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Getting your hands dirty is good for you
- jeanmichelselli 25d ago[flagged]
- bananaflag 25d agothese are Imperial hands getting dirty
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- librasteve 25d agoyes, I’m so delighted by this quality content I want to up my licence fee
- pydry 24d agoI remember having a conversation with somebody from the BBC about a study they commissioned once to ask license payers about how the license fee was spent. the overwhelming response apparently was: * we don't have particular concerns about how the license fee is spent. * we mainly just want that money back
- throw93947309 25d ago[flagged]
- bcjdjsndon 25d agoI knew the germphobes would be all over this one. > Children who play there willmdevelop all sorts of misterious allergies, skin rash conditions, asthma and so on! No they won't you hysterical boob. Youre fear of germs is irrational. Get a grip
- throw93947309 25d ago[dead]
- Retr0id 25d agoI hate to break it to you but wild animals poop too
- throw93947309 25d ago[dead]
- bcjdjsndon 24d agoNeither do dogs lol tell me the name and location of this park so we can verify this 6 times an hour dogshitfest
- bcjdjsndon 25d ago> it has nothing to do with regular germs! You're severely misunderstanding how germs and infections work. But germphobes have the phobia as a response to stress, its never a logical position they take. You're feelings rule your intellect on this one I'm afraid, that's a textbook definition of irrationally
- throw93947309 25d agoSimlle question: i see dozens animals shitting on the same spot every day. Next day I see a child playing at that spot, should a say something? Is that an overreaction?
- bcjdjsndon 24d agoYes
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- chownie 25d agoWhat do you think soil is made of? Where do you think it comes from?
- throw93947309 25d ago[dead]
- chownie 25d agoThe slugs in your soil carry a parasite which can cause lifelong paralysis if it enters your body, a lot of the worms do too. Those decomposing leaves carry tetanus. Your perspective is not aligned with reality.
- ectoloph 25d agoKids benefit from being kids and rolling around in the grass. In which cities are people favouring local parks over toilets? Parasites can actually help with allergies. I am loosely aware of various attempts at treating allergies using parasites. One of the approaches taken (under medical supervision) for kids with bad nut allergies is to gradually expose them to more of the allergen. Being able to survive a peanut or two without anaphylaxis is life-changing.
- sajithdilshan 25d agoThis is like the dumbest take ever, do you think people go and take a shit on the park in big European cities? I live in Berlin and compared to most other European cities it’s a shit hole, but one thing I can tell you is the cleanliness and green nature of the public parks. Most of the time people actually care about the public parks (with exception of few) However, one thing to worry about is the tick bites or any other insect bites, but that’s part of the nature
- throw93947309 25d agoWhere do you think ticks come from in a city park...?
- sajithdilshan 24d agoThrough animals of course
- pestatije 24d agoIn Spain dogs have taken over city parks, so pretty much the description is correct... nobody in their right mind lets their children play with the sand in parks in Spain
- sajithdilshan 24d agoThat is sad, so people don’t pick up after the dogs or are they stray dogs?
- pestatije 24d agotheyll pick the shit, they might pour some water from a bottle where the dog peed... but the main problem is the sheer amount of dogs in cities, people are just non-committal on having babies and instead keep a dog or two
- Yash16 25d ago[dead]
- chistev 25d agoDirt is good to prevent you from getting sick easily.
- nxobject 25d agoI look forward to seeing a lifehacking hyper-optimizer streamline this to a polished daily workflow... "I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning. Every weekend, I inoculate at a 1:5:5 ratio with biologically active stream dirt (after petri-dishing to check for activity), and a mix of poor-quality soil cover, and some compost; I finish by adding a 10-10-10 balanced fertilizer. Recently, I've been seeing if there are any additional benefits to smearing all over my arms; I'm conducting a 3 month/3 month comparison experiment, with a washout period in-between... Don't forget to buy my exclusive eBook!"
- sdcfgy 25d agoThey'd be copying the greats! I have seen a distinct pattern of artists and photographers doing self portraits while rolling around in shit or mud.
- mft_ 25d agoThere’s a startup opportunity: a body cream with concentrates of beneficial microorganisms. “Pair it with our full spectrum sun lamp and you can have all the benefits of playing outside from the comfort of your standing desk”.
- ceejayoz 25d agoFDA: “You’ve got E. coli in here.” “Yes.”
- electric_mayhem 25d agoYou folks are having fun with the idea, but, well, in 2026 there’s absolutely a viable market for this.
- doubled112 24d agoI thought sun exposure was bad. Or is it good again? Was it good all along? Do I need to wear sunscreen in front of my desk too now? Will the body cream include it? Too many questions. I'm going outside.
