Does eating dirty food and being exposed to the elements strengthen your immune system? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

The question 'Does eating dirty food and being exposed to the elements strengthen your immune system?' exemplifies an all-too common flawed premise that strength is or should be a vaunted attribute of the immune system. For muscle function to range from strong to weak sounds reasonable. However, using the same analogy to envision immune system function as strong or weak is a mischaracterization. A strong immune response doesn't necessarily indicate health. Consider autoimmunity and allergy, both examples of strong but inappropriate immune responses.

With different tissues, organs and even organ systems of their own bodies the targets of damaging immune attack, the immune systems of those with autoimmune diseases are clearly not weak but instead represent misdirected strength.

Damaging immune responses in allergies offers another example of misdirected strength where their triggers in the allergic are so-called 'allergens' that are nevertheless perceived as largely innocuous environmental antigens by the immune systems of the non-allergic.

Rather than strength that waxes or wanes in a monotone, appropriately discerning when to respond or not and responding effectively against appropriate targets better describes a properly functioning immune system.

If 'dirty' in 'dirty food' alludes to microbes and their products, that term is also a misnomer since it implies the existence of contrasting 'clean food' that lacks them. However, the consequence of living on a microbial planet is that it's practically impossible for food to be free of microbes or their products. Careful analysis shows even the so-called 'sterile' diets fed to experimental Germ-free animals contain microbial products. Analogizing microbes in food with terms such as 'clean' and 'dirty' is thus another mischaracterization.

Rather than envisaging microbes in food through the narrow binary of being either absent or present, a more accurate take would consider the variety and abundance of beneficial microbes in regular diet. After all, as food poisoning outbreaks routinely remind us, 'dirty food' swimming in pathogenic Listeria, Salmonella or Hepatitis A is unlikely to benefit someone's health. On the other hand, research increasingly shows that 'dirty food' brimming with beneficial fermenters such as Lactobacilli, Bifidobacteria, Propionibacteria indeed can.

Many studies in recent years have revealed a connection between diet, Microbiota and the types of chronic inflammatory diseases that increasingly accompany industrialized lifestyles. If 'dirty food' means a wide variety of minimally processed, largely plant-based, largely artificial additive (thickener, preservative, emulsifier, etc.)-free natural produce, an abundance of research now suggests such diets to be capable of sustaining diverse beneficial microbiota, which are in turn important for supporting a well-functioning and balanced immune system.

Some relevant scientific reviews:

Maslowski, Kendle M., and Charles R. Mackay. "Diet, gut microbiota and immune responses." Nature immunology 12.1 (2010): 5. https://www.researchgate.net/pro...

Hand, Timothy W. "The role of the microbiota in shaping infectious immunity." Trends in immunology 37.10 (2016): 647-658.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc...

Rapozo, Davy CM, Claudio Bernardazzi, and Heitor Siffert Pereira de Souza. "Diet and microbiota in inflammatory bowel disease: The gut in disharmony." World journal of gastroenterology 23.12 (2017): 2124. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org...

Statovci, Donjete, et al. "The impact of Western diet and nutrients on the microbiota and immune response at mucosal interfaces." Frontiers in immunology 8 (2017): 838.

Grigg, John B., and Gregory F. Sonnenberg. "Host-microbiota interactions shape local and systemic inflammatory diseases." The Journal of Immunology 198.2 (2017): 564-571. http://www.jimmunol.org/content/...

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