My best friend from high school and I both suffer with allergies. When I was a teen mine were so bad that I used to carry the precursor to the Epipen everywhere I went. Literally everywhere. There are pictures of me somewhere that show me dancing on a tabletop wearing the purse that contained my shot of adrenaline.
Because of this we were aware of the “hygiene hypothesis” years ago. We used to joke that we would take clean pacifiers away from our babies and say “No honey, that is sterile, let me put it in the dirt for you”.
As it turns out, we probably weren’t going nearly far enough.
I became interested again in the hypothesis when a friend of mine who had grown up in India mentioned that there was this odd phenomenon with Indian expats. A family in Bangalore might have 4 children. Two stay in Bangalore, one goes to Australia and one to the US or Canada. They all have their own children. The grandchildren born in Bangalore have no allergies. Those born to their siblings in Australia or Canada meanwhile, have Epipens.
As it turns out this is not just limited to my friends. There is a statistical correlation.
in the US
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23699865
and in Australia (it bugs me that this is so old. Why has it been 20 years since follow up)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7935095
And now there is a theory to explain my “miraculous” recovery from asthma. It may well have been the healing of my gut flora. For anyone who does not know me, I not only surrendered the adrenaline shot, I no longer need an inhaler, and I no longer need to dread ragweed season.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662166/
And its not as simple as needing the dirt, its needing a plan for recovery from every round of antibiotics
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16393316/
So for all my buddies with severe allergies, click the links, check out the articles. Try the probiotics and try the diet.
I know it seems hard, but compared to fighting for every breath, its actually very easy.
