Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders

https://neurosciencenews.com/dirt-fat-anxiety-14108/

by whack • 7 years ago

86 47 7 years ago

neurosciencenews.com

ubertakter• 7 years ago

I can see the webloids headlines now: "Should you eat dirt: Newly discovered fatty acid 10Z-HA helps cure burnout!"

/sigh If only it were so easy.

rb808• 7 years ago

I'm waiting for my dirt supplements.

codr72• 7 years ago

You're joking, but in Germany you can buy several different grades of so called healing soil for different uses in many regular super markets.

I take a tea spoon dissolved in water about once a week, which seems to help my system work more smoothly.

ScottFree• 7 years ago

Edit: no jokes on HN. Got it.

andrewl• 7 years ago

Fecal transplants are still going on, and are showing good effectiveness for certain serious problems, like C. diff infections:

Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile

New England Journal of Medicine 2013

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037

There are plenty of more recent articles as well.

kyoob• 7 years ago

Anxious? Eat dirt!

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

I wonder if there's a correlation between rural kids anxiety.

RyJones• 7 years ago

Pica?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)

ojosilva• 7 years ago

Copyediting your headline a bit with the latest trends in linkbaiting:

Cure burnout by eating this disgusting thing.

Or...

You never thought eating dirt would be a cure for this.

And etc. The linkbaity headline should convey a riddle to be truly effective webtrash.

m3kw9• 7 years ago

Maybe the hidden reason gardening is a viewed as a reason peeps live longer

mcfunk• 7 years ago

If soil indeed has anti-inflammatory properties, that would make a whole lot of sense.

mjevans• 7 years ago

I'd be more likely to believe (at least part of) the effect is caused by giving the natural defense systems of the body something actually foreign to 'attack'. Sort of like regular training exercises and legal explosives/fireworks days give a more controlled and thus safer expression of pressure relief, training, and general readiness inspection.

PS: Related to the fireworks I mentioned, I'm for having local fire departments provide basic fire knock back training with basic safety gear (bucket of water and hose) that should be required when they're in use. We focus way too much on black and white bans rather than enforcing responsible consumption.

Technoego• 7 years ago

Anecdotally, I'm reminded that for constipation, Gandhi followed Adolf Just’s prescription of applying to the abdomen a bandage of clean earth moistened with cold water and spread like a poultice on fine linen. This I applied at bedtime, removing it during the night or in the morning, whenever I happened to wake up. It proved a radical cure.

camjohnson26• 7 years ago

Off topic but does anyone else automatically filter out any headline that has "may" in it? Literally anything can be true if you add "may".

Eating dirt may cause cancer. Eating dirt may cure cancer. Earth may sit on the back of a giant, invisible tortoise.

It feels like a lazy way to pump out blog articles when there's no real information available.

fghtr• 7 years ago

"In scientific and academic language, may is often used to talk about typical occurrences - things that can happen in certain situations."

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/22134/can-could-vs-m...

casefields• 7 years ago

I would love a huge study done on say NY Times/Wapo and a few other sources and going back through their science reporting through 2000-2010. Focusing on articles like this and see if how wrong/right they were. Or, if it's so inconclusive, that we really shouldn't be letting scientists push out their work willy nilly without establishing better data/proof. Science journalists seem to take these education PR departments at their word a bit too often.

Stronico• 7 years ago

I'm working on something to track stuff like that. What would you consider evidence of a study being disproved?

ZeroFries• 7 years ago

May usually means 'has some evidence behind it'. Heuristic: the probability of it being true should be high enough to be worth talking about.

trilinearnz• 7 years ago

Reminds me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

r00fus• 7 years ago

I was once participated in a diet program where I was given some pills to eat to suppress my appetite (in addition to other generic mediterranean diet principles).

Being skeptical, I immediately scanned the ingredients and they all seemed like harmless/filler so I figured it was some placebo to placate those who needed pills as a confidence/mechanic. However, upon taking the pills for a few days, I did notice a marked decrease in appetite.

