Unobvious hygiene

Fruits and vegetables should be washed before eating. And better - hot water. Absolutely ideally - with soda or potassium permanganate. These rules are firmly hammered into the children’s heads by mothers and grandmothers, and then the children obediently wash apples and oranges all their lives, well, maybe not with potassium permanganate and not always with hot water, and if they don’t wash them, then at least wipe them with a handkerchief or on their pants .

Rinsing fruits and roots is far from the only action that people perform without thinking, because “it’s the right thing to do.” Brushing your teeth every day in the morning, washing your hands before eating, wiping the table with a cloth - all these hygiene rituals are performed automatically many times a day. And if someone you know ignores any of the obligatory ceremonies, then he is labeled as a slob and an unscrupulous person who regularly puts his health at risk.

Most people do not doubt the wisdom of brushing teeth or washing fruit - after all, this wisdom has been passed down from generation to generation and did not allow our ancestors to die from numerous harmful bacteria, insects, worms and other enemies of the human race. All this is true, but usually when discussing the need to wash hands or vegetables, two important points are overlooked: firstly, most of the hygienic heritage was inherited from our great-grandparents unchanged, although since then the situation with the microbial load has changed significantly, and secondly, few adherents of cleanliness perform all procedures as expected, for example, adding soda to the water for washing fruits.

Let's look at the above considerations individually. When people first realized that food should be washed before eating, concepts like bacteria and salmonella did not yet exist. Our distant ancestors simply removed visible dirt, which, as they already knew, could disrupt digestion for a long time, or even contribute to the speedy departure of the gourmet to the next world. It was experimentally found that soap solutions clean dirt better than plain water, and in especially critical cases (for example, when feeding children), mothers began to use them to wash vegetables.

Since there were no effective antibacterial agents in those early years, much more microbes lived in close proximity to people than now. Accordingly, carefully peeling off a tomato before eating it was of a much more meaningful nature: the chances that microbes that are not at all useful to people thrive on the gifts of nature were more than real.

The feeling of a bacterial threat emanating from everywhere has practically not weakened since pre-Pasteur times, but at the same time, paradoxically, it began to coexist with faith in science, the victory of the human mind over nature and general sterility. Therefore, the approach to hygiene procedures among residents of modern megacities has become absolutely frivolous: most of us wash apples for a maximum of three seconds and in cold water. And substances such as soda and potassium permanganate are completely out of use.

So, people zealously adhere to hygienic traditions, but they have stopped thinking about why these traditions were invented, and they carry them out so formally that there is no point in spending time on such events at all. Of course, in all cases it is better to be on the safe side and wash the apple or wipe the table than to suffer from intestinal disorders later. But the benefits of these actions would be much greater if people understood what result they would lead to. Because in some cases you can safely eat berries from the bush, but in others it is better not to eat even thoroughly rinsed fruits. Deciding what to do in a particular case is not difficult - if you even think about the need to make such a decision.

One question remains unclear: where should people learn to see the hidden danger or, on the contrary, understand that the danger is minimal (and here, finally, I will get to the issue of popularizing science). The first hygiene skills are instilled in children by parents and school teachers, and their further improvement remains the responsibility of everyone. Perhaps those who are engaged in education by profession should pay a little more attention to these seemingly obvious things, which in fact are not so obvious at all.

Iryna Yakutenko