Who wasn’t, back in those days?
Parasites were so ubiquitous that our immune systems now actively attempt to kill some of us because we eat bread. Fuck you, endoparasites, you cunting fucks. I miss bread.
I would like to read more about this. Could you point me along the way?
Recently, it’s been suggested that autoimmune disorders are the result of our bodies overreacting as an adaptation to parasites that produced immunosuppressants. Achieve a high enough parasitic load and you’re effectively immunocompromised and soon dead, unless your immune system started out turned up to 11 and dipped down to a natural level with a heavy dose of immunosuppressants via contemporaneously common parasites. That’s the gist, here’s the wiki link.
Soooo… Go get yourself infected with some of the less-deadly parasites and then eat all the bread? Just be sure to avoid brain worms.
Not exactly an ideal situation either way, but that’s it. Fundamentally, figuring out a way to regulate overzealous immune systems is the ends. This is one means, based in our evolutionary history, maybe. That’s about as far as we’ve come on this thread
As someone who has an autoimmune disorder, I’d take the parasites any day; it’s hard to overstate how much this fucking sucks.
I’d even take the brain worms.
Especially the brain worms.
Thank you for this. I’m going to be checking this out more. Although one of the other responses to you is suggesting benefit from infecting themselves with less harmful parasites - that’s a thing.
I mentioned to another response having listened to an episode of Radiolab (and forgot) that covers this very thing.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/91691-sculptors-of-monumental-narrative
Adding on to the other comment, it’s one of the theories for why allergies exist
Each of our antibodies seem to have a specific job, and that allows them to call for the correct response for the type of threat they are dealing with (ex. Fighting one large thing vs many small things, where in the body is it happening, what kind of cells are involved, etc)
Of those, IgE is the one that’s tied to allergies. Turns out it’s also involved in the response against parasitic worms. Parisitic worm infections aren’t as common in many parts of the modern world, while allergies are. So maybe we can treat allergies by studying worm infections
The classes differ in their biological properties, functional locations and ability to deal with different antigens, as depicted in the table.[19] For example, IgE antibodies are responsible for an allergic response consisting of histamine release from mast cells, often a sole contributor to asthma (though other pathways exist as do symptoms very similar to yet not technically asthma). The variable region of these antibodies bind to allergic antigen, for example house dust mite particles, while its Fc region (in the ε heavy chains) binds to Fc receptor ε on a mast cell, triggering its degranulation: the release of molecules stored in its granules.[46]
Thank you for sharing this. I had actually listened to an episode of Radiolab that has covered this and, I suppose, forgotten about it.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/91691-sculptors-of-monumental-narrative
I have an autoimmune disease, so now I’m back to doing more reading on the research referenced in the Wikipedia article.
Yep, 100 years from now there will be a similar article on microplastics in humans.
Some future researcher will be looking at one of us and shake his head “this poor bastard. didn’t even know he had more plastic in his brain than a Barbie doll”
