Are We Dying to be Civilized?



Several years ago during one of my return trips to college, one of my professors, originally from India, stated that we, as a society, had become too “clean,” –too germ conscious—that there were people living on the streets of Calcutta with healthier immune systems than most Americans have. This was both a shock and a revelation to me! I had always been taught, “cleanliness was next to Godliness.” Why shouldn’t “cleaner” be better?

And here is another lesson-- learned in Sunday school: A limb that isn’t used withers away. By extrapolation we can say that an immune system that isn’t used or challenged withers away.

In our society, today, most people have had several “rounds” of antibiotics, used antibacterial soaps and cleaner, eaten foods with preservatives—all of which reduce or eliminate the good organisms in our gut, along with the bad. And our immune system has become that “limb” which, in the absence of challenge, withers.


Living symbiotically in our gut should be billions of helper bacteria—bacteria that precondition—eat—process—all the food we eat before it is absorbed into our bloodstream and carried around our bodies. And these helper organisms also condition our immune systems to know pathogens when encountered, and to recognize “self” or "host"–our own tissues.


But pathogens that slip in may trigger autoimmune responses if their "molecular signature" is sufficiently similar to one of the "host" tissue signatures. In fact, some autoimmune diseases are now identified as being triggered by bacterial infection, such as Crohn's disease (Kobayashi et al, 2005; Maeda et al, 2005), which is an intestine autoimmune disease that causes chronic inflammation. Dilated cardiomyopathy is associated with a heart specific virus infection triggering dendritic cell-induced autoimmune heart failure (Eriksson et al, 2003). It has been argued that the broad range of autoimmune disorders discussed above, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and others, are due to multiple exposure to pathogenic bacteria and viruses (von Herrath et al, 2003). This class of autoimmune diseases can be attributed to breaches of the immune response against pathogens, by which invaded pathogens trigger a sustained immune response by molecular mimicry.

About 70 % of our immune system is in our gut--and it needs to be toughened into a fortress from which our immune system can mount a defense against invaders --pathogens-- rather than our own tissues!

We do ourselves, our children and future generations a great disservice by depending on and over using antibiotics and antiseptics. To help undo the damage we need to incorporate probiotics into our diets—that is, raw fermented products like yogurt, kefir, buttermilk (and/or the soy milk versions of these) and fermented vegetables such as saurkraut. Probiotics can also be taken in pill form if preferred.

Add to this a future where certain global warming may wreck havoc with our entire way of life....

We need to take strong measures now-- we run the risk of being unable and unprepared to defend ourselves from the next slightly virulent bug that comes along (not to mention worldwide pandemics such as HIV and threatened avian flu.)