Using anti-bacterial soap at your house is a good thing, right? It sounds good. And anti-bacterial products fill the cleaning aisle at your local grocery store.
However, these products have a significant negative impact that is similar to the problem that overuse of antibiotics cause: bacterial mutation and decreased natural immunities.
Anti-bacterial soap typically uses Triclosen, which penetrates the cell wall of bacteria and kills something inside of it. The more often this occurs, the more likely that bacteria will adapt to resist this, which could reduce the effectiveness of many things that are supposed to kill bacteria when you really need to kill bacteria.
Remember in history class when you read about the Native Americans and how many were killed by diseases the Europeans brought? The locals had no immunity because they'd never been exposed to those diseases. We can recreate that effect to some extent by constantly disinfecting our surroundings and reducing our immunities while potentially strengthening the local bacteria.
Moral of the story: don't get all OCD with the Lysol and Purel. You were intelligently designed to resist the other elements in your environment long before convenient hand and counter-top sanitizers were invented. We should probably be more concerned about breathing the gases released by your car interior or the lead content in Fisher Price toys than the bacteria that 's hanging out on your doorknobs, toilet seats and counter-tops.
(read a study about this)
Now, excuse me. It's time for me to go feed Nora some dirt.
Subscribe!
Posts
Comments
3 comments:
I had heard some of that. I still keep a bottle in my purse for those times when I'm just so grossed out I have to use some!
Thanks for keeping us updated on our health. I'm sure you can get some good dirt to feed Nora at one of the ranches in the corrals.
Oh, and did you read about the kids that are licking the anti bacterial gel? They're getting drunk. Supposedly snoops checked it out and it's true.
I'm disappointed that there was no "obligatory" picture of Nora. :)
When my daughter was in nursing school, they studied this and found that regular soap acutally got rid of more germs than the so called 'anti bacteriel' cleansers do. She said that they did an experiment and looked at the different results under a microscope. It was clear that soap won out.
I love the thought provoking blogs. Helps us all stay on our toes.
That is why I let Brooklyn eat pretty much anything she wants that isn't a choking hazard (dog food, dirt, screws, etc), and I let her play with toys she droppes on the floor of public places. She also gets to play on and around the toilet, although I did clean the bathroom the other day and used lysol. It only gets cleaned about once a month though, so I don't think that's considered OCD.
Post a Comment