MILT THOMAS

I am not into idolatry, but there are a few people I do look up to. Currently, my favorite is Anthony Bourdain – author, chef, traveler – and his new show on CNN, Parts Unknown. I’ve read his books and enjoy his foul-mouthed, alcohol imbibed narratives. I even have a Bourdain app on my iPhone, so when I travel I can frequent places he has visited. I also enjoy writing, traveling and eating local foods wherever I go, just like him.  When in another country, I never eat at a McDonald’s, KFC or any restaurant I can visit right here in Vero Beach.

I’ve learned that it takes an iron stomach and everything south of that to eat certain things when traveling out of the country, at least for most people. My prescription for avoiding those problems has always been a yogurt regimen, one cup per day, for the ten days or so before leaving home. At least I thought that was the reason I rarely have any kind of stomach or lower tract distress.

Now I have a new theory. The reason I can eat or drink anything under the sun without my body objecting is that I don’t sanitize myself. Many travelers, primarily Americans, are preoccupied with germ prevention. They use hand sanitizers all through the day, drink only bottled water, and avoid fresh vegetables.  They even avoid any food that doesn’t look like something they would eat at home. Yet, they still seem to get Montezuma’s Revenge, or the equivalent outside of Mexico. What they don’t realize is that all this cleanliness is the reason they get sick, at least that is my theory.

What we fail to realize is that the first humans ate road kill and didn’t have hand sanitizers. Yes, they didn’t live long either, but over the eons, our human immune system figured out how to deal with bad road kill and just about everything else we put in our mouths. Of course, not all humans developed the same immunities. When Europeans first came to the New World, they inadvertently killed off nearly all the Native American population with diseases that had all but disappeared back home.

Here we are today, the product of all who lived (and died) before us, finely tuned biological machines capable of withstanding just about any disease nature could throw at us. So, what do we do? Systematically kill off all germs and bacteria that help us maintain our immune systems, and we do it in the name of cleanliness. It should come as no surprise that so many new allergies have popped up in the last 20 years, or at least new in that our bodies handled them fine until we compromised our immune systems.

The scientific community has come up with something called the “Hygiene Hypothesis.”  Basically, it means the human immune system develops two types of biological defenses. When one defense system is compromised in its ability to fight bacteria and viruses, usually from an overly sanitary lifestyle, the other system overreacts to normally harmless substances. Hello allergies.

There is even evidence that parents interfere with development of a newborn’s natural immune system by sanitizing them against every germ in the universe during their critical first three months. It may even be linked to autism, some say.

In some scientific circles, fear of items like nuts and milk, while having some hereditary and environmental basis, is exaggerated to the point of mass hysteria.  Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School estimated that 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, 6.9 million allergic to seafood. Yet only about 150 people die each year from all food allergies combined, ten from nuts. While every loss of life is tragic, could this be one of those cases where the “cure” causes more problems than the disease?

Like I said, this is my opinion about the insane-tizing of America. There certainly needs to be more study on the subject. Like for instance, what is the incidence of peanut allergies among tribes in the Amazon basin? I would bet that extremely clean aborigines have more peanut allergies than the ones who, shall we say, let nature take its course.