This should come as no big surprise...
Day guards in Finland built "forest roads" and changed children's immune systems. Within 30 days of playing in forest soil and leaf litter, Finnish pre-schoolers had increased the number of T-cells and much more varied gut bacteria. In a fascinating experiment, Finnish researchers had recreated the environment of a forest floor on the playgrounds in 4 urban nurseries. They covered the playgrounds with forest soil, moss, meadow grass, heather, blueberries and crowberries and installed planting boxes for annual garden crops. Childcare workers instructed the pre-school age children to play in the greenery and the soil for an hour and a half each day for a month. Their gut and skin microbes were analyzed before and after the experiment and compared to children from normal urban nurseries with regular sterile playgrounds. After just 28 days the diversity of their bacteria increased dramatically, as did their T-cell numbers and other important immune markers in the blood. The findings support the hypothesis of biodiversity and the concept that low biological diversity in the modern living environment can lead to an uneducated immune system and thus increase the incidence of immune-borne diseases.
Back tomorrow with 1 or 2 posts and then I am taking a break till mid-week when I will post what I found on breast health.
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