My first inclination is to roll my eyes at the semantic brouhaha over the word "hygiene"—what's in a name, a rose by any other name would be just as sweet, etc.—but I suppose it might matter in today's world, where perception overrules reality, and tactically nudging the connotation of words in a direction beneficial to your side is the current MO.
We in the west are fixated on reductionism. It's not entirely without use, it's very helpful for understanding how [parts of] systems work. But it is not a good basis on which to construct a major paradigm about biology, which is a complex system. Complex systems are systems where the collective behavior of their parts entails emergence of properties that can hardly, if not at all, be inferred from properties of the parts. Or more simply, according to Aristotle, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
We can argue about the possible culprits of our current norm of ill health, of which there are many. It seems to me that we're in the middle of a perfect storm of a lot of bad shit that we have brought upon ourselves. My personal focus the last decade has been nutritional science, especially what happens in the mitochondria. I think the biggest culprits are modern grains, industrial seed oils (PUFAs), too much sugar, toxic chemicals, overmedication especially with antibiotics (iatrogenesis), and the resulting metabolic dysfunction and dysbiosis from all of the above.
I have personal experience with some of this. My four-year-old almost died from a non-overdose of acetaminophen. I used to have multiple annual upper respiratory infections, lactose intolerance, and seasonal allergies (all banished with a dietary change), have a mystery autoimmune disease, and went through a cancer blip a couple of years ago. Have experienced what is in retrospect appalling treatment by a dermatologist for rosacea. Have a family member whose thyroid was partially destroyed by radiation treatment, probably unnecessarily. Had a run-in with Lyme disease and learned firsthand about the CDC's head-up-its-butt testing protocol and recommended treatment, which I thankfully disregarded (a rare instance where I was grateful for antibiotics). Etc.
Allopathic medicine and modern culture are fixated on being *in control*, which seems like the modern extension of the anthropocentrism of past ages. You know, when people believed that god/s created the earth and everything on it for the use of man, and everybody thought the universe revolves around the earth because, us. So now we think we can't be healthy without constant intervention. To suggest a name for the modern age, how about the Age of Hubris.
This is unnecessary and counterproductive. We have a perfect system already for our bodies to take care of themselves, which has been developing on its own for millions of years, long before Homo sapiens was a thing. This would be Evolution. If humans were as smart as they like to think they are, they would acknowledge and embrace the evolved complex system that is our biology and our associated immune system, and squelch the impulse to be interfering busybodies.
90% of our chronic ill health would go away if we focused on evolutionarily appropriate lifestyles. Instead of throwing so many resources at pharmaceutical development, and instead doing honest, non-profit-oriented research on doing what's good for us (fat chance of that), we would mostly just need doctors to fix broken arms and nurse people through periodic common infections.
Seems like another one of the paradoxes of secularism - abandoning religion in the name of science and self-determination just promotes less intelligent behavior and less liberty. If we no longer can believe we were created in God's image, then we still need to have some 'intelligence' applied to our design, or it can't possibly be adequate. And if getting sick isn't something mediated by God, then it shouldn't be tolerated at all - which means no one has the right to "infect" someone else, so no one has the right to live naturally. That the evolutionary argument for why that doesn't make sense is iron-clad doesn't even matter.
And before accusations of being anti-science or whatever can be tossed around, I'm not suggesting that by any means. Just maybe a change in focus of our motivations and direction. I love science and understanding how things work.
'rather than absence of infection, absence of beneficial microbes is a better account for the different outcomes observed between rural and sub/urban children'
Why can't it be both? Assuming "beneficial microbes" is referring to the newly discovered microbiome and similar "beneficial microbes".
As with so many other things these days, we have to make it one or the other, so that we can choose a side to root for.
Oct 19, 2022·edited Oct 19, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
I posted Prasad's article on my Facebook page, where it earned a "fact check" flag. Not as bad as what I was expecting, which was Facebook jail. Maybe things are looking up.
