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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Are Your Kids Too Clean? (Pedcast)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Are Your Kids Too Clean? (Pedcast)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2017-04-30 20:47:16
Description: Voice intro: Welcome to another edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Smolen, also known as Doc Smo. From the bassinet to the board room, if the topic involves children, we talk about it here. I frequently get asked by the parents of my patients, "Why do so many children have food allergy, asthma, and eczema today? Most of these parents don't remember their friends having nearly the incidence of allergy that today's children do and that was just a few decades ago. What is going on, they ask? Well, my answer is that we really don't know, but we are beginning to get closer to an answer. For years, immunologists and allergists have been talking about something called the Hygiene Hypothesis to explain all of this allergy. Recent observations have made this less of a theory and more of an explanation. Experts are beginning to have some understanding. So in today's pedcast, I thought we would talk about some of this evidence and introduce you to the current thinking about allergies and children. The hope is if we can understand what is driving the allergy epidemic, we can help protect future kids from suffering from with terrible allergies. Music Intro: Life for Children has Changed Drastically: I grew up in a typical middle class family where there was a premium given to being clean. My mother was always telling me to go take a bath, wash behind your ears, and use soap!  She believed that you couldn't be too clean. Dirt and germs were the great enemy to her generation. Keep the children squeaky clean, their food, their water, and you are bound to have no disease... right?  Since germs were known to cause much of the disease in children, the less germs there were around, the less disease they will have- or so goes the thinking.  It's logical and this approach worked for about a 1/2 century. But as infectious diseases started to disappear, here comes another type of disease...allergic disease. Today's children are now faced with a tsunami of allergic disease. What has changed in just a few generations?  The answer is a lot! When I was a kid, we literally lived outdoors. We had almost no access to television, computers, video games, or other "indoor" kid activities. No, we lived outdoors unless the weather was extreme. And a large part of that outdoor experience was dirt. My childhood was filled with tire swings, mud pies, wading in creeks, rolling in the grass, and pushing toy soldiers and model cars around in the dirt. I was filthy at the end of everyday. Rarely did I take an antibiotic and if I did it was a very low potency medication, I ate very little processed food with preservatives, I ate food off dishes that were washed by hand at low temperatures, my food was washed but not irradiated, and of course, I was outdoors most of my childhood playing in the dirt. What is the link between dirt and health? Researchers are finding that modern life is having an impact on the bacteria in your child's intestines, on their skin, and in their noses. This is very important since it turns out that having  a healthy variety of good bacteria is essential to your child's immune system functioning well. Imagine that, your child's poop is actually vital to their good health! How ironic. Modern life seems to be changing today's children's gut and skin bacteria (the so called microbiome) and this seems to be driving the allergy epidemic. Many physicians think that the change in your child's bacteria, has changed the way their immune systems react to the world creating nonsense reactions like peanut allergy. That's the essence of the hygiene hypothesis in a nutshell.  But why are we seeing this in children and not so much in adults you might be wondering? Aren't the microbiomes of adults changing too? Researchers speculate that infancy and childhood are when a human's immune system is fine tuned, not during adult life and that's the reason why.  Additionally, children have much stronger immune reactions than d...
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