Category: immune system

More Fermented Foods, Less Runny Nose?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

As recently as four or five years ago,and for many years before that, I often had a runny nose. I went through boxes and boxes of Kleenex. I carried a handkerchief everywhere and often used it. Not because I had a cold–I almost never got colds. It was different than that. You might say I was mildly allergic to something in the air.

Because of reading an article I will discuss in a moment, I have just noticed that my runny nose has vanished, both in Berkeley (clean air) and Beijing (dirty air). So I don’t think it’s due to the dirty air in Beijing. There was no sharp change but as best I can remember it went away during the period when I started eating lots of fermented foods. Most days I eat about three types — yogurt and two other things, such as kimchi or kombucha. It is plausible that more exposure to bacteria caused my immune system to stop overreacting.

The article, from The Scientist, describes research suggesting that not enough bacteria can cause disease — specifically, sinusitis. Sinusitis, just like ulcers, has been associated with a particular bacterium, but the researcher involved, Susan Lynch of UCSF, has a more sophisticated understanding of causality than those two bacteria-causes-ulcers scientists and the committee that gave them a Nobel Prize. Lynch points out, quite reasonably, that the bacteria associated with sinusitis “have also been detected in the sinuses of healthy individuals . . . “Just because you find these organisms, it does not mean they are driving disease.” (The bacterium that supposedly caused ulcers, C. pylori, turned out to be very common. Almost everyone infected did not have ulcers.)

Lynch and her colleagues discovered

Samples from [sinusitis] patients tended to have less diversity of bacterial species than those of healthy controls. Furthermore the relative abundance of certain species differed between patients and controls. Sinusitis patients’s noses were enriched with a skin bacteria called Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum, for example, while samples from healthy controls were enriched with Lactobacillus bacteria, including L. sakei.

Which you could obviously get from fermented food. Following up this observation, the researchers did a mouse study that found that giving mice the bad bacteria caused sinusitis-like symptoms but giving mice both bad bacteria and good bacteria did not cause the symptoms. The good bacteria were protective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fallibility of Epidemiologists: Neglect of the Immune System

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Anne Weiss recently repointed me to an interview with the epidemiologist Tom Jefferson about swine flu. Jefferson, let me stress, is a good epidemiologist. In the interview he makes a point I make on this blog, that research is heavily shaped by two questions: 1. what will make money? 2. what will be good for my career? (How curious that economists — with the exception of Veblen and Robin Hanson — spend so much more time on #1 than #2.) For example:

Interviewer Why aren’t researchers interested in [other viruses]?

Jefferson: It’s easy: They can’t make money with [them]. With rhinoviruses, RSV and the majority of the other viruses, it’s hard to make a lot of money or a career out of it. Against influenza, though, there are vaccines, and there are drugs you can sell. And that’s where the big money from the pharmaceuticals industry is. It makes sure that research on influenza is published in the good journals. And that’s why you have more attention being paid there, and the entire research field becomes interesting for ambitious scientists.

Because Jefferson is willing to tell the truth about virology, it is interesting what he doesn’t say.

The big glaring gap is that in a discussion about how to avoid getting sick he says nothing about improving immune function. Not one word. He isn’t a doctor. He doesn’t work for a drug company. There is no obvious reason he fails to discuss this. He is reflecting the blindness of his whole field, I believe. It isn’t a mystery how to improve immune function: Sleep better and eat more fermented food. I have blogged before (here, here, and here, for example) about how widely this supremely important question — how to improve immune function — is ignored.

The other gap in the interview is more subtle. Jefferson recommends hand-washing as a great way to avoid getting sick. He says:

I wash my hands very often — and it’s not all because of swine flu. That’s probably the most effective precaution there is against all respiratory viruses, and the majority of gastrointestinal viruses and germs as well.

Later he says:

One study done in Pakistan has shown that hand washing can even save children’s lives. Someone should get a Nobel Prize for that!

In contrast, I believe that touching other people (and thereby picking up their germs on your hands) is part of a self-vaccination system whose goal is to protect us against the dangerous microbes nearby by exposing us to them in small amounts. Part of the system is an enjoyment of touching others and being touched. Another part is whatever causes us to constantly touch ourselves around the mouth. A third part is the tonsils, perfectly placed to pick up a tiny fraction of the germs around our mouths.

This theory of mine, which is supported by several lines of evidence, suggests that hand washing has a serious downside: It interferes with the self-vaccination system. Jefferson says nothing about any downside of hand washing. I’m not saying that Jefferson should have known of this theory of mine, of course not. (For one thing, the interview was before I thought of it.) My point is that — for reasons having nothing to do with money or career — he is too certain about what he knows. Maybe hand washing is only helpful when persons have weak immune systems or in places with large amounts of germs, such as hospitals. With strong immune systems in normal places, maybe it does more harm than good.

I became aware of the big gap in research after I improved my sleep and stopped getting colds. Before that, I had gotten the usual number of colds. No one had said that could happen — had said there was so much room for improvement in immune function. Anne Weiss became aware of the gap in research when she visited her doctor:

[More than 10] years ago I was seeing a family medicine doc who also taught epidemiology at [Famous Canadian University]. At one of my appointments I asked her how I could strengthen my immune system. She laughed in my face and told me that just was not possible.