The rise of chronic illnesses is fascinating to me. There are many possible causes. Some I have identified are:
- vaccines (ingredients, schedule, reduction of viruses)
- pesticides (DDT, glyphosate at different times)
- corn and soy, especially baby food, formula and hfcs
- shampoo, conditioners, etc containing fragrances and xenoestrogens
- smog
- fire retardants
- non-stick pans
It would be interesting to find numbers on all of these possible causes and compare to all the chronic illnesses and see if any correlations show up. As you note, different countries have different rates of usage, so that's one way to tease out correlations. That is a PhD thesis level research task, though, isn't it.
Complicating the matter is generational illness - my father had chemical sensitivity, but mine is now worse. Mouse research suggests sometimes exposures cause illness two or more generations later. So maybe my grandparents or great-grandparents were exposed to toxins.
There is any amount of statistics and correlative discussion in the nutrition science communities I hang out in. Correlations, per required caveat, are just that and not proof of causation, unless it's something totally obvious like smoking and lung cancer.
I could add to your list industrial seed oils ("vegetable oils"), whose detrimental effects on health are becoming more and more obvious. I really appreciate your mention of shampoo etc. This would include sunscreens. Skin is incredibly absorbent and it's truly astonishing the amount of crap the average person slathers on their skin. Go into any American bathroom and note the number of bottles of Stuff.
And, as Brian notes, "don't forget the viruses".
Several times Brian mentions "processed food". The mainstream acknowledges this is not always healthy, but the assumption is the implied content of fat, salt, and perhaps sugar. To my way of thinking the salt is Mostly Harmless, and it's not the fat so much as the kind of fat; specifically, polyunsaturated fat mostly in the form of linoleic acid which is bad. And then there's all those additives, including the common emulsifiers which can harm the mucosal lining of the intestine.
"Don't forget viruses!" the hygiene hypothesis backlashers would be quick to point out. Totally forgetting that those are the least controlled in the eras and regions with the least chronic immune-mediated disease...
Many of those in your list might be double-mechanism, with direct harms plus microbiome-degradation-mediated harms. That even holds for poor infection outcomes like for SARS-CoV-2 in urban and polluted rural areas (eg central valley California). As in my post and my comment below, I am definitely not against the old friends hypothesis on its own merits.
First off, thanks for the shoutout Brian. I hoped that people actually spent time reading the article, even if they agreed it was a concerning GOF sort of research, but it appears that most people have only looked at reports or just abstracts. A bit of a shame.
I actually wrote about immunity debt a few months ago, so it's nice to see other people discuss it. I believe Peter of All Facts Matter has done so as well:
This whole bruhaha seems so ridiculous. It sort of feels like some new post-modern form of sterility. It's like having the microbiome crowd also be allowed to bleach everything.
We know both good and bad germs exist out there, and there's no way we're going to select for which ones we want. The fact that children, and quite frankly people, are not outside as much as they used to be means that we are causing a detriment to our own welfare.
To the whole virus thing, it's clear that many of our own genome may have been derived from viruses. It's assumed many of our introns are remnants of some form of integration, and even things such as syncytium may have been derived from viruses, so we know that we have been coevolving with viruses since possibly the start of our species.
It's an interesting idea to think that loss of viruses may be detrimental in the long run. It's the same as bacteria and even parasites with some people thinking that parasites may have provided us with some regulatory mechanisms.
So I don't find it hard to assume that there's a world of harm that may be happening by pushing for all forms of sterility.
As an aside, bleaching (or using Quaternary Ammonium Compounds ) isn't all that good for your skin, or to be inhaled. Overuse of disinfectants could cause chronic health problems just by themselves.
I'm aware of that; my comment was sort of to indicate the fruitlessness of such endeavors. I'm personally very sensitive to bleach and it's one of the smells that causes my headaches. 🥴
Right - and beyond that, all of the genes responsible for multicellular coordination and epigenetic reprogramming are just as likely to have gotten their start in viruses as in cells, as I have said before.
