Read the article below and respond. What do you like/ dislike about the article (good points, fears, untruths, helpful info, etc. . . )?
Dirtying Up Our Diets
By JEFF D. LEACH
Published: June 20, 2012
OVER 7,000 strong and growing, community farmers’ markets are being heralded as a panacea for what ails our sick nation. The smell of fresh, earthy goodness is the reason environmentalists approve of them, locavores can’t live without them, and the first lady has hitched her vegetable cart crusade to them. As health-giving as those bundles of mouthwatering leafy greens and crates of plump tomatoes are, the greatest social contribution of the farmers’ market may be its role as a delivery vehicle for putting dirt back into the American diet and in the process, reacquainting the human immune system with some “old friends.”
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Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the potentially pathogenic and benign microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our preindustrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies. This research suggests that reintroducing some of the organisms from the mud and water of our natural world would help avoid an overreaction of an otherwise healthy immune response that results in such chronic diseases as Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and a host of allergic disorders.
In a world of hand sanitizer and wet wipes (not to mention double tall skinny soy vanilla lattes), we can scarcely imagine the preindustrial lifestyle that resulted in the daily intake of trillions of helpful organisms. For nearly all of human history, this began with maternal transmission of beneficial microbes during passage through the birth canal — mother to child. However, the alarming increase in the rate of Caesarean section births means a potential loss of microbiota from one generation to the next. And for most of us in the industrialized world, the microbial cleansing continues throughout life. Nature’s dirt floor has been replaced by tile; our once soiled and sooted bodies and clothes are cleaned almost daily; our muddy water is filtered and treated; our rotting and fermenting food has been chilled; and the cowshed has been neatly tucked out of sight. While these improvements in hygiene and sanitation deserve applause, they have inadvertently given rise to a set of truly human-made diseases.
While comforting to the germ-phobic public, the too-shiny produce and triple-washed and bagged leafy greens in our local grocery aisle are hardly recognized by our immune system as food. The immune system is essentially a sensory mechanism for recognizing microbial challenges from the environment. Just as your tongue and nose are used to sense suitability for consumption, your immune system has receptors for sampling the environment, rigorous mechanisms for dealing with friend or foe, and a memory. Your immune system even has the capacity to learn.
For all of human history, this learning was driven by our near-continuous exposure from birth and throughout life to organisms as diverse as mycobacteria from soil and food; helminth, or worm parasites, from just about everywhere you turned; and daily recognition and challenges from our very own bacteria. Our ability to regulate our allergic and inflammatory responses to these co-evolved companions is further compromised by imbalances in the gut microbiota from overzealous use of antibiotics (especially in early childhood) and modern dietary choices.
The suggestion that we embrace some “old friends” does not immediately imply that we are inviting more food-borne illness — quite the contrary. Setting aside for the moment the fact that we have the safest food supply in human history, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and food processing plants and farmers continue to take the blame for the tainted food that makes us ill, while our own all-American sick gut may deserve some blame as well.
While the news media and litigators have our attention focused on farm-to-table food safety and disease surveillance, the biological question of why we got sick is all but ignored. And by asking why an individual’s natural defenses failed, we insert personal responsibility into our national food safety strategy and draw attention to the much larger public health crisis, of which illness from food-borne pathogens is but a symptom of our minimally challenged and thus overreactive immune system.
As humans have evolved, so, too, have our diseases. Autoimmune disease affects an estimated 50 million people at an annual cost of more than $100 billion. And the suffering and monetary costs are sure to grow. Maybe it’s time we talk more about human ecology when we speak of the broader environmental and ecological concerns of the day. The destruction of our inner ecosystem surely deserves more attention as global populations run gut-first into the buzz saw of globalization and its microbial scrubbing diet. But more important, we should seriously consider making evolutionary biology a basic science for medicine, or making its core principles compulsory in secondary education. Currently they are not.
As we move deeper into a “postmodern” era of squeaky-clean food and hand sanitizers at every turn, we should probably hug our local farmers’ markets a little tighter. They may represent our only connection with some “old friends” we cannot afford to ignore.
I liked how the article was informational. I was not aware that 'dirt' could be beneficial for us individuals. I also liked learning new scientific vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteI disliked how the article was extremely long. I lost some interest halfway through, but after I refocused I was able to finish reading the article. It was actually interesting.
