It was a warm, spring day over 20 years ago in my home country - a perfect season of year to enjoy just being outside - when I got off a train at a station after hours of monotonous train-rides to visit a friend of mine in the countryside. Being so far from a major city, this town seemed to be oblivious to a crowded urban city with skyscrapers.

Little did I imagine that simply visiting this friend for several days would affect and reinforce my perspective toward healthy lifestyle later in my life.

Arriving in her home, her parents welcomed me with big smiles, followed by hearty meals - traditional meals that were indigenous to the region, types of meals I would not usually see in my urban life. No processed foods. I was also pleasantly surprised that they also made beverages at home from scratch. What particularly stuck to my mind for years up till now was that after meals they never used any dish detergent to clean the dishes. They used special fabric (I forgot what specifically they were using.) to scrub the plates. No chemicals. Before going to bed, the friend prepared to make bread for me for the next morning for breakfast. They didn't buy commercial bread from stores.

Time passed slowly in this town. My friend and I spent time walking around the town - mostly walking on unpaved roads with weeds on the sides - clearly showing that the soil was untouched - stopped often to admire wild flowers, trees and farm lands. The whole time, I kept sneezing with teary eyes and runny nose. My friend hadn't experienced any allergies in her life. She didn't know what it was like to suffer from allergies, although she was sympathetic toward me.

A whole different lifestyle kept unveiling in front of my eyes during my stay with this friend. Lacking knowledge and information back then, I didn't make any connections between health, lifestyle and environments, only the memories were ingrained in my mind - the memories of my friend having no allergies, her diet being different from mine, her home being virtually chemical-free, her living in a rural - almost primitive - area.

In a related topic, Jessica Snyder Sachs, a freelance science writer and the author of "Good Germs, Bad Germs" notes in the book that "By the 1980s asthma had become the most common chronic disease of childhood and the leading cause of school absences and childhood hospitalizations in North America and Europe, especially in cities.", and that "Braun-Fahrlander's study showed that farm children were three times less likely to develop allergies than were their classmates living in town." Scientists began to search in 1980s for an answer to what about a modern lifestyle that leaves people with such undesirable consequences such as allergies and asthma.

In retrospect, this friend's rural lifestyle had many hints and clues that help better understand how a convenient modern lifestyle has kept warning us for decades about something that needs paying attention.