From an evolutionary standpoint progress may be impossible without viruses. As for their benefit for the discrete organism, I dunno - it's at least likely that trying to fight viruses just makes it less likely that we will get the viruses that are more co-evolved and temperate, the same way a sterile environment favors the most resilient bacteria.
👏👏👏👏👏💯🙏 thank you for maintaining some balance and calm clarity in these eyerollingly, overly dramatic, teenager years post covid.
We have succeeded in pushing the microbial world out of whack within and around our halobiome, with our precious paranoia's, just as we did with the soils microbial balance for decades. Now we have relatively benign viruses like RSV, trying to restore the equitable balance within the virome. Why? So we dont anihalate them by killing their hosts.
Virus free world? Give me a break! They are 30 to the power of 10. Like trying to eliminate every grain of sand, with a pair of tweezers and a bucket!🤦♀️🤦♀️🙄😑😐
I guess it's become more fashionable to spell it as holobiome, but i believe the original term was based around the halophillic symbiosis studies done in plants.
But yes I mean, in a relation to an organism and its symbiotic relations to other organisms in, and around it. 👍🤗
I tried looking up the word halobiome, and there were no hits. Holobiome came up so I was sort of wondering if it was just a typo. Thanks for the clarification
Thank you - I lost some of my tabs from the twitter meltdown, but yes there were one or two that saw "not accepting viruses" as some sort of next benchmark for society to be judged on. Why not just skip to "not accepting sad thoughts" and lobotomize everyone.
As far as I am inclined to think the benefit is and has always been nil. The majority of severe outcomes or deaths resulting from infection, just like all cancers, should be seen as immune failure. Remove the biggest danger, and the immune system just "crashes" on the next-biggest danger. It is the same way as if you fix a "bad intersection" in a village you can still end up with the same number of crashes - the people who weren't paying enough attention in the bad intersection are still going to eventually crash somewhere else. Of course I could be totally wrong about that. Like Prasad says, we really know nothing at all about the big picture.
My bet is something different. I used to have debilitating seasonal allergies. I was out for 2 months of the year unless i was drugged to the eyeballs. I was able to cure it by getting rid of diet drinks (aspartame) and taking probiotics. After recommendation froma friend I went middle of peak season from practically being a zombie to experiencing no symptoms within 2 weeks.
I think the modern diet has fucked our gut biome and this is the major cause of all the auto immune. Not ruling out vaccines as a major contributing factor as well. I mean you don't get bell's palsy from eating KFC
Right, so that's evidence in support of the old friends model. Like I said, my guess would be that both things are true and really should just be part of the same theory, even if old friends explains more instances on a per-case basis. The immune system needs exposure to both the "good" and "bad" elements of not-self in order to stay in homeostasis.
I, like everyone, got allergies within a year of moving to Austin. But they self-resolved with 12 mile bike rides to work.
KFC is a known neurotropic pathogen found to cause shame, depression, and existential alienation.
I was just kidding. Well, yes and no. Those are in fact the emotions caused by the fifth or sixth time I ate one of the 'wraps' that they were selling circa 2002. I have only since purchased some sides from the combo KFC / Taco Bell. Those are overpriced but as long as you maintain a positive attitude you don't actually have to be "ashamed" about spending 4 dollars on green beans.
I would call it the "old frenemies" hypothesis.
Here's an apropos poem about the current discussion.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/fear
My first inclination is to roll my eyes at the semantic brouhaha over the word "hygiene"—what's in a name, a rose by any other name would be just as sweet, etc.—but I suppose it might matter in today's world, where perception overrules reality, and tactically nudging the connotation of words in a direction beneficial to your side is the current MO.
