Photo via IRRI
Yesterday marked the first day of Autumn, at least for us in the Northern Hemisphere. The back-to-school/end-of-summer frenzy has quieted down and everyone has settled into their Fall routine. Now, the focus has shifted to the cold and flu season and keeping our home and family safe and healthy. We begin this seasonal topic every year around this time (just like we focus on sun protection at the onset of every summer) even though we can get sick all year round. Everyone is talking about and marketing products to this effect. And the products span a very wide range from immune-boosting foods and supplements to anti-bacterial and sanitizing products to symptom relievers. But in the end, those are just products and they can only do so much. We don’t even know how effective some of them are.
The lesser talked about, cheaper (free) way to keep our home and ourselves healthy all year round is to exercise our immune system. How? By being more tolerant of the microbes in our environment. Before you jump out of your seat in disgust, let me just clarify that I’m not advocating that it’s okay to be dirty and live in filth. I’m just supporting the theory that the modern environment we’ve created for ourselves has weakened our immune system. People in the industrialized world have become too much of an indoor society and an over-sanitized one. For most individuals who don’t already have a compromised immune system, getting sick with common bacteria infection is how our bodies learn to fight it off and boost our immune system. So, when we get sick from a really severe infection, well then we have both the wonderful drugs of modern medicine and our own strong immune system to fight it off and help us recover faster. Isn’t twice the defense better than one? For more information, google the “hygiene hypothesis”. There’s also an interesting segment on this topic in the video “The Evolutionary Arms Race”.
Another downside to microbe intolerance is bacterial resistance. That’s coming up next.
Posts in this series on microbes: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
