How Gardening Can Help Your Immune System
by David Gutierrez, Natural News:
One of the best ways to protect your children from a lifetime of allergies and autoimmune disorders is to make sure that they – and you – spend plenty of time outdoors getting dirty, scientists are now saying.
That’s because exposure to the naturally occurring microbes in our outdoor environment helps program the developing immune system to learn what types of foreign agents are actually harmless. This prevents it from later attacking innocuous allergens, or even your own body.
“You want your immune system to have a large repertoire of harmless organisms that it has learned not to attack,” said medical microbiologist Graham Rook of University College London. “If you have this, then, because all lifeforms are ultimately built from the same building blocks, you are equipped to recognise almost anything that comes along and mount an appropriate immune response,” he continued, as reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
More dirt = healthier immune system
The idea that exposure to microbes helps program the immune system goes back to 1989, when epidemiologist Prof. David Strachan noted that rates of allergies were rising in Western countries, concurrent with a drop in infectious diseases. He had also found that children with more older siblings were less prone to allergies (and, scientists later discovered, to autoimmune diseases). He suggested that exposure to more childhood infections via older siblings helped “train” the developing immune system.
In the years since, scientists have discovered that the key factor is not actually childhood infection – understandably, since our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely got many of the “herd” infections that large, urban populations now suffer from. Instead, the immune system is programmed by exposure to parasites and, most of all, harmless microbes that surround us.
For example, studies have found that children who are exposed to farms and cowsheds early in life – or whose mothers are exposed during pregnancy – are less likely to develop allergies and asthma later in life. Another study found that children born in homes with cat and mouse dander and cockroach droppings were less likely to suffer from wheezing by age three, and that children in homes with more bacteria had fewer allergies.
