The Danger of Being Clean

This may be the most important article you read this week. I say this only in part because it appears to at least partly vindicate my thirty year campaign against excessive hygene! The researcher suggests that the American fascination with hygene is primarily cosmetic and has become a social norm in part due to the advertising industry. According to this author, the only clear hygenic benefits are hand washing, everything else is just personal comfort or to meet social norms.

Indeed, our fascination with hygene may even be making our kids sick! Supporting a claim I have often made in the past (can you see I am anxious for vindication here?), the researcher write, "In order to harden the immune system, the immune system requests some kind of stimuli all the time." Indeed, this correlates to the homeopathic method of medicating patients by giving them a little of the "bad stuff," to trigger their bodies natural immune response and heal naturally.

When asked if our hygene obsession helps keep us from getting sick, the researcher responded, "No. Not at all. I think it's making us sicker in the case of the hygiene hypothesis. It's increasingly believed by a large number of doctors and scientists, who say that the fact that we're not giving one of our immune systems enough dirt and germs to kind of flex its muscles on and get strong is allowing the other immune system, the one that gets allergies and asthma, to [take over]."

Wow, I mean, double wow! We could be healthier, have less respiratory problems, less illness, and less auto-immune disease if we simply washed less! I mean, talk about an easy call to action, all we have to do is stop doing something that takes time, wastes water, and is often uncomfortable (my wife disagrees here). Having a symbiotic relationship with dirt and bacteria is the key to a healthier life! As the researcher states, "it's not good for our health to have robbed ourselves of all these bacteria with which we have had a pretty fruitful coexistence."

From now on, when someone notices that I haven't showered in a couple days, or my body odor is a bit strong, I will just tell them I am having a "fruitful coexistence" with bacteria!