Our Cleaning Obsession is Depressing Us?
Keeping your environment hygienic is important. Cleaning can be relaxing and rewarding. Where cleanliness is next to godliness it can also mean despair, but not for the reasons you might think. In a seemingly backward way, scientists are deducing depression caused by too much cleaning.
I’ve always been on the fence about if overly sterile environments rob our bodies’ ability to strengthen itself against germs. It seems that they can’t be sterile enough. By that logic, should we run through pig manure or let a sick friend sneeze on us? Stop cleaning all together? Harmful, toxic cleaning products and overuse of antibiotic products I can understand. But the scientists below believe that we need our immune systems boosted by some bacteria lest our bodies overreact. This overreaction might keep your brain from producing chemicals like serotonin and lead to depression. I’m still more inclined to think an overreaction, or allergy, could be due to chemicals and that it might be those factors that disrupt hormones. What do you think?
~Health Freedoms
Our Obsession with Cleaning Is Depressing Us
Our obsession with cleaning could be linked to rising rates of depression, scientists claim.
They believe that eliminating bacteria and viruses has actually made our immune systems weaker, and this in turn has affected the functioning of our brains.
Scientists have long blamed our overly sterile environments for increases in asthma and allergies. They say some bacteria are necessary for bolstering our immune systems, and without them our bodies over-react to dust and pollen, resulting in an allergy.
But now researchers believe that this over-reaction may also impair the brain’s ability to produce certain chemicals that make us happy – such as serotonin – and this leads to depression.
They point out that rates of depression are far higher in the Western world compared to poorer nations, because people’s immune systems are less trained to cope with bacteria.
Around one in ten Britons suffers from depression compared to just one in a hundred in Nigeria, for example.
Researchers in Atlanta, Georgia, have studied how this over-reaction, or inflammation, affects the brain by recruiting a group of 27 patients taking drugs to treat hepatitis C – which causes similar reactions.
They believe certain reactions may affect the brain’s ability to produce certain chemicals including serotonin, known as the ‘happy hormone’.
Dr Andrew Miller, one of the scientists, said: ‘We believe the immune system is causing depression.
‘As people develop and grow up, their immune system develops. If they are exposed to more bacteria and parasites, they are able to better control the inflammation.
‘Nowadays people’s environment is much cleaner and hygienic so our immune system never really learns how to deal with infectious agents. We are overactive because our immune system has not been trained.’
The researchers, whose study was published in the journal Molecular Pyschiatry, are now testing whether anti-inflammatory drugs could be used to treat depression.
By SOPHIE BORLAND
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1378337/Obsession-cleaning-making-depressed.html
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