re: #411 Obdicut

I’m not sure I could have been dirtier as a child.

I grew up for most of the year in Connecticut, the summer in San Francisco.

In Connecticut, my parents had 9 1/2 acres of mixed light woods and swampland. real swamp yankee territory. I would go and muck about on the weekends from dawn to dusk, and when I got back my mom would literally hose me down before letting me in the house. I loved it.

In San Francisco, things were cleaner but I swam in the ocean every week and went to Golden Gate park almost every day.

I wonder if the mix of such different environments has helped me be allergy free.

It certainly was awesome from my perspective as a kid who loved the outdoors.

Obdi - I did read an article where there was a study one of children in India, and the researchers were expecting to find these kids miserable with allergies. And they found very few allergies, whereas kids growing up in more sterile environments had tons of allergies. The conclusion was something along the lines of - your immune system has a job to perform; and if it is kept from performing the job it was meant to, then it will FIND a way to do SOMETHING. The result: Allergies.

I don’t know enough about how all this works to know how accurate that conclusion is; all I know is that to me, it seems reasonable.