Submitted by universityofturku t3_10e9rw4 in science
Biodiversity is fairly simple to achieve in suburbia. Most subdivisions have vegetated stormwater infrastructure, like roadside ditches. Having flowering groundcover like clover in the planting plan, allowing native plants to propagate and act like a “meadow,” using various practices (Integrated Pest Management) to control invasive plants, and avoiding mowing during the peak blooms all make a huge difference.
Note too that stormwater systems are generally the connected spaces which allow for animals like frogs and invertebrates to travel. There’s some threat of these ponds turning into ecological traps, but if you build it, they will come. Imperfect habitat is better than no habitat.
Edit: I’ll add that one of the best ways to make a difference is to keep a native wildflower seed blend on-hand (I use spice jars on my belt) and sprinkle/smush onto dirt patches in urban areas. If your plants are native and appropriate for the exposure, you’ve created a little gas station for migrating pollinators.
In Georgia there’s more diversity in the middle of Atlanta than in suburbia. It’s really weird honestly. Car centric suburbs overflowing with HOAs that hate wildflowers and maintain grass is a big issue down south.
>HOAs that hate wildflowers and maintain grass
I guess it's just a matter of taste but I just truly cannot imagine preferring a grass lawn to a meadow of wildflowers.
The mind of the HOA enforcer is a twisted and warped place defined by technicalities and a blurry aspirational picture of white 1950's suburbia.
Tall grasses/meadow flowers encourage other kinds of pests (like snakes, opossums, and rats) to live near your home. You ultimately don’t want them that close, because they can come inside (my mom had a snake in her house last year).
I keep a front yard of grass (also easier for some lawn games), but have garden beds for native plants. Healthy compromise.
Snakes and possums aren't pests, they keep pests away.
and as for rats, cats will keep them out of the home and theyre very skittish. a child playing in a yard of wildflowers and native plants probably wont come into contact with any of those "pests." to the person youre replying to: not all native plant meadows are tall grass and flowers, either. think clover!
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Yes they are, a pest is literally defined by being unwanted. If someone doewnt want them there and they are, they are a pest from their perspective.
Walking barefoot on grass in the summer is such a beautiful sensory experience. Outside of that I prefer just about everything else.
I did that yesterday after a rainstorm following a godawful hot day. I was surprised at how it felt.
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I live in and around Atl, that's not even close to true. The heart of the city is just like any other, maybe a little more green, trees, parks than most. But further out you go from center, the more forests, greenery you find. Our sprawling suburbia is still packed with forests, lakes, rivers, fields. It's still mostly forest if you ever look at it from the sky
But yea, HOAs here are horrible
It may be that some areas of atlanta have more to offer than some suburbs in terms of access to parks. Where I grew up the only park was a 15 min drive of 3 mile run. In the city the closest park is right out front of the door. Depends where in the city obviously but shared green space is more of a thing inside the perimeter than outside neighborhoods. Of course there are some decent neighborhoods with tons of deer but I still prefer in town nature somehow unless we’re talking national parks
Yup. Had to get a fence in order to have a native garden in my backyard here. Rest of the neighborhood is just Bermuda grass.
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HOAs should be banned.
We have Lady Bird Johnson to thank for much of the wildflower diversity — especially in the Midwest where production agriculture dominates the ecosystem.
Wow that was an informative read
I think /r/NoLawns has some good info on clover and wildflower seed blends. They are certainly mentioned relatively frequently.
>Biodiversity is fairly simple to achieve in suburbia.
Less so in high density "concrete jungle" urban environments.
Do you think there could be a difference in a summer pregnancy VS winter? I'm in the Midwest where its lush and green for summer but grey and dead in the winter.
I think there is a difference, but there is no limit to the amount of research and hypotheses about what affects pregnancy. A pregnancy typically lasts long enough to gain some seasonal exposure at some point. If you were concerned about having immunodeficiencies due to a long winter, you should ingest locally sourced honey. Since they gather pollen from neighboring flowers, you’re inoculated to allergen-causing plants (as is the baby, theoretically).
