Sometimes, unhelpful or just plain wrong health advice can stick in our heads. You don't need to drink eight glasses of fluid every day. A few apples a day might not be enough to keep your doctor away if fructose intolerance is a problem. What about overly clean homes that damage our immune systems?Although this false interpretation of the "hygiene hypothesis" has been proven wrong many times, it is still ingrained in our collective memory. Researchers in the UK published a paper that systematically rejected the notion that we are too clean for ourselves.Graham Rook, a University College London microbiologist, said, "For over 20 years, there has been a public narrative about how hand and household hygiene practices, which are essential for stopping the exposure to disease-causing organisms are also blocking exposure.""This paper attempts to resolve the conflict between hygiene and cleaning to prevent infection and the need to provide microbial inputs for our digestive and immune systems.Researchers stress that microbes are vital to our health. They are essential for our whole bodies, including our skin, lungs, and guts.The hygiene hypothesis focuses on early childhood exposure to certain microbes that have co-evolved alongside humans to help develop an immune system, especially in relation to allergies.It's not going to help your immune system develop better, but it will make you more likely to get gastroenteritis. It's important to remember that different washing products can encourage more microbes than you might think.The team has identified four specific nails for the "clean home is bad fo immunity" adage in their new paper, which is a review and analysis of existing literature.First, children and babies develop their own microbiome, which is seeded by their mother and then mainly by their family and the environment. Individual microbes shed and mix, creating a unique household microbiome that is shared mostly by people living together (including pets).Rook stated that vaccines and exposure to mothers, families, the natural world, and vaccines could provide all the necessary microbial inputs.These exposures do not conflict with intelligently targeted hygiene and cleaning.Second, vaccines can be surprisingly effective in priming the immune system for other diseases, just like a potentially fatal disease.The team stated that "in the 1980s it started to be reported that vaccination in Africa with a live measles vaccine reduced overall child mortality to a level that could not have been explained by measles.""The nonspecific benefits of vaccines are comparable to the survival benefits that nonspecific infections provide after treatment."We are also well aware of the importance of outdoor exposure for building strong immune systems. The team points out that nature's bacterial profiles are not the same as those found indoors.The team stated that children were exposed to biodiversity in the school's natural environment, which resulted in increased peripheral blood biomarkers for immunoregulation."So evolutionary and epidemiologic considerations point out that children should be exposed to the microbiota found in the natural environment, rather than the unnatural microbiota found in modern buildings."The team believes that if there are health concerns related to a clean environment it is not the removal of organisms but the harsh cleaning products that are responsible.According to the team, focusing on cleaning can help reduce these issues and our exposure to microbes that could make us sick.Rook stated that while cleaning your home and personal hygiene are good, it is not enough to stop the spread of infection. He also suggested that you focus on the surfaces and hands most likely to transmit infection."By focusing our cleaning practices, it is possible to limit the direct exposure of children and their parents to cleaning agents."The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published the review.
