Limivorous: Eating dirt like a worm

I was engaged in an interesting conversation between a dentist and someone who had once spoken to a nurse. So the credibility took a nose dive on that last source, but hear me out nonetheless.

Clean freaks; to what benefit do they gain for all their overt OCD position? The dentist went on to explain the benefits of your saliva and how it improves from germs, which, in turn, help build your immune system. Naturally I brought up the necessity of swapping spit with ... people. Yeah, no one laughed then either. However, this provoked the conversation to the next level. Our society has become so anti-germ crazy, that we are actually raising a generation without a good immune system. We spend so much time and resources sanitizing our environment, that our immune systems are, in a word, bored.

There's a problem, however. Immune systems actually do not get bored, they get restless and either turn on each other, or worse, cease to be productive at an optimal level. Before I get any further into this, another point was brought up; when you use soaps that sanitize "99.9%" of all germs, that leaves that immune .1% to monopolize and create more problems than the 99.9% probable benign germs would have. That 99.9% was keeping the peace, in a manner of speaking.

Still, let's look at today's society. Lots of problems these days with regards health; more asthma, allergies, colds, and coincidently, unnatural phobia of germs. Our lazy under-worked immune system has its guard down because someone has already killed all the normal germs that our body battled on a daily basis. Everything is filtered, pre-washed, pre-cleaned, recleaned, and thoroughly sanitized.

I'm not against washing hands after going to the bathroom, or changing babies too. No need to throw caution to the wind, whatever that means. And perhaps I should consult a microbiologist or someone else in the necessary fields of study. But in the interim, I think it's time we started eating more dirt to make up for lost opportunity. Maybe my daughter does have a point, but at least she should try to find better quality dirt. Let's have some standards around here.