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My family and I inherited land and I have worked on re-introducing more native species of trees and flowering plants for pollinators around the areas near the house. I have breastfed each of my three children, so this is definitely cool to read this morning as I nurse my third.
I’d be interested to see what benefits of raising a child from birth in a big city like New York or Los Angeles would look like, plenty of studies on the downside.
More moxie, a refined taste for pizza, knowledgeable on driving aggressively or defensively, heightened tolerance for crowds and smells.
I'd be interested to know if there even are any benefits. I honestly can't think of any.
People living in cities are less likely to be obese.
As someone living in a very rural area, I wish fervently that my kids were growing up in a more diverse community. I love where we live. But, I hate that their school has... Idk, maybe a half dozen non-white people in it.
Probably tons of useful social skills, better intellectual development, bigger chance to earn a fair wage.
If you look at Google maps on satellite view, try zooming in on the darker spots in urban areas. You'll find that the darker spots are in fact greener and have much larger and more affluent houses than the lighter areas. It's a "thing".
A bunch of confounding factors you’d have to account for
...sounds like these are just allergy-type responses, and the effects are overstated in the post title.
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Meanwhile, here in Melbourne which is claimed to be the child allergies capital of the world...
Me breastfeeding in 12” of snow.
It's the exposure to nature. I live in northern WI and have 2' of snow on the ground. Being out in the winter forest has all the same effects on me (reducing heart rate/blood pressure, levels of stress hormones, etc.) as being out there in the middle of summer.
Being surrounded by nature, whether it is snow, sand, forests, a park in a city has significant positive health effects.
715 represent!
I'm nursing my first while reading this article and I'm very glad he gets to be around cows and nature.
Northwoods Redditors unite!
The research article specifically mentions diversity of green vegetation, and not just exposure to any vegetation or other natural features, to be the biggest factor in its findings. In other words, not just being exposed to nature, but a diverse array of species of green vegetation, which would likely be more present in, say, a forest during spring than during the winter, or the desert.
So for the purposes of increasing the diversity of oligosaccharides in nursing women, simply being in nature at all is only weakly helpful. Certainly exposure to non-diverse nature is still good for the reasons you mentioned, just less so for oligosaccharide diversity.
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Isn’t snow also considered a green space?
How are the oligosaccharides making their way to breast milk? Are people eating more diverse diets in greener urban environments?
Or is it that people with more wealth are more likely to live in greener urban areas?
The article says the results were independent of socioeconomic status, so they apparently controlled for that, but I'm still a bit suspicious too because we already know that wealth literally improves every aspect of a person's life already.
I think I'd have a fair amount of skepticism unless they proved the direct causal relationship, or maybe if they were still able to find the same correlation when looking at poor rural families and wealthy inner city families without many green areas (I feel like this is rare for wealthy people, but it does exist). I feel like controlling for things like diet, exercise, etc would be extremely difficult in that case too.
AllI know is I live in a very socio economic diverse suburb city with lots of greenery. The Pacific Northwest is pretty green everywhere and the suburbs always felt like forest cities.
Let's keep in mind that the study was only testing for something very specific (the diversity of HMOs), not for any direct benefits or general wellness like the press release article speculates. So the question isn't "should we expect rich people to have this good thing" (not actually tested), but rather, "should we expect rich people to be more likely to be exposed to areas with high biodiversity and low human impact", which were the main factors linked to HMO diversity. Which isn't necessarily the case.
If only there was something posted that you could read.
Read? I am a Reddit user, sir. I make judgments on articles based on the title alone!
Forests are pretty cheap
Rural areas too
or is it that they are exposed to less air pollution?
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No lie, I’m pretty sick of this too. Every single research article is “but what about wealth??”.
In the comments below, people keep guessing that maybe it’s because richer people eat better food. Even tho food has NOTHING to do with this topic!!
Like sure, hate the rich all you want, but at this point it’s become an excuse for folks to get out of responsible decision making.
There’s plenty that can be done to improve your life or the life of your child. One example, as implied by this research, is to be out in nature more. Even poor people have access to nature. Stop this ridiculousness folks.
