How we've taken the business of keeping clean way too far says Brandie Weikle
New science shows that blasting away tiny organisms called microbes with our hand sanitizers, antibacterial soaps and liberal doses of antibiotics is having a profoundly negative impact on our kids’ immune systems, says microbiologist Marie-Claire Arrieta, co-author of a new book called Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Our Children from an Oversanitized World.
The assistant professor at the University of Calgary, along with her co-author, esteemed microbiologist Brett Finlay, make the case that we’re raising our kids in a cleaner, more hyper-hygienic environment than ever before. They say that our over-clean approach is contributing to a host of chronic conditions ranging from allergies to obesity. I chatted with Arrieta recently to find out more.
What inspired you and Finlay to write Let Them Eat Dirt?
We’re both microbiologists and we’ve been studying the community of microbes that live in our guts — what we call our gut microbiome. In recent years research from our lab and other labs has shown that the health of this microbiome early in life is really crucial to our lifelong health. It’s not just that we’re scientists but we’re both parents. We thought that parents and caregivers would really benefit from us bringing this knowledge to the public.