- throwawayjacob 25d ago[flagged]
- SachaSOL 25d ago[flagged]
- asimovDev 25d agowrong tab I assume, cause above this post on the frontpage is the LAN house post
- Tepix 25d ago> Those using the microbially-diverse soil saw an increase in the diversity of bacteria on their skin, and on the number of anti-inflammatory cytokines in their blood – while the other group didn't. That's really remarkable.
- PowerElectronix 24d agoYeah, getting the immune system to tone down the responses is probably the best one can do for oneself health. Our body didn't get the memo that for the last 200 years water and food are clean now and bacteria is fought with antibiotics. Getting the immune system to not freak out at everything it detects via just touching grass is the best news I've read today.
- dd8601fn 24d agoThe next fad… microdosing immunosuppressants? We could get in early. Nevermind. Just saw people are already doing it.
- whatthe12899 24d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
- PowerElectronix 24d agoWell, that's some wacky way of releasing some built up tension in the immune system.
- dd8601fn 24d agoYeesh. That’s not even the one I saw from my edit. > Rapamycin, an organ-transplant drug, has become popular after research found it could extend lifespans in other species. The longevity biohacker community uses rapamycin at substantially lower intermittent doses (3 to 8 mg once weekly), versus transplant doses (typically 2 to 5 mg daily).
- jareklupinski 25d agoafter i switched to washing my hands with antibacterial soap (the orange kind they use in hospitals), i've gone from a bimonthly cold-analog disease to maybe being sick twice a year
- disgruntledphd2 24d agoIf you're getting colds that often (and you're not immuno-compromised) then it might be worth getting checked out. I was getting sick constantly, and it turned out I had chronic sinusitis, and surgery made it much much better. (Just friendly advice, I know nothing about your situation).
- jareklupinski 24d agodoctors kept pitching tonsillectomy to me; i'm just hesitant of the knife :( glad it was just poor hygiene :P
- codersfocus 24d agoIf you have tonsilitis / tonsil stones, that means you have a biofilm there and it’s a very common place for that to happen. Regular mouthwash and even antibiotics won’t get rid of it, but a solution of vinegar, lemon juice and salt will. https://youtu.be/0he8BCs8VD0 https://youtu.be/0he8BCs8VD0
- someguynamedq 24d agoIt helps, but it is a very painful recovery
- Arodex 24d agoWashing your hands is not only about your own health, it is also about other people's health. Maybe you could get the same quality of life improvement without decreasing other's.
- Arodex 25d ago... Wasn't there papers and articles showing getting in contact with soil was causing Parkinson's? Feeling some pâro, again: https://youtu.be/w7l2hUp0CkQ https://youtu.be/w7l2hUp0CkQ
- christophilus 25d agoI thought that was related to the insecticides/herbicides, not soil itself.
- Arodex 24d agoIt's unclear. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/sep/23/medicalscience.world https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/sep/23/medicalscience.wo... My point was more that articles like the one on the BBC (or the Guardian for that matter) just contradict themselves every year. I completely stopped reading those "pop science" takes that are only there for clicks. (To its credit, the Guardian makes place for long form articles that go more in-depth on known knowns and known unknowns.)
- satnhak 25d agoAnd no one has dirtier hands than the BBC
- delichon 24d agoMaybe there's a benefit to having diverse natural memetic microflora on your cognitive convolutions. Like it could innoculate you against aggressive viral ideological infection.
- PowerElectronix 24d agoSo much dumb stuff in your brain that you are just immune to propaganda as you can't take it seriously (it's just as dumb as the other stuff)
- throwatdem12311 24d agoI heard the most ridiculous thing the other day: That GenZ and Gen Alpha have started doing this thing they call “private podcasting”. Where they invite a friend over and discuss topics like one of those podcasts where dudes just talk about stuff…but they don’t record it or post it anywhere. I was stunned. Is this generation really so socially starved by the attention parasites that human beings are starting to reinvent “hanging out” or “just having a conversation”. It’s so ridiculous I just refuse to believe this is how they actually think and this has to be some kind of rage bait. I pray that it’s rage bait because if it isn’t we failed our children badly. All that to say that I get similar vibes from the “grtting your hands dirty is actually good for you” thing. It just screams that entire generations of people have been stunted by helicopter parenting that this just seems like novel information. It seems we’ve completely abdicated our duty as parents and dumped our responsibility to educate our children onto profit seeking media companies. And that terrifies me.
- matroxmemories 24d agoThere is a certain style of trolling that isn’t as obvious to older people.