We in the west are fixated on reductionism. It's not entirely without use, it's very helpful for understanding how [parts of] systems work. But it is not a good basis on which to construct a major paradigm about biology, which is a complex system. Complex systems are systems where the collective behavior of their parts entails emergence of properties that can hardly, if not at all, be inferred from properties of the parts. Or more simply, according to Aristotle, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
We can argue about the possible culprits of our current norm of ill health, of which there are many. It seems to me that we're in the middle of a perfect storm of a lot of bad shit that we have brought upon ourselves. My personal focus the last decade has been nutritional science, especially what happens in the mitochondria. I think the biggest culprits are modern grains, industrial seed oils (PUFAs), too much sugar, toxic chemicals, overmedication especially with antibiotics (iatrogenesis), and the resulting metabolic dysfunction and dysbiosis from all of the above.
I have personal experience with some of this. My four-year-old almost died from a non-overdose of acetaminophen. I used to have multiple annual upper respiratory infections, lactose intolerance, and seasonal allergies (all banished with a dietary change), have a mystery autoimmune disease, and went through a cancer blip a couple of years ago. Have experienced what is in retrospect appalling treatment by a dermatologist for rosacea. Have a family member whose thyroid was partially destroyed by radiation treatment, probably unnecessarily. Had a run-in with Lyme disease and learned firsthand about the CDC's head-up-its-butt testing protocol and recommended treatment, which I thankfully disregarded (a rare instance where I was grateful for antibiotics). Etc.
Allopathic medicine and modern culture are fixated on being *in control*, which seems like the modern extension of the anthropocentrism of past ages. You know, when people believed that god/s created the earth and everything on it for the use of man, and everybody thought the universe revolves around the earth because, us. So now we think we can't be healthy without constant intervention. To suggest a name for the modern age, how about the Age of Hubris.
This is unnecessary and counterproductive. We have a perfect system already for our bodies to take care of themselves, which has been developing on its own for millions of years, long before Homo sapiens was a thing. This would be Evolution. If humans were as smart as they like to think they are, they would acknowledge and embrace the evolved complex system that is our biology and our associated immune system, and squelch the impulse to be interfering busybodies.
90% of our chronic ill health would go away if we focused on evolutionarily appropriate lifestyles. Instead of throwing so many resources at pharmaceutical development, and instead doing honest, non-profit-oriented research on doing what's good for us (fat chance of that), we would mostly just need doctors to fix broken arms and nurse people through periodic common infections.
Seems like another one of the paradoxes of secularism - abandoning religion in the name of science and self-determination just promotes less intelligent behavior and less liberty. If we no longer can believe we were created in God's image, then we still need to have some 'intelligence' applied to our design, or it can't possibly be adequate. And if getting sick isn't something mediated by God, then it shouldn't be tolerated at all - which means no one has the right to "infect" someone else, so no one has the right to live naturally. That the evolutionary argument for why that doesn't make sense is iron-clad doesn't even matter.
And before accusations of being anti-science or whatever can be tossed around, I'm not suggesting that by any means. Just maybe a change in focus of our motivations and direction. I love science and understanding how things work.
'rather than absence of infection, absence of beneficial microbes is a better account for the different outcomes observed between rural and sub/urban children'
Why can't it be both? Assuming "beneficial microbes" is referring to the newly discovered microbiome and similar "beneficial microbes".
As with so many other things these days, we have to make it one or the other, so that we can choose a side to root for.
Right - that is exactly where I go in the conclusion, haha
That's what I get for commenting before finishing the article. But otherwise I forget what I wanted to say!
I posted Prasad's article on my Facebook page, where it earned a "fact check" flag. Not as bad as what I was expecting, which was Facebook jail. Maybe things are looking up.
This is so good. Thank you for your work Brian.
Thanks!
The rise of chronic illnesses is fascinating to me. There are many possible causes. Some I have identified are:
- vaccines (ingredients, schedule, reduction of viruses)
- pesticides (DDT, glyphosate at different times)
- corn and soy, especially baby food, formula and hfcs
- shampoo, conditioners, etc containing fragrances and xenoestrogens
- smog
- fire retardants
- non-stick pans
It would be interesting to find numbers on all of these possible causes and compare to all the chronic illnesses and see if any correlations show up. As you note, different countries have different rates of usage, so that's one way to tease out correlations. That is a PhD thesis level research task, though, isn't it.
