Embrace dirt, live better!
It’s a little hard to remember now, but there was a time when peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were a staple of school lunch bags, not cause to dial 911.
That was back when the student with asthma that everyone worried about in gym class might well have been the only kid in school with asthma. Playground equipment was designed for fun, not just safety, kids played in the dirt with their grubby siblings and even grubbier dog, and office buildings and malls weren’t littered with vats of antibacterial hand-sanitizing gel.
Now, by and large, kids are kept clean and safe, our houses are sparking with special products for every room and hygiene-related marketing urges us to sanitize anything and everything we can. Along with all that, though, it’s now estimated that one in every 13 Canadians is allergic to at least one type of food.
That’s about two children in every classroom. Other types of allergies are also rising, along with autoimmune conditions such as asthma and eczema.
It seems our obsession with cleanliness and health is actually making us less healthy. How ironic is that? Now, we seem to be having second thoughts. Scientists are conducting research that (sort of ) revives that old five-second rule for how long food can be dropped and still acceptably consumed. Others are contemplating the possibility of developing a barnyard dust vaccine to give urban kids some of the stuff that results in their farming counterparts’ lower allergy rates. And Canadian microbiologists are published authors under the catchy title, Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Our Children from an Oversanitized World.
As with anything, all this comes with the usual caveats: it’s complicated, there are multiple factors for everything and research is still ongoing.
But it’s increasingly clear that being exposed to microbes, especially in childhood, makes for a healthier immune system.
Humans evolved to survive our environment. Now we’re sanitizing it. And our bodies just don’t seem to be handling that well.
When the immune system isn’t properly trained, it can overreact to normally harmless things. Cue the rise in allergies.
This phenomenon is getting an increasing amount of attention — nut bans and EpiPen shortages have a way of doing that. But it’s not new. A British physician studying the rise of hay fever as long ago as the 1880s wryly noted: “Summer sneezing goes hand-in-hand with culture, we may, perhaps, infer that the higher we rise in the intellectual scale, the more is the tendency developed.”
Certainly the medical and scientific community is not suggesting we abandon modern progress. Water treatment is great; so, too, are vaccines for once deadly and debilitating diseases. In lots of ways, we’re far better off than we used to be.
But our push for health and cleanliness and perfection in all things is giving rise to a different, more modern kind of unhealthiness.
Antibiotics kill bacteria, both the good and the bad, leaving us with less of the beneficial stuff in our gastrointestinal tracts and increasing our susceptibility to allergies and illness.
And the dangerous bacteria that’s not killed with the inappropriate use of antibiotics is rebounding with a vengeance.
The United Nations has declared antibiotic-resistant superbugs to be one of the biggest threats to global health. Britain’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, has called these superbugs a threat as serious as terrorism and natural disasters.
That’s awfully scary and drives people to pump the hand sanitizer like their life depended on it. Which, of course, is the opposite of what we’re now learning is good for us and the environment.
We became so scared of germs that we raced to embrace products full of chemical compounds we can’t even pronounce. How does that make any sense?
But amid all this doom and gloom, there was a spot of good news this past month.
Anew Canadian study, by the University of British Columbia and B.C. Children’s Hospital suggests most preschoolers who are allergic to peanuts can be safely treated with small amounts of peanut protein.
While oral immunotheraphy — in which patients are directed to eat small amounts of an allergenic food to gradually build up tolerance to it — isn’t new, this study led by pediatric allergist Dr. Edmond Chan is the first to show it can safely be offered as a practical, routine treatment.
That, along with a recent recommendation by pediatricians urging parents to introduce common allergy-causing foods to high-risk babies as soon as they are ready to eat solids, may help roll back the dramatic increase in food allergies.
So there’s new hope for kids who already have food allergies and hope for reducing the number who develop them. And possibly, someday, even hope that we’ll get back to a place where a PB&J sandwich can again be a lunchtime favourite.
Economist and journalist Tim Harford argues for the power of messiness. Disorder, he says, is good for our brains. When conditions aren’t perfect, it forces us to be more resilient and creative in problem solving.
But messiness isn’t just good for the soul; it’s good for the body, too.
We can’t all grow up on family farms surrounded by elder siblings, livestock and big hairy dogs. But we can pet them when we see them, go easier on the hand sanitizer and generally embrace a little dirt.