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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Wow, maybe (not being sarcastic) eating a monocultured food diet and living as sedate humans in sterile environments has a bigger effect on our immune systems than we'd like. This must have been measured? Compare immunity in farmers vs office workers or some such?

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I'd have thought, if anything, that a farmer living in a rural environment saw less exposure to (human) diseases than an office worker in an urban environment. They have far less exposure to _people_, after all, and people are generally the main carriers.

Also, basically no-one works in a sterile environment. There's a reason that so many places have hand sanitiser dispensers.

I think you underestimate the amount of bad health environments there are in cities (anecdotal evidence only). I would not call most cities or working environments anywhere close to sterile.

Nor anything close to a spoonful of soil on the bank of a pond outside a city?

Actually: lots of people bring a lot of diseases with them, so it you judge by germs, I would argue a city with buses, train stations, airports and harbors would be worse than any soil outside of it. Though it says nothing about food, can't argue there. Though (from experience) "farmers" tend not to be too broad in their nutritional uptake and eat mostly the same where I come from as people in the cities. Might be different in the states though.

Its immunity before you're exposed that at issue. How did you grow up? What routine exposures did you experience?

I grew up muddy and dirty, eating anything I found in nature that was mostly edible (apples, ground cherries, berries, chewing bark and grass), as well as organic beef and pork (before we knew what that meant) and garden vegetables. That was closer to historical experience.

To be honest, nobody is talking about very deadly exposure to pesticides in farmers populations. There actually have been papers published on that. While living outside a big city might be on average better for you, being a farmer is probably not.

Right; nobody was talking about that.

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