Complicating the matter is generational illness - my father had chemical sensitivity, but mine is now worse. Mouse research suggests sometimes exposures cause illness two or more generations later. So maybe my grandparents or great-grandparents were exposed to toxins.
There is any amount of statistics and correlative discussion in the nutrition science communities I hang out in. Correlations, per required caveat, are just that and not proof of causation, unless it's something totally obvious like smoking and lung cancer.
I could add to your list industrial seed oils ("vegetable oils"), whose detrimental effects on health are becoming more and more obvious. I really appreciate your mention of shampoo etc. This would include sunscreens. Skin is incredibly absorbent and it's truly astonishing the amount of crap the average person slathers on their skin. Go into any American bathroom and note the number of bottles of Stuff.
And, as Brian notes, "don't forget the viruses".
Several times Brian mentions "processed food". The mainstream acknowledges this is not always healthy, but the assumption is the implied content of fat, salt, and perhaps sugar. To my way of thinking the salt is Mostly Harmless, and it's not the fat so much as the kind of fat; specifically, polyunsaturated fat mostly in the form of linoleic acid which is bad. And then there's all those additives, including the common emulsifiers which can harm the mucosal lining of the intestine.
"Don't forget viruses!" the hygiene hypothesis backlashers would be quick to point out. Totally forgetting that those are the least controlled in the eras and regions with the least chronic immune-mediated disease...
Many of those in your list might be double-mechanism, with direct harms plus microbiome-degradation-mediated harms. That even holds for poor infection outcomes like for SARS-CoV-2 in urban and polluted rural areas (eg central valley California). As in my post and my comment below, I am definitely not against the old friends hypothesis on its own merits.
I briefly touched on the research around inherited innate immune sensitization in a previous post - https://unglossed.substack.com/i/71561323/context-innate-not-adaptive-fetal-immune-reprogramming-may-be-common - and this, too, could be related to the West's leading the rest of the world in these types of diseases
First off, thanks for the shoutout Brian. I hoped that people actually spent time reading the article, even if they agreed it was a concerning GOF sort of research, but it appears that most people have only looked at reports or just abstracts. A bit of a shame.
I actually wrote about immunity debt a few months ago, so it's nice to see other people discuss it. I believe Peter of All Facts Matter has done so as well:
https://moderndiscontent.substack.com/p/paying-back-the-immunity-debt
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/even-corporate-media-is-admitting
This whole bruhaha seems so ridiculous. It sort of feels like some new post-modern form of sterility. It's like having the microbiome crowd also be allowed to bleach everything.
We know both good and bad germs exist out there, and there's no way we're going to select for which ones we want. The fact that children, and quite frankly people, are not outside as much as they used to be means that we are causing a detriment to our own welfare.
To the whole virus thing, it's clear that many of our own genome may have been derived from viruses. It's assumed many of our introns are remnants of some form of integration, and even things such as syncytium may have been derived from viruses, so we know that we have been coevolving with viruses since possibly the start of our species.
It's an interesting idea to think that loss of viruses may be detrimental in the long run. It's the same as bacteria and even parasites with some people thinking that parasites may have provided us with some regulatory mechanisms.
So I don't find it hard to assume that there's a world of harm that may be happening by pushing for all forms of sterility.
As an aside, bleaching (or using Quaternary Ammonium Compounds ) isn't all that good for your skin, or to be inhaled. Overuse of disinfectants could cause chronic health problems just by themselves.
I'm aware of that; my comment was sort of to indicate the fruitlessness of such endeavors. I'm personally very sensitive to bleach and it's one of the smells that causes my headaches. 🥴
I agree it's a fruitless, and likely dangerous, endeavor.
Bleach and chlorox give me headaches too.
