Cult of Clean

We've become a nation of grime fighters, and there's growing evidence that we're sacrificing our safety and our sanity to sanitization.

By Carlin Flora, published on September 01, 2008 - last reviewed on November 21, 2008

On the Tyra Banks Show, a young mother publicly confided she was terrified that her apartment could be harming her toddler son—because it wasn't perfectly clean. Banks sent a microbiologist to the home to test for germs. Sure enough, the place was filled with them! "Are you surprised the bathtub was the dirtiest part of the house?" Banks asked. "Yes," the woman answered, her voice quavering and her eyes welling with tears, "I clean it with bleach."

Banks leaned in: "But do you clean it after every shower? Do you really scrub it?"

"Well," the woman confessed, "I have a 2-year-old. I don't always have time."

Such chagrin is no surprise to writer Katherine Ashenburg, who heard cleanliness confessions throughout a tour promoting her book The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. "I don't shower every day," people sheepishly whispered to her. That experience only reinforced her belief that "we are obsessed with cleanliness" to "a point of absurdity. Today there seems to be no resting place, no point at which we can feel comfortable in our own skins for more than a few hours after our last shower. Clean keeps receding into the distance."

Interest in home and body hygiene has waxed and waned through the ages, from early Egyptians who frolicked in pools for hours to Enlightenment Europeans who never bathed a day in their lives, believing that water spread diseases such as the Plague. But ever since deodorant and mouthwash entered the American marketplace in the twentieth century, standards of cleanliness have steadily ratcheted up.

Now, nearly a decade into the twenty-first century, we are convulsed by full-on germophobia and personal hygiene mania. Office supply stores sell germ-resistant highlighters and scissors. Ten years ago hand-sanitizing gels could be found only in hospitals. Now they're flying off the shelves of every grocery and drug store. In 2005, more than $67.3 million in sanitizers were sold, a 54 percent increase over 2004.

Why the massive panic over invisible threats? On the surface, it seems an earnest effort to promote health. But a closer look suggests that we feel a deep distrust of our bodies and profound pessimism about human nature: The backyard is a hotbed of creepy crawlies, my body is brimming with toxins, and the germs in my kitchen are just waiting to rise up and infect me!

We scour and scrub in an attempt to alleviate our anxieties and exercise control over an environment we perceive as hostile—a futile act that gives a whole new meaning to germ warfare. Our battles against what is by far the largest population of living things on earth—the weight of all microbes is 25 times that of all multicelled animal life combined—also misunderstands the role of dirt and the place of germs on the planet. Without bugs we wouldn't be drawing breath.

Because we seem never to feel clean enough, all our scrubbing and scouring only stokes the anxiety it is meant to allay. But it may be sabotaging our physical health as well. Just as overprotecting children can keep them from developing coping skills, sanitizing ourselves may be undermining the immune system, which requires germs to keep it viable. What's more, overuse and misuse of cleaning products directly expose us to toxic chemicals. And, quite possibly, they even encourage what germophobes fear most—the rise of resistant "superbugs."

It's Their World

"They're lying in wait for you at the ATM machine and on your computer keyboard at work. Secretly, they attach themselves to your hands when you push a shopping cart at the store. The little pests will even attach themselves to your children's hands when they romp on playground equipment." So warns materials sent to the press by a maker of hand-sanitizing gels.

Titled "99 Places Where You Need to Watch Out for Germs," it is 100 percent intimidating. Who could possibly keep an eye on all 99? More surreptitiously the material perpetuates a fundamental misconception about germs. The idea of watching for and banishing creatures that are literally everywhere is patently preposterous.

The adult human body contains an estimated 100 trillion cells, points out microbiologist Lynn Bry, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. But only 10 percent of those cells actually belong to us! The rest are—are you ready for this?—germs. Most are bacteria that live in the digestive tract and help you break down food and secure nutrients as they protect you from the minority of disease-causing bug groups.

"If you were germ-free this moment," says Bry, "you'd be dead within two weeks." Microbes living in the gut, for example, make vitamin K, essential to the proper clotting of blood. "We have an irrational fear of germs and dirt," she contends. "And in the grand scheme of things, the very oxygen we breathe is a byproduct of blue-green algae"—scum—"that evolved millions of years ago."

Our internal flora may even be able to cure some of our most perplexing diseases. A molecule naturally produced in the gut completely eliminates the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease in animals, researchers reported in Nature. Human trials of the substance are in the works.

"I fully advocate appropriate hygiene and cleanliness," says Bry. "Don't suck on your fingers after you cut open a chicken. But you don't need to scrub yourself until you're sore."

On her press tour, Ashenburg suggested to audiences that we really don't need to wash above the wrists very often. She was scolded by her listeners. But if you're looking for a way to prevent illness, nothing beats regular hand washing with hot water and plain old soap. So says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation's—and perhaps the world's—highest authority on infectious diseases.