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It would help if the title wasn't clearly misleading bait.
Of course people exposed to more environmental factors would develop immunities to those factors. They intentionally word the title to make it seem like urban sprawls are inherently harmful to humans.
A lot of the oligosaccharides are actually produced by your body.
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All oligosaccharides in mammalian breast milk are produced exclusively in the mammary glands during lactation, and do not enter or arrive from systemic circulation. It’s not something a breastfeeding mother can consume and have it show up in breastmilk.
I wonder how this is reflected in colder climates, arid climates, and overdeveloped cities where there's much less exposure to greenery.
For colder climates, when it is good weather everyone seems to make going outside and enjoying it more of a priority than places with fairer climates. Everyone gets intense green exposure in a shorter amount of time.
Now I wonder what effects short but intense exposures have when compared to less intense but more frequent exposures.
That would be very interesting to know
Minnesotan here.
If you declare cold and snow to be bad weather and stay inside for half of the year you're going to be miserable.
The only way to get through is to make the best of it and find ways to enjoy the outdoors in every season.
I suppose good weather was a wrong choice of words. I love snow activities and hiking all year. I was more picturing the amount of dining al fresco, picnics, family gatherings outside with bbqs, lazy long forest walks, and all such activities that are pleasant in warm and sunny conditions surrounded by spring/summer greenery.
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Agreed. No small bit is cognitive framing and attitude/resilience/being able to see good in everything.
The research article cites two specific indexes they tested as being linked to oligosaccharide diversity, the Simpson's Diversity Index of Vegetation Cover, which measures diversity of vegetation, and the Naturalness Index, which measures "how much human impact and intervention there has been in the residential area".
So those areas would likely be less conducive to oligosaccharide diversity since drier, colder, and more developed areas tend to have less biodiversity, though you'd have to check specific locales with the above indices to have a better idea.
Thank you very much. Drunk rn, making a note to research those further in the morning.
Edit: further, morning
This is actually a big deal. OP just linked the press release, but this was in Nature (one of the most important research journals) publication. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-27317-1
From the paper,
“The results were independent of the education level, occupation, marital status and health of the children’s parents as well as the socio-economic disadvantage in the residential area.”
Generally I’m a cynic and quickly can find reasons to scoff at what I see on Reddit. This isn’t one of them.
This may be a “huh” moment that spurns on a lot of research in many fields.
Nature Scientific Reports is very much not the same as Nature
Is there something you can do to help your kid "catch up" if mom didn't get as much nature exposure when the child was breastfeeding?
Not a doctor, nor anyway an expert in children.
I’d say right now it’s nothing to worry about, and may end up being practically irrelevant.
This is a new study, with a mainly unexplained mechanism (the breakdown of why things happen the way they do).
It will be years before any meaningful result filters out to a layperson.
Even if this is actually useful knowledge (seems like it might be), it very likely will be rolled into another theory/ used to confirm something else.
In ten years you’ll probably see a litany of products on the shelves that advertise providing the same thing as actual nature. Likely, they will all be varying degrees of ineffective.
However, as a scientist, this is a big step BECAUSE of what it could help to happen. Science is a ton of confirming ideas that are pretty much solved, so things like this are interesting.
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The research article is available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-27317-1#citeas
Aren't ogliosaccharides a class of multi-ring sugar we can't metabolize, but bacteria in our large intestines can? Or is that not true of all ogliosaccharides?
There are some we cannot metabolize and some we can. Oligosaccharides present in human milk have been found to promote helpful bacteria in the growing child’s gut by bypassing our primary digestion. Oligosaccharides are also used on the outside of cells for cell recognition. The combination of different sugar chains on the outside of cells attached to proteins (collectively glycoproteins) are what give one their blood type. A B AB O positive and negative blood types are descriptors of what types of Oligosaccharides are present or not present.
Yep. Just to add for those curious to look it up, the attachment of carbohydrates to proteins is (usually) called glycosylation, which is why they are called glycoproteins.
