Nov 3, 2013 2 min read

At lunch with my wife and a few of her friends, the topic turned to the need for vigilant hand-washing and latex-glove-changing when dealing with the outside world. Since they were all retired elementary school teachers who spent decades with snotty-nosed and coughing young children, this was not such a surprise.

Still, I could not stop thinking of a recent photograph I had seen of a healthy and chubby toddler from Mongolia, sitting on the dirt floor of his parent’s yurt. Raised on unpasteurized milk and eating flecks of dirt or an occasional bug off the floor, there is an excellent chance this happy child will have a strong immune system and live well past 100, like many others in his country.

Are we becoming too clean for our own health? As a nation that spends billions on personal hygiene products, are we doing more harm than good? What steps should we be taking to boost the immune systems of our young children?

A recent study from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests we do indeed have a problem. It found that among our children there is a 50 percent increase in food allergies and a 69 percent increase in skin allergies since the late 1990s. The most popular theory is the “hygiene hypothesis,” which finds that exposure to germs and parasites in early childhood may prevent the body from developing certain allergies.

If there is a downside to America’s culture of disinfection and overuse of antibiotics, there is also a no-brainer response. Let kids be kids and permit commonsense exposure to our “dirty environment.” A visit down to the farm, stepping in manure and hugging goats would not hurt. Every surface in the home does not need to be as sterile as an operating room. The occasional cold does not require massive medical intervention. In short, moderation is much healthier than an all-out assault on the germs that share our world.

And a lot more fun.

Gary Stout

Washington