Eat dirt, suckers!

Not the humble pie. But, the real stuff. The real dirt.

Well, dirt as in not grabbing a handful of dirt and having that for dessert.  But, to get into a mindset of a little bit of bugs is good for your system.

We increasingly live in sterile conditions here in the US.  We wash our hands, a lot. We have hand sanitizers everywhere we turn and have made Purell one profitable product.  A couple more steps and as a country we will join the ranks of Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson.

But, hey, a bit of the bad stuff is good for us:

[A] great deal of research has shown that exposure to diverse bacteria or even parasitic worms helps to train and regulate the immune system, preventing it from becoming over-active.

In the old country, we were never too far away from unclean conditions.  Even within the home, even the food could get freaky.

It was only recently that I understood why my sister never cared for cauliflower when we were young.  I mean, those days, cauliflower was a treat.  It was not an everyday vegetable.  But, my sister could not be tempted.

A couple of years ago, when an aunt was visiting and we were recalling the old days, the aunt said that she hated cooking cauliflower because of the tiny worms that always seemed to be present deep in the florets.  And that is when my sister admitted that it was the possibility of worms that turned her away.  Aha!

Yes, tiny worms in vegetables. In the rice. Bugs in the lentils.  Ants seemingly in everything.

There was no point complaining to the grandmothers.  "That's ok, if you swallowed ants, your eyesight will get better" was one of the responses.

Agricultural practice without chemicals meant that other life forms coexisted with the vegetables and fruits.  They hitched a ride home with the produce that we bought.  As simple as that.

Washing hands and feet we did a lot. But, in the tropical "heat and dust" dirt and bugs were always around.  Sterile conditions it was not.  Babies crawling on the floors routinely ingested all kinds of crap as they licked their hands and sucked their fingers.

I am willing to buy into the idea that all those tiny doses of dirt in the air and the food helped me develop my immune system, and I now worry that I will live way too long for my own good!  And that the absence of that from my regular life now is why I have to be ultra-careful when I visit India.

Even in the absence of a full-blown immune response, exposure to different populations of bacteria can have a significant impact on the way that our immune system responds to other threats.

Totally sterile conditions, I have always believed, are unhealthy.  It just ain't nature.  Yes, we need the cleanest possible spaces at ICUs and ORs and food preparation places. But, not every single second of our existence.

During most of human evolution, humans have been consuming microbes from the environment, and it’s clear that this exposure shapes the populations of microbes in our guts. A experimental link between microbes consumed in the diet and specific health conditions has not been shown, but it’s quite plausible that at least some of the observations linked to the hygiene hypothesis aren’t just due to passive microbial encounters, but because of what we put in our mouths.

For all I know, in a few years, Purell will sell a profitable product--dirt.  "A teaspoon of dirt everyday will keep the doctors far away."  After washing the hands, of course.