Re-examining the ingredients, the first one was "silica". Sand. Dirt. I've since come to the belief that our modern diet is too clean, and we are evolved to eat some amount of dirt - even if it's inhaled, so we may need to reintroduce some to control weight/allergies/disorders.

That dirt also contains other beneficial ingredients other than silica doesn't surprise me one bit.

xyzzy_plugh• 7 years ago

This is interesting, but my nonscientific counter might be:

What if "dirt" is harmful, and causes your body to degrade appetite in attempt to overcome the irritants?

I agree we've evolved perhaps, but sometimes modern is better (e.g. portion control). Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite?

CptFribble3• 7 years ago

Is it harmful to "feel" hungry and not sate your appetite?

This is something that most people don't understand, given that we live in a world where food is cheap and plentiful.

As many people who have gone through fasting-based diets have discovered, there's a difference between "I'm hungry" and "I need calories, I'm getting weak and tired." Learning that difference is how you discover the actual amount of food your body requires, not just checking off three meals per day.

The feeding patterns of our ancestors were very far from "eat as much as you want all the time with no physical effort required," and that was normal for 15,000+ years, so it'll probably take longer than the 100-200 or so since industrial food production began for our brains and bodies to adjust to the new normal. That, or we'll just have to start teaching our kids about cravings vs hunger vs actual food-need.

refurb• 7 years ago

Silica was probably sourced as a refined product and was likely pretty pure and free of things like bacteria.

NikkiA• 7 years ago

Yeah, no way it'd be actual 'dirt', it's going to be food grade silica at the very least.

kouh• 7 years ago

This could explain why some people pick and eat nasal mucus (a dirt colloid) when anxious

phkahler2• 7 years ago

The wikipedia page on this bacteria says it is not pathogenic and when fed live to mice their maze solving performance increased. If it's not pathogenic to humans, why haven't they tried it with people? With all the rage about gut bacteria an experiment like this seems obvious.

colechristensen• 7 years ago

Human trials are expensive and involve a whole lot of being careful beyond "the wikipedia page says it's fine so let's do it!"

Part of that being careful often involves mice.

phkahler2• 7 years ago

Clinical trials are expensive. Trying something on yourself is not. I'm not advocating any of us do that. But if the mouse researchers actually believe it's not harmful and believe their own results, why wouldn't they do an ad-hoc experiment on themselves?

zeofig• 7 years ago

I'll try anything to improve my maze solving performance!

giardini• 7 years ago

This is old news (circa 2002) and was published widely under the subject heading of "The Dirt Vaccine". Here's a link to "The Edge" series on this topic:

"The Dirt Vaccine (Bacteria and Health) 2002":

http://emro.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=1059

Google for "the dirt vaccine" for more:

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+dirt+vaccine&ie=UTF-8&oe...

ianai• 7 years ago

As a vegan, I’m not surprised. We all have to get our vitamin b12 from functional food because it would otherwise naturally occur on the foods we eat from bacteria. Our foods are sterile and thus the bacteria never deposit b12 for us. There’s probably much more we don’t know about.

Aromasin• 7 years ago

I remember reading a study a while back about the B12 found in unfiltered river water being sufficient for maintaining healthy levels in humans. It would be interesting to see a human study on this - albeit not useful for most people, as river water in most places if very much contaminated.

Also for something more anecdotal, I worked as a labourer on a couple of farms for a while (which had a lot to do with why I went vegan...), and the animals had to be supplemented to the teeth to get sufficient vitamins and minerals. My guess is this was because their feed was all from processed grains and legumes, and their water came from the filtrated mains system.

SmokeGS• 7 years ago

This paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05253...

indicates IL6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleukin_6) is down regulated in ex vivo tests (outside animal, cell cultures)

and specifically 10(Z)-hexadecenoic acid may be related with PARa signaling in mice

so this is pretty cool. I hope they get some similar results with humans.

Healthy fat hidden in dirt may fend off anxiety disorders

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