What’s the relationship between household cleaners and gut bacteria?
“The gut microbial composition is mostly acquired from the environment that we live in
— if we live in an environment that is continuously cleaned with anti-bacterial cleaners, then the gut microbial composition will definitely be altered,” Dr Badi Alatasi, consultant paediatrician at Valiant Clinic Dubai, told Gulf News.
Dr Kalyanasundaram added, “The environment we live in affects the gut flora — and living in a very clean, disinfected environment creates a selection bias in terms of the variety of organisms that stay in our system.”
He said: “Excessive antibiotic use, for example, changes the gut flora on a short-term basis. Cleaning chemicals affect the bacteria in our environment.
“This reduces the load [of good bacteria], as well as creates a shift in pattern to certain groups of bacteria which may resist the disinfectant effect more. As our gut bacteria have a role in so many of our functions, some of these changes might impact on our health.
“We could show a preference for eco-friendly products for various reasons, and this [study] could be one such reason.”
According to Dr Srinivasan, “The basic issue is that we’ve become too obsessed with cleaning agents and sterilisation.
“[At the same time] exposure to potentially deadly infection isn’t something you can shrug off either. We need to be clean, we need to use cleaning agents, but of course, judiciously,” she said.