Amish Children are Remarkably Immune to Allergies, Says Expert !

• Amish children are remarkably immune to allergies, says expert! 
  by Michael Ravensthorpe, http://www.naturalnews.com/ 
  (NaturalNews) The Amish, it seems, place themselves at risk every day of their  lives. They refuse to vaccinate their children, exposing themselves to disease.  They drink raw cow’s milk, exposing themselves to salmonella. They even – and  this is really disturbing – favor natural food, exposing themselves to tomatoes  that contain cracks. Given these eccentric practices, isn’t it inevitable that  their communities become breeding grounds for allergies and asthma? Not  according to Dr. Mark Holbreich, an allergist who has been treating Amish  families in Indiana for over 20 years.
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  Holbreich was inspired to  investigate the allergy rates among Amish children when he began researching the  so-called ‘farm effect’ (the notion that children raised on farms demonstrate  lower allergy and asthma rates than their urban counterparts) in central Europe.  Keen to investigate whether the farm effect also manifested itself in the United  States, Holbreich assembled a team of German researchers to compare farming and  non-farming children in Switzerland with Amish children of Swiss descent in  Indiana.
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  Altogether, Holbreich’s team assessed the health of 157 Amish  children, approximately 3,000 Swiss farming children, and almost 11,000 Swiss  non-farming children between the ages of six and 12.
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  Holbreich found that  a mere five percent of the Amish children were diagnosed with asthma, versus 6.8  percent of the Swiss farming children and 11.2 percent of the Swiss non-farming  children. Moreover, only seven percent of the Amish  children tested positive for predispositions towards allergies, versus 25  percent of the Swiss farming children and a whopping 44 percent of the Swiss  non-farming children.
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  While Holbreich did not investigate why children  raised on farms were healthier than non-farming children, he has his  suspicions:
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  “This [study] would suggest that if you have early life  exposure [to allergens], then somehow it drives the immune system away from  developing allergies,”  said Holbreich. “Large animals are part of it, and the straw bedding animals  sleep on. [Also] what [the Amish children] eat and the fact that their mothers  are in the barn when they are pregnant.”
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  Holbreich’s study was published  in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
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