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Would this suggest that formula-fed infants receive zero such benefits and are more likely to develop allergies and other diseases cited in the article?
There’s already lots of epidemiology pointing in this direction, so it’s more than a suggestion. Most infant formula contains little to no milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), and generally they are synthesized from bovine milk. Human milk generally has the highest amount and diversity of oligosaccharides of any mammal, so bovine milk isolates are a poor substitute, and might be completely useless since HMOs are just one piece of the extremely bioactive mixture in breastmilk.
Seems like we’re always surprised that the idea of that nature and being in nature and not eating plastics or pesticides or any of that stuff is good for us We are Stone Age people trying to manage in an environment we don’t belong in
Bad news for you there, plastics and pesticides are so prevalent in our environment they're finding microplastics in the deepest ocean trenches and PCBS and DDT in the breastmilk of Inuit women who have never been south of the Arctic Circle. Human exposure to these things is inevitable.
Your bad news doesn’t refute what I am saying.
I always joked that my parents must’ve thrown me into a pile of dirt right after birth because I have no allergies. I guess my premise wasn’t incorrect since I pretty much grew up in a field surrounded by forest.
I grew up on a small farm and my allergies look like a grocery list and I have asthma to boot. And it's just me, no one else in the family has any.
So idk. The immune system is gobsmackingly complex and I have tremendous respect for immunologists that can wrap their head around it.
like feeding a milk goat poison oak and drinking the milk!
Unfortunately not. Human milk oligosaccharides are exclusively derived from the mammary glands. They are not passed from the mother’s intake into breast milk.
Does that work??
hard to tell. a lot people swear on it though, so I'm inclined to think it has a beneficial effect. me personally, I just put up with the oak infections till I built up a resistance. meanwhile everyone's just telling me "you need to get a milk goat." haha.
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We were not built to live in urban squalor and high rises. We were built to be a part of the natural world.
Now this is interesting!
Homelander would like to know more.
That would go some way to explain the rise in numbers of people with allergies.
Could be a factor in urban/rural differences in asthma prevalence.
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Just visited NYC. This makes perfect sense why people are the way they are there.
The important part: results were independent of socioeconomic status.
A lot of "may" and "can" in that title.
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It’s click bait .
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I take oligosaccharides as a supplement every day, and it's helped my gut health more than any probiotic I've ever tried.
Interesting! Could you please message me the brand you like?
Green concrete for everyone!
Key word in that whole paragraph is "may" I know plenty of kids that were breastfed and they have allergies and ear issues.
First, it’s not about breastfeeding, it’s about where. Were they breastfed in nature??? That’s literally the point of the research.
Second, of course it’s may. Nothing in life is 100%! Even things we have studied extensively doesn’t guarantee anything. We know excess sugar consumption predominately leads to development of diabetes 2. Does it GUARANTEE diabetes 2? Of course not!! Just like you can also find anecdotes of people who smoked and lived to 90 with no lung cancer. Good for you but those exceptions are meaningless.
>The results were independent of the education level, occupation, marital status and health of the children’s parents as well as the socio-economic disadvantage in the residential area.
I'd be really interested in seeing how health was controlled for in regards to the oligosaccharide content of the mother's breast milk.
