The Downside of Too Much Cleanliness

Many people feel that our society is just way too clean. We in North America are obsessed with cleanliness. We use anti-bacterial soaps to wash ourselves, disinfectant sprays for every part of the house, detergents guaranteed to kill germs in every form on our dishes and clothes, and even anti-microbial mouth washes. We scrub our fruits and vegetables, bleach our clothes and shower far too often, according to some. Personally, I’m glad about the shower part, but the rest is somewhat over the top.

Our hospitals are exemplary. Such an emphasis is placed on disinfection and anti-bacterial agents that hospitals have become breeding grounds for strange new viral and bacterial life that we have come to call “superbugs”. These new strains of germs are so foreign to us that our immune systems have yet to catch up, making hospitals great places to get ill.

Exposure to bacteria and viral organisms is critical to the development of a mature immune system. By constantly cleaning and sterilizing our environment, we don’t give our defense mechanisms a chance to grow. How it works is like this: bacterial species belong to families, like us, with cousins and distant relatives. By coming into contact with a harmless cousin of say a dangerous streptococcal bacteria, our immune system can build a defense, so that if we ever contact the real thing, we have the basic structure in place to mount an effective fight. If we are always washing, scrubbing, sterilizing and cleaning our environment, we will never have the pleasure of meeting the harmless cousin.

Many friendly and neutral bacteria come from the soil. The obsession we have today with washing our food removes these organisms, eliminating any chance that they could assist us. Rinsing off residues from possible chemical sprays is one thing, scrubbing to the point of sterilization, is quite another.

Organisms in soil helped our ancestors to survive. “You’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die” is not simply an expression our mothers used to help us rationalize when we accidentally ate something unseemly. These soil-based bacteria are helpful with our digestive tract, which should be so loaded with good bacteria that unfriendly ones have no place to live. A proper GI flora is vital in the prevention of many common, chronic intestinal diseases.

This lack of contact with soil-based organisms is a problem that has become endemic in Western society. Now the ever-resourceful natural food industry is encapsulating soil-based bacteria for supplementation. And…it really helps some people! These supplements are known as “homeostatic soil organisms” and they can play a role in helping many chronic diseases.

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