- bluGill 24d agoWhen you get older you've seen a lot of people who do things like that and are serious about it. Of course we haven't seen the podcast angle exactly but plenty of other things and it's common enough to make you cynical and so then you would fall for such jokes. assuming it is really joke which isn't clear
- throwatdem12311 24d agoI mean it was so ridiculous that I do think it was trolling. But more like…what if this is actually true.
- balfirevic 24d agoWell, what if it is? Hanging out with a whimsical premise? Oh the horror!
- Ledgermellow 24d ago[dead]
- arjie 24d agoThe mechanism is somewhat dubious imho - why would dirt selectively have beneficial bacteria that other environments don’t? I could come up with some just-so stories about how more “virulent” (haha) bacteria are the only ones to conquer our more sterile world but it’s just a plausible tale. I do subscribe to it myself but not out of evidence. It’s just vibes. Built my daughter a little dirt box with grass and edible herbs so when she would muck around at five to six months she could do it in there on the balcony of our San Francisco apartment and she enjoyed destroying the plants so at the worst she got some fun out of it.
- iterateoften 24d agoIt’s not dirt, it’s soil. Soil is a living ecosystem.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- arjie 24d agoSo is my gut but if I smeared my insides on my body I would likely fall ill. Even pathogens form a living ecosystem. Or, to put it a different way, > Cars have windows and can go. Houses have windows and can’t go. So it’s not the windows that make the car go
- DangitBobby 24d agoThe Simpsons explained this one a while back, funnily enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8
- goda90 24d agoI have gotten weird rashes on my hands after working in the garden, so maybe it's not all good all the time.
- broose_goose 24d agoMy partner is an estate gardener; early on in our relationship she came home with a green thumb. Apparently, the adage is about getting fungus under your nail beds and not keeping plants alive
- cortesoft 24d agoYeah, as someone who fairly recently discovered that the reason I always feel so uncomfortable out in nature is because I am severely allergic to almost all grasses and most trees, I think we need to put some caveats on these statements. I grew up playing outside in the dirt a lot, but as I got older I liked it less and less because I always felt so itchy when i would go outside, and my nose would get stuffy and my eyes would water. I am doing weekly shots trying to make it better, but I always get frustrated whenever everyone acts like I should just go out and 'touch grass'
- mytailorisrich 24d agoMy experience with gardening is that you also get bitten and stung all the time by a range of bugs and plants so you get resistance training, too ;) British false widow spiders have nothing on me at this point...
- jackschultz 24d agoCurious what people's thoughts here are on grounding as another benefit. Article talks about benefits of bacteria on the skin, but I'd say the other and maybe bigger benefit is discharge of electrical energy in our bodies to the ground. Which, can sounds weird depending. Some papers on the subject[0] talking about similar results as this article, almost implying that it's not the microbes, but grounding making the difference. I also got a $30 "grounding mat" that you plug into the ground part of electrical socket, and I dunno, it feels amazing to have skin touching it. I put it in bed and literally slept the best I have in years in the last two night, by far. Comments online generally are snake oil, but many others are first person accounts saying that for whatever reason, the grounding mat worked for them. (I have theories that the people who it does nothing for are those who already have an outlet. Like a dog where you're in nature and on walks, and also a dog can do the discharge for you). Other comments online are stories of how when the mat is plugged to ground, their cats love sitting on it, but if unplugged, the mats are ignored. That seems like some study that would be interesting at animal shelter, seeing if animals can tell and prefer. But anyway, wondering what others opinions on this topic are. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/
- mdrzn 24d ago[flagged]
- LiamPowell 24d agoNote that all of the authors of this paper work for a company that sells this snake oil. This entire idea of charging or discharging your body for some physiological effect is fundamentally flawed. It is indeed true that touching the ground will change your electrical potential to that of the ground, however that's as far as it goes, the rest is just nonsensical. Let's start with the very first part of that, specifically changing your electrical potential to match the ground. The problem with this is that the ground is 0V because we define it as 0V, not because of any sort of fundamental property. Between two points on the Earth you can see hundreds of kilovolts. So the obvious question is why should the electrical potential of a particular piece of soil where your grounding rod is installed be physiologically preferable to whatever potential your body happened to be at before? Now lets go on to the next part of what these scam artists usually claim. That is that the Earth's electrons enter your body and do good things of some description. When you touch the ground some small charge does enter or leave your body, however that stops nearly instantly when the potentials equalise[1]. How is the Earth meant to to keep putting electrons into your body if there's no voltage? That's just simply not how electricity works. As an aside, note that I said enter or leave. A positive static charge and a negative static charge can both easily build up in your body. Therefore any claims that specify that electrons enter your body (or leave you body) is immediately nonsensical because it could go either way. I'll leave it to someone else to explain all the nonsensical biological claims that follow on from the already fundamentally wrong electrical side since that's not my area. I will however note that none of these sponsored papers actually show and measurable biological effect, they all just hand-wave about redox reactions. [1]: Yes, you're coupled to mains wiring and other changing fields that are around, however that's getting too far into the weeds for a short comment. If the claim made by the snake oil salesmen was that a current going through your body is good then they'd also suggest wrapping yourself in an electrical cord to maximise the effect, or just taping batteries to your skin.