On another note...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligosaccharide#Dietary_oligosaccharides
> Human milk is an example of this and contains oligosaccharides, known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), which are derived from lactose.[21][22] These oligosaccharides have biological function in the development of the gut flora of infants. Examples include lacto-N-tetraose, lacto-N-neotetraose, and lacto-N-fucopentaose.[21][22] These compounds cannot be digested in the human small intestine, and instead pass through to the large intestine, where they promote the growth of Bifidobacteria, which are beneficial to gut health.[23]
The question then becomes, how do these different bacteria that are promoted by the oligosaccharides in human milk go on to affect the body in regards to allergies and other diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifidobacterium#Bifidobacteria_and_the_infant_gut
>The human infant gut is relatively sterile up until birth, where it takes up bacteria from its surrounding environment and its mother.[14] The microbiota that makes up the infant gut differs from the adult gut. An infant reaches the adult stage of their microbiome at around 3 years of age, when their microbiome diversity increases, stabilizes, and the infant switches over to solid foods. Breast-fed infants are colonized earlier by Bifidobacterium when compared to babies that are primarily formula-fed.[15] Bifidobacterium is the most common bacteria in the infant gut microbiome.[16] There is more variability in genotypes over time in infants, making them less stable compared to the adult Bifidobacterium. Infants and children under 3 years old show low diversity in microbiome bacteria, but more diversity between individuals when compared to adults.[17] Reduction of Bifidobacterium and increase in diversity of the infant gut microbiome occurs with less breast-milk intake and increase of solid food intake. Mammalian milk all contain oligosaccharides showing natural selection[clarification needed]. Human milk oligosaccharides are not digested by enzymes and remain whole through the digestive tract before being broken down in the colon by microbiota. Bifidobacterium species genomes of B. longum, B. bifidum, B. breve contain genes that can hydrolyze some of the human milk oligosaccharides and these are found in higher numbers in infants that are breast-fed. Glycans that are produced by the humans are converted into food and energy for the B. bifidum. showing an example of coevolution.[18]
So many studies that frame these kind of findings as “living in greener cities”, which is really just another way of saying that too much city is a bad thing. When will we just accept that there are diminishing returns to public health as urban density increases?
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There are backwoods super babies being developed somewhere.
> somewhere
in the backwoods
There are backwoods in all different locations, feller. Backwoods of Kentucky? Who knows. Backwoods of Montana? Could be. Backwoods of downtown Los Angeles? Well, if you please, partner.
It does seem like people who grew up in a city are more sensitive to allergies than those who grew up in rural areas
Mormon supersoldiers gonna descend from the Uinta mountains
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What about winter? It’s really green here in the summer but now everything is just White and cold
Who knew that living closer to what we're evolved in has benefits?
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How many correlations can you fit in one heading?
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Yeah but you just know the parents will be overbearing to negate this
> The residential green environments were measured at the time the child was born around the homes of the families with measures of greenness, diversity of vegetation, and naturalness index, i.e. how much human impact and intervention there has been in the residential area. The results were independent of the education level, occupation, marital status and health of the children’s parents as well as the socio-economic disadvantage in the residential area.
> The study showed that the diversity of oligosaccharides increases and the composition of several individual oligosaccharides changes when the mother’s residential area includes more green environments.
> “This could indicate that increased everyday contacts with nature could be beneficial for breastfeeding mothers and their children as the oligosaccharide composition of breastmilk would become more diverse. The results imply that breastfeeding could have a mediating role between residential green environments and health in infancy,” says Lahdenperä and continues:
Something tells me that the drive towards overly dense urbanization that is being pushed by housing advocates and some politicians to solve housing issues will override the benefits shown from studies like this
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As an early childhood expert and as a mother, I preach this to my familes that I serve.
Now I also advocate for parental choices as breastfeeding can be horrible for some mothers.
I had a child that could not get the nutrients that he needed as my production was low.
That made me feel like a failure but supplementswith formula and my megar breast milk was how I was able to get my child the nutrients that he needed
It should be that we support mothers on how to feed a newborn and not criticism on how she does.
My (admittedly very) basic knowledge of oligosaccharides in cellular biology is that they are used for signaling with glycosillation of proteins. What role do they have in protecting an infant from harmful microbes and allergy/disease mitigation?
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I'm gonna have to be that guy and say that we really can't tell anything from this article in terms of health benefits/detriments so we have to be careful about the conclusions we draw. I did my PhD on the synthesis of glycoprotiens and oligosaccharides. Biologically, these structures are unimaginably complex and their functions are equally complex and mostly unclear. The study seems good on preliminary reading, but the fact that they found increased diversity in these compounds should not be read as "better" or "worse" in terms of health (since the oligosaccharide system is still so mysterious). Just words of caution. I don't have the biology expertise to criticize the methods directly (I'm a chemist) but I just wanted to point out that diversity of oligosaccharides doesn't necessarily indicate "healthier"
Another way privilege makes a difference in people's life.
