Should we sterilize our environment? Makers of antiseptic sprays and chemicals have tried to convince us that we should for the last half-century. But the science is showing that this is a very bad idea.
In fact, it’s downright healthy for kids to play in the dirt.
You can think of our immune system learning in the same way as our children learn languages. You want to immerse young children in at least one language, and preferably several, to increase their linguistic skills. Otherwise, words sound foreign to them.
In the same way, it’s best to immerse young children in the environment. This goes beyond not disinfecting everything. It’s good to give in to children’s natural inclinations to play in the dirt. This way, they get broad exposure to the numerous things that make up a healthy, normal environment.
Why?
When young children grow up playing in the dirt, even on farms where there are a wide array of microscopic bugs, their immune system later recognizes these and knows not to react against them- unless they’re dangerous. Without this early exposure, like a child without exposure to language, the immune system adversely reacts to the many unfamiliar items that it meets, triggering the tendency to increased allergies.
This is why playing in the dirt actually and intuitively is associated with a lower allergy risk. It is quite healthy for children to do this.
It goes even well beyond this. There are more bacteria in our bodies than there are cells of our own. Called the “human biome,” you can think of this as the normal zoo we carry around with us. Countless studies are now showing how important having a wide diversity of these bugs is to optimal health.
The illnesses of modern life are very different from the ones we had centuries ago. People would die from infections like smallpox or plague. Now that we have learned how to handle these, the problems have flipped. Instead, we now face a major challenge with autoimmunity and immune conditions. Our immune systems have become both weak and overreactive at the same time.
Other conditions associated with not having the right mix of healthy bugs in our body include:
- anxiety and depression
- autism
- autoimmune conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease
- allergies including eczema
And we are still just in the “A’s”…
Less Dirt Means More Challenges For the Immune System
In addition, the challenges of not having the wide exposure to organisms we had when we were allowed to play in the dirt, our immune system is facing numerous other challenges.
For example:
- Thousands of chemicals are added to our food supply and the environment in general, including disinfectant sprays.
- About half of the vitamins and minerals normally found in food are lost in the Standard American Diet (SAD), which has become ultra-processed. Not having zinc, vitamin C, and other key nutrients can cripple our immune systems. I do recommend a good age-appropriate children’s multivitamin which includes zinc.
In addition to leaving us afraid to have our children play in the dirt and encouraging us to fill our households with unnecessary chemicals, some food processors continue to try to sell us fake food. This leads to misleading medical myths, such as butter, eggs, and salt being bad for you. These can be quite healthy for people, and are healthier than margarines and egg substitutes.
So it’s OK to get back to our roots a bit and let our kids play in the dirt. You may even want to join them!
Love and Blessings
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, is a nutrition, pain, and fibromyalgia expert and bestselling author of From Fatigued to Fantastic. He is the lead author of 9 studies, including one on a novel effective treatment of autism by addressing allergies.
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Cover photo by Allan Mas
