Why getting your hands dirty is good for you

"I take my preworkout, do my exercise, then I sit for 12 minutes at 90 degrees in sauna, before three minutes in the cold plunge-pool at 8 degrees, before going to sauna again for 19 minutes and I finish with a seven minute warm shower".

Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna, and timing things minute by minute sounded exhausting.

I assume going to sauna takes an hour, it might be I leave it on for a couple of hours, but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery and I like it like that. Same story with being outdoors in a cabin/cottage. I might dig up some plants, or move the hammock around, but whether I get (literally) dirty is just down to whatever random things I've done that day!

“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”.

If we could only get them to collaborate, we could get some real knowledge out of it!

Not quite but close enough :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWzWwx8T3nE

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.

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.

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-so...

When I say "come as a surprise" I mean they would be unable to articulate the exact mechanisms behind the health benefits before being told what they are or that they exist. Liking a thing and presuming it must have health benefits aren't the same.

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).

If it's just you and one species of bacteria, you're closer to a circumstance that would call for the activation of such behavior than if diversity is high.

So it's not that the bacteria are intrinsically good or bad, but that the different circumstances call for calm or aggressive behavior, and all your friends going missing cues aggressiveness in species who have evolved by filling that niche in the past.

For one it's just competition. If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.

Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.

As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3980089/

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6827147/

Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.

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.

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

> 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