Green Tip: Get Dirty for Your Health

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Lisa Kaas Boyle, an environmental attorney, co-founder of Plastic Pollution Coalition and member of the Resilient Palisades Zero Waste team.

We are inundated with bad news about the chemicals in our environment that can harm our health. Here is some good news about the environment: Soil, and the plants growing in it, share their healthy bacteria with us.

Research shows that the natural environmental microbiome in soil and plants can have a big impact on our health. The benefits come from simply spending more time interacting with nature. Gardening, for example, provides many benefits beyond the great produce or flowers grown.

A Finnish research project showed that letting kindergarten-aged children play in a yard that contained “dirt” from the forest floor resulted in a significant positive impact on their gut. The children who played in the experimental yard showed a large increase in the diversity of microbiota on their skin and in their gut associated with health benefits. There was also a significant increase in the children’s immunity markers showing enhanced immunoregulatory pathways indicative of a reduced risk of immune-mediated diseases.

This is not a surprise: The microbiomes of plants and soil share very similar bacteria communities to our own, composed of five major bacterial phyla that are also found in the human gut and skin. We are a part of nature and intimately connected to our surroundings.

Experiments show that bringing nature into our homes may likewise have a positive impact. One study placed a spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) in a cleaned room for six months. After this time the microbial diversity of the surrounding floor and walls had a significant increase in beneficial plant bacteria (abundance and diversity).

To keep a healthy diverse gut microbiome it is beneficial to keep regular exposure to our environmental microbiota. Thirty-five days after the Finnish study of persons handling soil, changes to their microbiota were no longer observed. This suggests that when we stop interacting with nature-derived microbiota, our own not-so-healthy microbiota can reestablish itself.