Slanted Science

Great news for men! You always thought it was true, but now scientists have confirmed it: being a bit dirty, and not obsessing over the odd discarded pizza slice laying around for a few days, is good for your immune system.

Read on as we tell you about the research, and provide you with a scientifically approved message to cut out and hand to your wife or girlfriend next time she asks you to wash the dishes.

The modern age has brought mankind many wonderful things: chemotherapy, cellphones and tiny little remote-control helicopters (words cannot adequately express our love of those things).

But some scientific advances have come with a cost. Take our quest for ever-increasing cleanliness: during the last hundred years, we have become obsessed with ridding our children’s lives of bacteria and other bugs. That’s been great for getting rid of the childhood diseases which claimed so many of our grandparents’ generation, but its over-zealous application has – in the opinion of many scientists – also meant that our kids are more prone to such chronic conditions as asthma.

The theory is that exposing the developing immune system to a wide variety of relatively harmless microbes actually prepares and strengthens it for its main job: a lifetime keeping the body clear of dangerous pathogens. Well now we have some proof. Hooray for dirty kids!

The work – headed by Denise Kelly at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland – has just been published in the journal BMC Biology (that’s an open access journal, so you can read the whole paper for free if you’d like). Here’s what she and her team did.

A set of piglets, sharing the same father, were divided into three groups. The piglets were then raised in either a natural outdoor environment, a cleaner indoor environment, or an isolated, laboratory-style environment. The last group were also given a daily dose of antibiotics to further decrease their bacterial exposure. After several weeks spent in these conditions, the scientists sampled the pigs’ intestines and looked at how gene expression patterns varied between the groups. They also checked out what kinds of bacteria were colonizing the animals’ guts.

The results showed that the intestines of naturally-raised porkers (those who could roll around in mud baths, just as nature intended) contained huge numbers of bacteria from the phylum Firmicutes; in particular, those known as Lactobacillus, which are known as singularly healthy gut bacteria. The animals housed either indoors, or in lab conditions, not only had fewer of these good guys, but their intestines actually had higher numbers of pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria.

Furthermore, the team found that the dirty pigs’ immune systems were expressing more useful genes, and fewer harmful genes, than the indoor pigs’. And, surprisingly, the indoor pigs bodies were expressing higher levels of genes which code for cholesterol-synthesizing proteins.

Nature comments on the work, including a quote from Dr Kelly:

“There has been a lot of hearsay around gut microbiota and how it influences immune function and susceptibility to diseases and allergies,” [Kelly] says. The latest work establishes a strong causal link.

So, great news for filthy degenerates everywhere. We’re looking at you, gentlemen.

As promised, here is something for you to print out and hand to the lady in your life the next time she complains about the dirty plates in the kitchen, on the sofa, or under the bed:

Dear wife/girlfriend/mother (delete as appropriate): SlantedScience.com hereby informs you that xxxx (insert your name here) is excused from cleaning duties in the name of good health. Furthermore, you are to immediately cease nagging him about the mold growing in those coffee cups. He is merely providing a boost to your immune system.

You’re welcome!

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: improved living conditions for farmed animals and men.

In the meantime, here’s a t-shirt at Amazon you might like to wear around the house.

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