I think that this article is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. It poses many examples of how clean of an environment we live in. This can be viewed as good and bad, depending on the reader's opinions on the subject. A good point that the article suggests is that our bodies are not accustomed to foriegn germs in our food. This is becasue we douse them with chemicals to get them to a prestine state. In reality, this rids of many beneficial germs that can help our immune system become stronger. I think of more people new about this information, local farmers would be supported more than ever before. A statistic in the reading says it costs 100 billion dollars annually to treat autoimmune diseases. This could easily be avoided by simply paying the extra fee for organic produce and goods that are free of chemicals/pesticides, or to just simply visit the local farmers market for an even cheaper price on goods grown in their backyards. I believe in that if we don't change and start boycotting the big bussinesses that run the food industries, we will lose most of the biological organisms that help make our body stronger, slowly, from generation to generation. Germs are not preventable, and more exposure to them will only make humans more resiliant, not vulnerable as the media makes us percieve it. My fear is that people will not want to change the system, or not want to face reality in why they are getting sick.
ReplyDeleteThis problem has been nipping at the back of my mind for awhile. What I like about this article, is that it uses fact to oppose the media, and what is accepted as a truth just because we were told so. This article confirms my paranoia of human beings becoming weak and fat from new technology. The blaming of the Food and Drug Administration is a good point. Maybe our perception of 'clean' is skewed entirely. I think making evolutionary biology a basic science for medicine is a good idea. It's ironic that the more knowledge we gain, and the more we try to protect ourselves from every little thing in the world, is our potential downfall.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about this article is that it is very informational, it uses facts. I agree with the article that we do blame others such as Food and Drug Administration,Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, etc. for our illness from food instead of looking at ourselves and what we are eating. I found it interesting that a lot of things we think are super clean, are actually not. What I dislike about this article is that it didn't have a lot of statistics. I like to see more numbers so I can see differences between things.
ReplyDeleteI like how the article gave interesting facts. This article shows how clean our enviorment is and that nobody really realizes it, also how dirty it is as well. Us as people do tend to blame others and never ourselfs for our own health. There are so much things out there that we think our protecting us from being clean. But there are many things that have bacteria, and we never really notice it. What I didn't really like about this article is that some of the information I would have liked to see more of.
ReplyDeleteI liked how it was filled with lots of information and realy shows how our enviroment is. It was interesting that dirt can be benifical. I didnt like the length. it was quite long and i started to lose interest.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I like about this article is the explanation of the informations/ facts that I really didn't take notice of before. I had no clue what we consume, the things we think are safe, healthy, and clean, can turn out to be bad for us. I do agree on spending a little more money on organic food that are actually beneficial for us rather than spending money on things that are not. Also, we would have to spend thousands of dollars for doctor visits due to the tainted food that makes us ill. One thing that I dislike is the length of the article. Overall, it was interesting and informational.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the article. I already try to eat a lot of free-range meat and organic produce, so I didn't really learn anything new. But, I liked how they presented the information. The human race has lived for thousands of years without modern food processing and will continue on for many more if we go back to the way it used to be, at least with food. Nothing good can come from consuming chemicals. :P
ReplyDeleteTalia Perez.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this article. I learned a lot of new things that I had no idea about before. I found it interesting when it said we should hold the farmers closer to us, I never saw that as a good thing im not really sure why though, but now after reading this article I do. I didnt realize all the diseases there were and how many possible ways you can get them from reading this article and one that i found interesting was eating habbits.
The article is helpful and give me a lot of good informations that i didn't know before. I also get many advices from it, prevention is more important than curing disease. Instead of paying money to cure the illness, why don't we try to prevent it? We could simply buy organic food and wash the vegetables we eat. It might be simple but "valuable". Other could not change anything unless you make a change yourself
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the amount of information that was in this article. It was very helpful, and I learned somethings that I did not know before. Such as how how many people suffer from a disease. There is a lot of money that is spent on diseases. I think we need better priorities in our country.
ReplyDeleteThis was a rather interesting article.I knew that the dirt held nutrients that would make our bodies stronger, but I did not expect dirt to be that important for our immune system. It is true people have been living cleaner lives for centuries which is a good thing, but getting dirty would not be considered a bad thing anymore since humans need dirt to help our bodies become stronger.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I did not know that dirt could be so important for our body. There were tons of new things that I learned from this article. Like Autoimmune disease annually costing more than $100 billion. Also, I think this article could make a person's views on a farmer change. Whether that'd be good or bad.
ReplyDeleteThis article was filled with tons of benificial information. It had valid points and gave facts and information that I didn't know.I learned plenty of things such as how important getting dirty once in a while is good for you. The squeekier of clean we are and less exposed we are to dirt and the unclean, the more easily vulnerable we become to diseases.
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