Clean up your health with dirt
By Burton W. Cole
I was going to run the vacuum cleaner, and maybe even wash the dishes. A few of them, anyway.
But then I considered the health consequences of trying to survive in a sterile environment.
Science says that we are too clean for our own good. In fact, cleanliness makes us sick, some reasonable researchers say.
For my own health and wellbeing, I swatted the cookie crumbs off my easy chair and plopped down, safe for another day. The T-shirt I’m wearing for the 13th day in a row may be the armor of immunity that’s saving my life.
As the National Library of Medicine so eloquently states it, “The ‘hygiene hypothesis’ as originally formulated by Strachan, proposes that a cause of the recent rapid rise in atopic disorders could be a lower incidence of infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings.”
Burt translation:
Dude, go play in the mud. It’s good for ya.
Other researchers dispute this notion as a bunch of dirty, rotten hooey, but I’d rather not take any chances by taking any unnecessary showers. Our hale and hearty ancestors who took a bath every Saturday night even if they didn’t think they needed one might have been on to something.
The fact is, according to the dirty researchers, that we, as a nation, are too clean. It used to be that roughly 60% of the human body was comprised of water. Now it’s about 72% hand sanitizer and antibacterial soap.
And it’s playing havoc with our health.
A decade or so ago, during an International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, Tufts University geneticist Stuart Levy warned the shiny clean congregation that that with all the antibacterial soap we use, shining ourselves up just like Mom lectured us to do all those years ago, we are cleaning up for the viral beating of our life.
It takes a little dirt to keep the ol’ immune system strong, by Levy’s theories. Dirt works on the same principle as vaccines.
Basically, the strategy for vaccines is to plunge harmless antigens into the body to imitate infections so that immune systems create the antibodies that will neutralize the real thing, should it ever come a’knockin’.
Levy’s reasoning is that a little bit of messy prevents us from catching full-blown nastiness.
Which means that my refrigerator contains the richest store of health this side of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All of us kids used to grow up with sandboxes. The grownups in our lives would have scoffed at the notion of sanitized fillings for our sandboxes. “Go play in the dirt,” they’d say.
A woman I know once gift-wrapped boxes of dirt for her grandkids for Christmas. Good clean dirt not only is healthy, it stimulates the imagination.
It’s even better if you share your dirt with other mucky, dusty kids.
Which we did. We built castles out of dirt, dug holes in dirt with our Tonka trucks, spun out our bicycles on dirt, and even played war by throwing dirt clods at each other.
Again, other researchers pooh-pooh this reasoning as soiled logic. But do I really want to dust the shelves and mop the floors only to catch the flu? I don’t know if the risk is worth it.
I didn’t want to do dishes, anyway.
Write to Burt at news@falmouthoutlook.com or contact him on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. Use hand sanitizer first. You don’t know what kind of dirt he’s rolled in.