Amish Farm Kids Remarkably Immune to Allergies
May 6th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Amish children raised on rural farms in northern Indiana suffer from asthma and allergies less often even than Swiss farm kids, a group known to be relatively free from allergies, according to a new study.
“The rates are very, very low,” said Dr. Mark Holbreich, the study’s lead author. “So there’s something that we feel is even more protective in the Amish” than in European farming communities.
What it is about growing up on farms — and Amish farms in particular — that seems to prevent allergies remains unclear.
Researchers have long observed the so-called “farm effect” — the low allergy and asthma rates found among kids raised on farms — in central Europe, but less is known about the influence of growing up on North American farms.
Holbreich, an allergist in Indianapolis, has been treating Amish communities in Indiana for two decades, but he noticed that very few Amish actually had any allergies.
…
The study did not determine why the kids who grew up on farms were less likely to develop asthma and allergies, but other research has pointed to exposure to microbes and contact with cows, in particular, to partially explain the farm effect (see Reuters Health story of May 2, 2012).
Drinking raw cow’s milk also seems to be involved, Holbreich said.
The going theory is this early exposure to the diverse potential allergens and pathogens on a farm trains the immune system to recognize them, but not overreact to the harmless ones.
As for why the Amish kids have even lower allergy and asthma rates than the other farming kids, “that piece of the puzzle we really haven’t explained,” Holbreich told Reuters Health.
http://www.nature.com/news/early-exposure-to-germs-has-lasting-benefits-1.10294
Excerpt from the link above:
In a study published online today (March 22, 2012) in Science, the researchers show that in mice, exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body’s inventory of invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which help to fight infection but can also turn on the body, causing a range of disorders such as asthma or inflammatory bowel disease.
The study supports the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, which contends that such auto-immune diseases are more common in the developed world where the prevalence of antibiotics and antibacterials reduce children’s exposure to microbes.
…Daniel Peterson, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, says that the study has limitations because no human — no matter how dirt averse — could be as germ-free as the mice used in the study. Nevertheless, Peterson finds the paper provocative. “The striking finding is that you have this long-term persistent elevation of iNKT cells that isn’t reversed later with conventional microbes,” he says. “It really opens up a lot of questions about how long this window lasts and which microbes are involved.”
While Dr. Mark Holbreich is careful to mention that his particular Amish “have their immunizations”, he doesn’t actually enumerate which ones they have or when they had them.
The Amish give birth at home, with midwives, so we know they haven’t had Hep B on their first day of life. Neither have they had vitamin K shots or silver nitrate-in-the-eyes.
So, Dr. Mark Holbreich, exactly which immunizations have your Amish had. And when did they have them?
Not that I mind the plug for raw milk….
Cow’s milk is not only for cows only, it is only for cows with underdeveloped gastrointestinal tracts, i.e. calves.
Even mother’s milk is only for children with GI tracts in the same condition.
MILK IS NOT FOR ADULTS and daily consumption thereof can only come with serious side effects, but hey, who wants to put the dairy business out of business and compromise margins in the world of beef?
@Arthur Borges: nope & nope. but, yes, the factory-dairy “industry” is a menace.
raw cow’s milk and its products are likely to be beneficial for a lot of people. and all my children were breast fed well after they could digest solids.