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Is this the same fallacy as “women who ride horses have better healthcare”????
As a clinician I love learning new things but I have to question how many assumptions stand between this and proof of clinical significance. Don't forget that 15 years ago we were telling parents to avoid peanuts.
So living in the country is healthier? Who'd have thunk it?
Those of us who grew up rural already knew this… we rarely have allergies and grow up strong!
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imagine if living in jungle, no wonder tarzan is so healthy
How sure are they that this is causative? Couldn't it just be that people who can afford to live in residential areas with green spaces can also afford to eat healthier diets?
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Cities are more expensive to live in than rural areas.
does not address the fact that higher green areas also correlate with higher incomes. income affects diet, healthcare, stress levels, etc. the correlation between green areas and oligosaccharides in no way suggests a causal link between the two. saying one impacts the other is not proven and is an overstep in interpreting the results of whatever study this is referencing. it should note correlation and encourage further study.
The full article said that they had similar results when they controlled for that.
it doesn't actually cite a control. they claim no coorelation to income but offer no data. in the study description they say they requested income information and then assigned people to groups based on education level instead, which is bizarre
They mention in the methods section that they made another statistic model that controlled for it.
No offense but what is the reason that having more money in your bank account would have a bigger affect on oligosaccharides than living in a more natural environment? I would think that environment would have a more direct connection to breast milk quality than finances.
First, in many countries people with more money have better access to green spaces. Also, people with more money could be healthier on average for a variety of reasons (e.g. access to healthier food, more leisure time and time to exercise, fewer life-or-death stressors), and healthier people would presumably produce higher quality breast milk.
Socio-economic status is a huge and obvious confounder, so bringing it up makes sense. In this case, however, the full article said they controlled for that and saw similar results.
There's a lot of poor folks in rural areas.
Rural doesn’t necessarily mean quality green spaces.
Idk how you define "quality green space" but in most rural places, it's all around. Might not be in the form of public parks and walking trails, but it's there in farms and lakes and streams, and many of us have animals to care for that get us outside daily, large yards, gardens, etc.
At least in this context, defining quality as ecological healthy with high biodiversity seems like the right choice.
While we are obviously talking averages/in general, I would guess that for every rural community with healthy lakes and streams, there are twice as many with monoculture farms with heavy herbicide and pesticide usage, which might not confer as much benefit if I am understanding correctly (which I might not be). I can’t back up those numbers, but maybe someone has the relevant data.
I would also like to note that I said “better access”, which doesn’t necessarily mean that other people don’t have access. Furthermore, I was simply trying to explain why wealth could be a confounding factor, not necessarily suggesting that there couldn’t be people seeing the same benefit without being wealthy.
I think that the bottom line is that more studies looking at how benefits vary depending on which kind of green space is available would be potentially helpful.
I think it's presumptuous to think that more income equals less stress. More income usually does not fall out of the sky. It usually entails working a more demanding career. It's also true that some people have more money because they are neurotic about finances. I know poor people who do not stress about money and well-off people who are obsessive about finances. You can factor in socioeconomic status just to have another vector of analysis but treating wealth and stress as automatically inverse variables is presumptuous and unscientific.
I didn’t say less stress. I am perfectly aware that is not the case. I said fewer life-or-death stressors, like a person not knowing if they will be able to afford essentials (e.g. food or shelter), as well as the possibility that an unexpected cost or illness might cause their finances (and their well-being) to crumble.
There are lots of kinds/sources of stress, and each person handles stress differently, but not knowing when you can next eat or if you can pay your rent fall into a special category, IMO.
income is directly correlated with health, meaning those with higher incomes are healthier than those with lower incomes
That's a statistical correlation not a mechanism of causation. You actually need to draw a picture how finances impact breast milk quality.
> does not address the fact that higher green areas also correlate with higher incomes
Source?
lurklurklurkPOST t1_j4pq2pe wrote
Greater biodiversity in one's environment leads to a wider range of defensive measures in one's immune system, leading to a wider variety of defensive measures passed to offspring.