hygiene hypothesis” in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen isn’t very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over."

2

so what’s the take away? don’t shower or wash your hands as often as we’ve been told to?

I mean, it makes sense. I would think it’s only been pretty recent that humans had such large access to soap and shampoo, things like that. I personally don’t use mouth wash because I think it’s just weird to make my mouth burn like that every night. I just stick to brushing and flossing.

3

[quote]PB Andy wrote:
so what’s the take away? don’t shower or wash your hands as often as we’ve been told to?

[/quote]

Maybe. We tend to think that we are washing our hands to avoid illness, right?

I haven’t read anything over at Mark’s Daily Apple for awhile, but I’d imagine the paleo people wouldn’t be surprised. Eating like a caveman would mean you got a lot more exposure to microbes and most likely had some worms too. It never would have occurred to me that maybe our immune system had evolved to function best when under assault.

I know a lot of us have avoided anti-bacterial soaps and household cleansers, for other reasons, mainly the proliferation of anti-biotic resistant strains. Still, this would support the wisdom in not trying to kill off all the bacteria in our homes.

I just find it interesting that so many kids these days have food allergies and asthma. I never recall hearing about peanut butter allergies when I was in grade school. Now we have lots of people who seem to have developed some form of inflammation or food intolerance.

4

There is also the factor that kids get fed the food pyramid diet from birth (there’s added sugar in some formulas etc.), so there could (could!) be chronic inflammation etc. from a very young age, especially with little to no dietary fat.

Purely hypothesis, of course.

5

The thinking here is not wrong per se, but these issues (and their biostatistics) are certainly not this simple.

First of all, I am of the personal opinion that things like asthma may be related to over-santization of the home while children are young. I have no problem with that conjecture.

However, with regard to diseases such as Crohn’s, MS, RA, etc. saying that an increase in #s correlates with an increased actual incidence of the disease is not a solid avenue of thought. Auto-immune disease processes, for the most part, require fairly complex diagnostic criteria. Crohn’s requires a biopsy, MS has the McDonald Criteria (imaging and clinical symptoms, often with the addition of CSF results), even RA usually involves bloodwork (including rheumatoid factor). The “increase” in these diseases over the last several decades is much more likely secondary to ability to diagnose and not increased incidence within the population.

The first year that any newly-described disease process becomes widely diagnoseable the number of people with the disease goes way, way up. How many more people actually have the disease that year than the year before? Not very many

6

Bam - Good point about our increased ability to diagnose diseases. I wondered about that with the Autism label back in the early 1990’s. It seemed almost trendy to label the mildly eccentric person as autistic. Now, I think everybody will agree that there is a real increase in incidence going on.

Along those lines, a lot of other factors in our modern world are different. Chemicals, preservatives, environmental pollutants, and so forth. Kind of hard to get at causation.

Still, I think it’s really interesting that they are using Hookworms to treat MS. Here are a couple of other links you might find interesting.

Hookworms to treat MS

Autoimmune Diseases and Parasites - This one has some awesome stats.

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Powerpuff- I did not use the autism example because it stirs up such a fire most places, but you are very insightful to bring it up as it is possibly the best example of this phenomenon. But I disagree with your saying that autism is legitimately on the rise now in terms of actual incidence. We are still within the “first year” example from above imo. Truth be told, the DSM IV diagnostic criteria are not really all that sound for Autism, even today

Also, use of hookworms for control of peripheral eosinophilia and immune response is gaining popularity even in western medicine (though this is a small relative increase to be sure). Ill check out those articles

8

[quote]bam7196 wrote:
Powerpuff- I did not use the autism example because it stirs up such a fire most places, but you are very insightful to bring it up as it is possibly the best example of this phenomenon. But I disagree with your saying that autism is legitimately on the rise now in terms of actual incidence. We are still within the “first year” example from above imo. Truth be told, the DSM IV diagnostic criteria are not really all that sound for Autism, even today

[/quote]

I’m with you on the shortfalls of the DSM IV criterion and I absolutely don’t want to hijack my own thread. Autism does stir up a lot of controversy. I did recently read that about 20% of cases can now be linked to genetic factors (Fragile X being a big one). We can only expect that to increase dramatically over the next few years, and that’s a good thing.

I was doing a lot of preschool diagnostics back in the 1990’s so I felt like I had a front row seat to the autism explosion. I probably saw one kid per week in my practice. Lots of preschool kids with language delays getting an autism label.

9

I think that as a society we have caused some of our own afflictions. How much I can prove and what I can do about it are two different things. Eat good foods, lift hard, and see the doctor and make some of my own decisions are what I do.