Weiss says she was treated “as if I had asked about the existence of fairies or unicorns.” (She added that attitudes seem to be changing and one Canadian hospital now uses probiotics to prevent and treat C. difficile infection.)

Epidemiologists could easily study environmental control of immune function. They could ask questions like how many colds do you get in a typical year?, when you get a cold, how long does it usually take before the symptoms disappear? and during the last year, how many days did your longest cold last? As far as I know, they haven’t done so.

Early Immune Warning System: A Bit of Evidence

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have proposed that three things — a tendency to touch each other (e.g., shake hands), a tendency to touch near our mouths, and our tonsils — together form an early warning system for our immune system. The early warning system helps the immune system get tiny exposure to microbes circulating in the community. It performs self-vaccination. Like ordinary vaccination, exposure to tiny amounts of Microbe X protects against exposure to a large amount of Microbe X.

In Daniel Everett’s anthropological study of the Pirahã people (Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, 2009) he says the Pirahã “all touch one another frequently” (p. 85). “They loved to touch me too.” He has never seen kissing but “there is a word for it, so they must do it.” This supports the idea that a tendency to touch others is widespread.

If this theory is true, reducing microbe exposure to zero (e.g., sterile food) is a seriously bad thing. It’s been proposed that the polio epidemics of the first half of the 1900s were caused by cities becoming too clean.

Evidence from ants.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • the power of Marmite
  • problems in the Chinese economy
  • Edward Jay Epstein reviews A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris. Janet Malcolm, among many others, assumed McDonald was guilty but new evidence suggests he was innocent.
  • Fermented food addiction. Several months ago I had a hard time not eating roasted peanuts. I kept buying them. Eventually the compulsion to eat them disappeared. Maybe they were supplying a nutrient I was deficient in.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Adam Clemens, Melissa McEwen, and Navanit Arakeri.

More Examples of Mainstream Health Care Ignoring the Immune System

Seth Roberts19 Comments

In a recent post I made an obvious point. If our immune systems were stronger, we would need antibiotics less often and antibiotic resistance would become less of a problem. I hadn’t heard this point made (for example, this WHO report fails to say it). This was one example, I said, of how mainstream health care ignores the immune system. Perfectly obvious things, such as this idea about antibiotic resistance, fail to be noticed. I gave five more examples. Since then I have come across even more examples:

1. Hospitals do little to help patients sleep and often interrupt sleep, Nancy Lebovitz pointed out (better sleep –> better immune function). This article describes the problem. One way to improve hospital sleep — beyond don’t wake patients up — would be to provide exposure to strong sunlight-like light in the morning and prevent exposure to sunlight-like light after dark. I found that an hour of sunlight or similar light from fluorescent lamps in the morning improved my sleep. Most fluorescent light resembles sunlight (both have strong bluish components), incandescent light (reddish) does not. Until they install dual lighting systems (bluish light during the day, reddish light at night), hospitals can provide blue-blocker glasses to wear after dark.

2. The book Immortal Bird (sent me by the publisher) tells how Damon Weber, born with a defective heart, had a heart transplant when he was a teenager. After the transplant, problems arose. The doctors involved (at NewYork-Presbyterian ­Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center) took the problems to be signs of transplant rejection. In fact they were due to infection. Drugs given to deal with the mistakenly-assumed rejection suppressed Damon’s immune system. They reduced his ability to fight off the infection and he died. The author of the book, Damon’s father, sued the doctors and hospital for malpractice. The doctors did not exactly “ignore” the immune system, but they apparently failed to fully grasp the danger of immune suppression, even though the infection that killed Damon is common in transplant cases. (Although Columbia Presbyterian charged half a million dollars for the transplant, “three years into the lawsuit the [hospital’s] medical director claimed Damon’s post-op records couldn’t be located.”)

3. I asked a UCSF medical student what she’d been taught about the immune system. “We cover it!” she said. In a section called “Infectious Disease, Immunology, and Inflammation”. What makes the immune system work better or worse? I asked. “If you’re stressed out, it doesn’t work well,” she said. If you’re malnourished, like in Bangladesh. You need “nutrients and vitamins”. (A booklet I got telling me to take less antibiotics told me to “eat healthy”.) She also said the students get entire lectures on how to treat diseases so rare they might never be encountered. There is a whole section on genetics. Sure, they cover it. So superficially that they don’t remember the most basic idea: Better sleep –> better immune function. I said our health care system is built around first, let them get sick. That’s right, she said. Ignoring the immune system is an excellent way to allow people to get sick.

4. Melissa McEwen pointed out that proton pump inhibitors, such as Nexium, reduce the body’s ability to fight infection. They are prescribed for acid reflux and reduce how much acid the stomach makes. Because stomach acid kills bacteria, there should have been far more concern about their safety. “Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are among the most widely prescribed medications worldwide [billions of prescriptions]. . . . The collective body of information overwhelmingly suggests an increased risk of infectious complications,” says this article. Because the drugs are so common, the damage is great and, because of more infection, not restricted to those who take them. It could have been avoided by research into treatments that do not harm the immune system.