It’s official. If you led a dirty life when you were a kid, you would have been healthier when you grew up. Science says so.
It’s quite well known in medical circles that modern-day kids who grew up being more exposed to the “real world” tend to be healthier than those who live in sterile environments of soap and disinfectants all the time.
I know what you might say: “Can science make its mind up? We were told when growing up that we must keep clean and use soap and wash and not touch all those ‘natural’ things out there!”
Both sets of advice are true and useful, and they all have their place, and it’s clearly been shown that too much of one or the other is bad for us.
Years ago, for those growing up, whether in the kampungs or even in many of the urban areas, cleanliness wasn’t really top of most people’s minds. Putting food on the table was.
Education was left to the teachers in school, and for them, getting people to know their 3Rs (Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetics) was challenging enough, much less trying to teach a whole regime of modern hygiene.
Doing the dirty work
I remember when I was in my kampung primary school, we would be asked to clean the drains and even the toilets. Given that for almost all of us toilets at home were some holes in the ground behind the bushes, cleaning porcelain bowls with water from pipes seemed almost a luxury.
For most of us, clean school uniforms didn’t look much different from non-clean ones, and a little elbow grease (often accompanied by the occasional knuckle raps) wasn’t a big issue. I had only one set of school clothes anyway, and so did pretty much everybody else.
And everybody was used to hard labour at home. Many had to help their family, whether at planting rice or tapping rubber or fishing in the sea, the three main kampung jobs back then. Doing some more work at school was downright enjoyable.
I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody now; otherwise some “Karen” would take you to court before you can even say “flush”.
The Japanese example
Japan, however, sees things differently. Such practices are an inherent part of their culture and a sign of showing respect to others as well as to nature. People still talk about how the Japanese football fans cleaned up the stadiums after games (even ones they lost!) at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.
Given that we’re exposed to a lot of the things that scientists now say are good for a child’s growth, did I and my fellow kampung kids grow up healthy? Of course not. Our problem wasn’t the exposure to nature, it was the over exposure.
Everything the scientists say are good for kids, such as exposure to plants and soil and animals, we had by the bucketload, and in overtime too. Those, plus the hole-in-the-ground toilets, and multiple kinds of mosquitoes and worms and poisonous creepy crawlies, and even the occasional ones that eat you whole.
Our salvation then was the weekly hospital medical van coming to visit us, where a paramedic – though for all we know he could have been a senior hospital clerk – dispensed medicines, usually either May & Baker pills to be swallowed or a blue ointment to be smeared all over our afflictions.
We certainly could have done with more soap and disinfectant then. But taking a bath at the well was inconvenient (and cold), and on the occasions that we had soap, they tended to be used for all cleaning purposes – from our own body to our hair and laundry and even the pots and pans.
Weaker immune system
Meanwhile, in the more prosperous cities, the opposite happened. Parents freaked out at even the smallest smudge, and probably put their kids through multiple soaks with all kinds of soaps and shampoos and creams. Their living environment, including their clothes, were also thoroughly cleaned by even stronger chemicals.
The biodiversity hypothesis says the lack of biodiversity in our life caused by such over enthusiasm in using chemical cleaners has left our young with a weakened immune system. This is seen especially in instances where asthma has become a curse for many young children because they aren’t able to handle the allergens found in normal life.
An easy answer seems to be to expose the young children to more of nature. You don’t have to reproduce my childhood certainly, but you should let children get their hands dirty regularly, perhaps through a little gardening, or visits to the botanical garden, or hikes along jungle trails.
The human body has been conditioned over hundreds of thousands of years to co-exist with natural stuff, from microorganisms, to biological and chemical allergens, as well as domestic animals and pets. Such exposure conditions our own immune system and primes it to be ready to handle the future.
Training your system
The latest findings say that even a month of being exposed to plants and grass and flowers instead of sterile concrete and sand would have improved your microbiome significantly, giving one an improved ability to handle immunity challenges.
It’s almost like taking a vaccine, really – you train your biological systems to handle future challenges. Such exposure increases T-cells and other immunity systems within our body, and actually makes us healthier and more resistant to diseases.
It’s not a surprise that those who are more outdoorsy tend to also be healthier. Part of the reason is obviously the benefits many of their cardio exercises have conferred them, as well as lower stress levels. But these newly-discovered benefits must also be credited for that.
Parents, you don’t have to dig holes in the grounds for toilets, but you can totally improve your children’s health by exposing them to more of the natural side of our lives, such as plants and soil – what we call “nature” nowadays.
And then take and post copious photos on social media, thus getting the best of both worlds. - FMT
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
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