Right - and beyond that, all of the genes responsible for multicellular coordination and epigenetic reprogramming are just as likely to have gotten their start in viruses as in cells, as I have said before.
From an evolutionary standpoint progress may be impossible without viruses. As for their benefit for the discrete organism, I dunno - it's at least likely that trying to fight viruses just makes it less likely that we will get the viruses that are more co-evolved and temperate, the same way a sterile environment favors the most resilient bacteria.
👏👏👏👏👏💯🙏 thank you for maintaining some balance and calm clarity in these eyerollingly, overly dramatic, teenager years post covid.
We have succeeded in pushing the microbial world out of whack within and around our halobiome, with our precious paranoia's, just as we did with the soils microbial balance for decades. Now we have relatively benign viruses like RSV, trying to restore the equitable balance within the virome. Why? So we dont anihalate them by killing their hosts.
Virus free world? Give me a break! They are 30 to the power of 10. Like trying to eliminate every grain of sand, with a pair of tweezers and a bucket!🤦♀️🤦♀️🙄😑😐
Keep going with your excellent Substack. 👍🙏
Holobiome?
I guess it's become more fashionable to spell it as holobiome, but i believe the original term was based around the halophillic symbiosis studies done in plants.
But yes I mean, in a relation to an organism and its symbiotic relations to other organisms in, and around it. 👍🤗
I tried looking up the word halobiome, and there were no hits. Holobiome came up so I was sort of wondering if it was just a typo. Thanks for the clarification
Thank you - I lost some of my tabs from the twitter meltdown, but yes there were one or two that saw "not accepting viruses" as some sort of next benchmark for society to be judged on. Why not just skip to "not accepting sad thoughts" and lobotomize everyone.
Thanks, great post.
Thanks!
Eat properly - exercise - minimize alcohol intake - do not smoke - deal with stress by taking it on and not letting it fester...
And the medical profession would be bankrupt and reduced to fixing broken legs.
Having recently read Silent Killers https://drkevinstillwagon.substack.com/ I am convinced that vaccines carry far more risk than benefit..
As far as I am inclined to think the benefit is and has always been nil. The majority of severe outcomes or deaths resulting from infection, just like all cancers, should be seen as immune failure. Remove the biggest danger, and the immune system just "crashes" on the next-biggest danger. It is the same way as if you fix a "bad intersection" in a village you can still end up with the same number of crashes - the people who weren't paying enough attention in the bad intersection are still going to eventually crash somewhere else. Of course I could be totally wrong about that. Like Prasad says, we really know nothing at all about the big picture.
My bet is something different. I used to have debilitating seasonal allergies. I was out for 2 months of the year unless i was drugged to the eyeballs. I was able to cure it by getting rid of diet drinks (aspartame) and taking probiotics. After recommendation froma friend I went middle of peak season from practically being a zombie to experiencing no symptoms within 2 weeks.
I think the modern diet has fucked our gut biome and this is the major cause of all the auto immune. Not ruling out vaccines as a major contributing factor as well. I mean you don't get bell's palsy from eating KFC
It's multifactorial, and I think diet is one of the biggest factors.
Right, so that's evidence in support of the old friends model. Like I said, my guess would be that both things are true and really should just be part of the same theory, even if old friends explains more instances on a per-case basis. The immune system needs exposure to both the "good" and "bad" elements of not-self in order to stay in homeostasis.
I, like everyone, got allergies within a year of moving to Austin. But they self-resolved with 12 mile bike rides to work.
KFC is a known neurotropic pathogen found to cause shame, depression, and existential alienation.
but the chicken is just so damned yummy
I was just kidding. Well, yes and no. Those are in fact the emotions caused by the fifth or sixth time I ate one of the 'wraps' that they were selling circa 2002. I have only since purchased some sides from the combo KFC / Taco Bell. Those are overpriced but as long as you maintain a positive attitude you don't actually have to be "ashamed" about spending 4 dollars on green beans.