If you are a parent who lets their children play in the mud and eat food that has fallen on the floor, then new research shows you could be helping protect them against problems later in life like heart disease.
“Our research suggests that ultra-clean, ultra-hygienic environments early in life may contribute to higher levels of inflammation as an adult, which in turn increases risks for a wide range of diseases,” including cardiovascular disease, Thomas McDade, lead author of the study, said.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois looked at data from a study in the Philippines, which followed participants from birth to 22 years of age. Researchers visited the children every two months for the first two years of their lives and then spaced out the visits to every four or five years until the kids reached their 20s.
Among items that the researchers assessed were the hygiene of the children’s household environment — “whether domestic animals such as pigs and dogs roamed freely” — and their families’ socioeconomic resources.
Blood tests taken when the study participants reached adulthood showed that although Filipinos suffer far more infectious diseases as infants and toddlers than their American counterparts, their level of C-reactive protein (CRP) when they reached adulthood was at least 80 percent lower than in Americans.
Filipinos in their early 20s had average CRP concentrations of 0.2 milligrams per liter, while Americans in the same age group had blood concentrations of the protein of 1-1.5 milligrams per liter.
“CRP concentrations are incredibly low in Filipinos compared to people in the United States and that was counter to what a lot of people would have anticipated because we know that Filipinos have higher exposure to infectious diseases,” McDade said.
McDade said the message to take home from the study is the importance of being exposed early in life to common microbes and bacteria.
“These bacteria and microbes may never result in outright clinical disease but they do play an important role in promoting the development of regulatory networks,” said McDade, who is an associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern and a fellow at the university’s institute for policy research.
