 Hi this is Dr. Richo, let's discuss exposure to dirt and animals and how that impacts autoimmunity. You've likely heard that westernized societies, because of lack of exposure to dirt and animals and because of their high levels of hygiene, have higher levels of autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's thyroiditis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, what have you. Yes, this is true and a definite factor in this is the fact that we need exposure to dirt, animals, bacteria, what have you to train our immune systems as they're developing so as to prevent our immune systems from attacking self and that's essentially what an autoimmune condition is. It's when you have an immune cell that attacks a healthy cell of your body that it shouldn't. So one of the ways that we can make sure the immune system develops is by having this early life exposure to dirt, animals, bacteria and that exposure helps train the immune system so it has a good aim and the immune cells will only kill bad stuff and not attack healthy tissue of your body as it does in autoimmune conditions. So this has led to the thinking that, well, if I am a young adult or an adolescent or a full grown adult and I have an autoimmune condition or an immune mediated condition like allergy or eczema or what have you, perhaps exposure, exposure right now to more dirt and bacteria and animals can help with that condition and this is certainly a understandable hypothesis and there's certainly some evidence showing that by gaining exposure to animals, to dirt, visiting the forest, visiting the farm, what have you can help with autoimmune conditions and immune mediated conditions but it's not an absolute rule and this is very important and this is what brings me to a study I wanted to discuss which essentially showed that for those that already had certain forms of immune mediated conditions in this case specifically asthma, visiting a farm actually made the asthma worse and I'll put the study abstract up here on the screen and I'll quote for you, our finding suggests and I'm actually paraphrasing, our finding suggests that intermittent exposure to farm animals increased the risk of allergic asthma in urban children visiting farms. There's some key points there, urban children meaning they did not grow up on a farm but they're visiting the farm actually increased asthma. Now why is this? It's probably because you need to be growing up in an environment for that environment to be healthy for you right so if you grow up on a farm you have a very well tuned or toned immune system that can deal with lots of exposure to dirt and animals and what have you. But if you did not grow up on the farm you don't have that level of training for an immune system so when you just visit the farm periodically your immune system may not know what's going on and it may react negatively as we saw in this study where they actually showed that ironically visiting a farm actually made asthma worse. Now I'll give you another example, we see many people in hunter-gatherer bands have a high level of bacteria in their intestines and they also eat a high carbohydrate, high fiber diet and what happens sometimes is we think that that will be healthy for westerners with gut conditions like IBS and IBD and while in some ways in cases it can be there's also certainly a subset of people where eating a higher carb, higher fiber diet actually makes them much worse and any of the opposite which is actually eating a lower carb and a lower fermentability type diet as seen in diets like the low FODMAP diet. So what this all means is that the immune system is complex and what works for one group will not necessarily work for another group meaning if you grew up on a farm visiting the farm, being on a farm is healthy for you but if you did not grow up on a farm visiting the farm may not be healthy for you and to outline that a little more if you grew up on a farm you're likely going to have less asthma and other immune mediated and autoimmune conditions but it doesn't mean that if you did not grow up on the farm and then you visit the farm you'll help things like asthma and immune mediated and autoimmune conditions. So coming back to the other example of the gut, if you grew up in a hunter-gatherer band with lots of bacterial exposure eating high carb, high fiber diets and you have great digestion it doesn't mean that if you grew up in the United States and you at age 28 tried to go on that higher carb, higher fiber diet it would work well for you. It may but we want to make sure not to miscontextualize some of these things. So the immune system is complex not every finding in one group of people is going to be helpful for another group of people. What I really think this all comes down to is learn to listen to your body. If you read a bunch of information that says that people that grew up on farms have less inflammation less asthma less allergy it doesn't mean that if you did not grow up on a farm you can visit a farm and expect to garner those same benefits and also if you did not grow up in a non-westernized hunter-gatherer type society it doesn't mean that you may benefit from that type of diet. But if you learn to listen to your own body you'll eventually find your own truth instead of getting misled by different information that you lead. And of course sometimes that information can be helpful and can lead you to what will ultimately be helpful for you but it's always important to make sure you listen to your own body and trust in the experience that you're having. So in this case a very interesting study that shows that even though farm life has been shown to be protective for the immune system it seems that you need to have exposure to that farm life from early in life. Infancy maybe even in utero onward to garner the full benefit. And if you don't grow up in that atmosphere but you just visit the farm it may actually be slightly deleterious for your health for some people. So always remember to listen to your body and take your own experience into account. So this is Dr. Ruscio. I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.