- CrzyLngPwd 24d agoNot just your hands. Walking barefoot, over all manner of surfaces, feels good, increases your connection to your surroundings, and slows you down. I've done it lots, both in the countryside and in the city. You have to watch out for spiky plants and fox shit in the country, and in the city you soon learn which surface textures require more care :-) "Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it's as if the whole world has been covered." - Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist monk
- Markoff 24d agoI think I can live without my connection to asphalt, concrete, dirt, broken glass and literal shit while living in the city, which has nothing to do with nature.
- spike021 24d agoYeah, where I live there's constantly shattered glass, other people's dog's poo they don't pick up, etc. Last week I was walking my dog and he stepped on glass or something that gashed open part of his paw pad.
- jacobrast 24d agoDid you know that walking barefoot in the Southern US was how most people contracted hookworm? At is height an estimated 40% of the population in certain regions had the parasite which was know to cause a "mental haze". Some historians attribute the disease (again, contracted by walking barefoot outdoors) to have caused the stereotype of the "lazy slow southerner" [1]. Do you feel walking barefoot is worth the risk of catching this and other potentially hazardous diseases? [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
- criddell 24d agoBut also, hookworm infections are known to suppress allergies and asthma, help inflammatory bowl disease, and improve insulin resistance in people with type 2 diabetes.
- HNSheldonImpost 24d ago[flagged]
- mitchbob 24d agohttps://archive.ph/MWUcR https://archive.ph/MWUcR
- jan_m_savage 24d agoThis is just how anti-fragility works. Getting your hands 'dirty' is what's known as introducing turbulence and chaos in order to achieve true stability/robustness. Conversely, trying to keep your hands too clean might create more severe bacteria problems--which is known as: system blow-up. A good layperson-friendly example of such blow-ups (that are inevitable, due to avoidance of small 'failures') was masterfully depicted in Matthew Lewis's 'The Monk'-- in which he shows how a pious, religious abbot whose piety was not earned (but merely guarded), descends into the worst possible outcomes because his piety and morality was not antifragile (and hence blew up). A fascinating read.
- aldanor 24d agoNot going to lie, I was a bit confused at first (before visiting the link), why would BBC publish an anti-AI post for software developers.
- penguin_booze 24d agoNot about soil specifically, but even something as trivial as a prick can kill you -- because, bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Alexander_(police_officer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Alexander_(police_offic....
- jackmalpo 24d agolindy
- stronglikedan 24d agoI finally feel justified! Not only do I get my hands dirty, but I also don't use soap unless water alone can't get them clean. Most of the time, our great universal solvent does a fine job without stripping my good bacteria.
- QuercusMax 24d agoI have read but not verified that washing with water is about as effective as with soap at removing bacteria from hands. Having soap on your hands forces you to get all the soap off, which requires touching more skin surface.
- peterashford 24d agoI'm sure the behavioural point is correct, but surfactants effect oils in a way that water does not. Water will not be as effective
- red369 24d agoI also remember reading this - that unless there is oil and grease which requires soap to remove, then water alone is effective. At the time it seemed to me it was somewhere fairly reputable. From memory, the idea was that soap reduced the friction, and actually might lessen the effectiveness. I think it wasn't comparing best-practice handwashing with and without soap, but focused instead on the kind of handwashing that people actually do. Hard to find anything on it now, and I understand soap was particularly effective against SARS-CoV-2 compared to water alone (can I just call it the COVID-19 virus?) so it looks like the idea is mostly gone now.
- PoopDaddy 24d ago[dead]
- jamiek88 24d agoI use a bidet because I’m not disgusting. Wiping shit with paper does not clean your stinky arse cracks. Fucking gross people walk around with dried shit smeared on their body all day. There are zero cogent arguments for using toilet paper over a bidet.
- mococa 24d agoSome cultures clean without paper, with their hands
- skyberrys 24d agoCan I send off my garden soil samples to learn what sorts of bacteria and microbial life it is hosting? I do go outside and touch grass and dirt daily, it does make me feel good, but I always thought it was the sunlight and the beauty not the bacteria.