I look forward to seeing a lifehacking hyper-optimizer streamline this to a polished daily workflow...
"I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning.
Every weekend, I inoculate at a 1:5:5 ratio with biologically active stream dirt (after petri-dishing to check for activity), and a mix of poor-quality soil cover, and some compost; I finish by adding a 10-10-10 balanced fertilizer.
Recently, I've been seeing if there are any additional benefits to smearing all over my arms; I'm conducting a 3 month/3 month comparison experiment, with a washout period in-between...
I'm sure the comments will be full of detractors scoffing at this claiming that all one needs is not to wash their hands. Or just go outside to handle that mud. With luck you might come across the king of Briton.
You forgot the app! You can connect our app to your smart dirt bucket so you can track that the correct composition of bacteria reaches your hands at all time! Collect points by completing challenges and watch a few ads for premium guides!
I made the mistake of looking at /r/sauna on Reddit once or twice recently, and there was a lot of people doing very similar things.
"I take my preworkout, do my exercise, then I sit for 12 minutes at 90 degrees in sauna, before three minutes in the cold plunge-pool at 8 degrees, before going to sauna again for 19 minutes and I finish with a seven minute warm shower".
Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna, and timing things minute by minute sounded exhausting.
I assume going to sauna takes an hour, it might be I leave it on for a couple of hours, but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery and I like it like that. Same story with being outdoors in a cabin/cottage. I might dig up some plants, or move the hammock around, but whether I get (literally) dirty is just down to whatever random things I've done that day!
I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Just this summer I was at a cottage by Vänern (the largest lake in Sweden), the sauna was built right at the lake with a pier setup for jumping into it, we had a party going late into the night where you constantly moved from the sauna into the lake, out of the lake, have chats, a beer, into the sauna again, rinse and repeat for some 8-10 hours. I have no idea exactly how long I was in the sauna but it was definitely more than a couple of hours in the whole affair :)
>I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Yes, I definitely do agree with that. I too love what you're describing - we have some of that in Poland too :)
However, I was not sure if we're talking about it - or some American version I know only from various memes - where people are coming in with phones and in shoes.
> I assume going to sauna takes an hour, [...] but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery...
I understand that as the general act of getting up, starting the sauna, going for your clothes change, resting a couple times, going to the kitchen for water, shower, switch off, kitchen again, whatever... you've filled an hour of your time.
I said "was" because 2010 was, in fact, the last edition of the event:
> On 7 August 2010, two competitors were removed from the sauna and brought to the hospital in critical condition after six minutes of 110 °C (230 °F) heat
Curious what people's thoughts here are on grounding as another benefit. Article talks about benefits of bacteria on the skin, but I'd say the other and maybe bigger benefit is discharge of electrical energy in our bodies to the ground. Which, can sounds weird depending. Some papers on the subject[0] talking about similar results as this article, almost implying that it's not the microbes, but grounding making the difference.
I also got a $30 "grounding mat" that you plug into the ground part of electrical socket, and I dunno, it feels amazing to have skin touching it. I put it in bed and literally slept the best I have in years in the last two night, by far. Comments online generally are snake oil, but many others are first person accounts saying that for whatever reason, the grounding mat worked for them. (I have theories that the people who it does nothing for are those who already have an outlet. Like a dog where you're in nature and on walks, and also a dog can do the discharge for you). Other comments online are stories of how when the mat is plugged to ground, their cats love sitting on it, but if unplugged, the mats are ignored. That seems like some study that would be interesting at animal shelter, seeing if animals can tell and prefer.
But anyway, wondering what others opinions on this topic are.
Note that all of the authors of this paper work for a company that sells this snake oil.
This entire idea of charging or discharging your body for some physiological effect is fundamentally flawed. It is indeed true that touching the ground will change your electrical potential to that of the ground, however that's as far as it goes, the rest is just nonsensical.
Let's start with the very first part of that, specifically changing your electrical potential to match the ground. The problem with this is that the ground is 0V because we define it as 0V, not because of any sort of fundamental property. Between two points on the Earth you can see hundreds of kilovolts. So the obvious question is why should the electrical potential of a particular piece of soil where your grounding rod is installed be physiologically preferable to whatever potential your body happened to be at before?
Now lets go on to the next part of what these scam artists usually claim. That is that the Earth's electrons enter your body and do good things of some description. When you touch the ground some small charge does enter or leave your body, however that stops nearly instantly when the potentials equalise[1]. How is the Earth meant to to keep putting electrons into your body if there's no voltage? That's just simply not how electricity works.
As an aside, note that I said enter or leave. A positive static charge and a negative static charge can both easily build up in your body. Therefore any claims that specify that electrons enter your body (or leave you body) is immediately nonsensical because it could go either way.
I'll leave it to someone else to explain all the nonsensical biological claims that follow on from the already fundamentally wrong electrical side since that's not my area. I will however note that none of these sponsored papers actually show and measurable biological effect, they all just hand-wave about redox reactions.
[1]: Yes, you're coupled to mains wiring and other changing fields that are around, however that's getting too far into the weeds for a short comment. If the claim made by the snake oil salesmen was that a current going through your body is good then they'd also suggest wrapping yourself in an electrical cord to maximise the effect, or just taping batteries to your skin.
Walking barefoot, over all manner of surfaces, feels good, increases your connection to your surroundings, and slows you down.
I've done it lots, both in the countryside and in the city. You have to watch out for spiky plants and fox shit in the country, and in the city you soon learn which surface textures require more care :-)
"Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it's as if the whole world has been covered." - Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist monk
I think I can live without my connection to asphalt, concrete, dirt, broken glass and literal shit while living in the city, which has nothing to do with nature.
Did you know that walking barefoot in the Southern US was how most people contracted hookworm? At is height an estimated 40% of the population in certain regions had the parasite which was know to cause a "mental haze". Some historians attribute the disease (again, contracted by walking barefoot outdoors) to have caused the stereotype of the "lazy slow southerner" [1].
Do you feel walking barefoot is worth the risk of catching this and other potentially hazardous diseases?
But also, hookworm infections are known to suppress allergies and asthma, help inflammatory bowl disease, and improve insulin resistance in people with type 2 diabetes.
> Those using the microbially-diverse soil saw an increase in the diversity of bacteria on their skin, and on the number of anti-inflammatory cytokines in their blood – while the other group didn't.
That GenZ and Gen Alpha have started doing this thing they call “private podcasting”. Where they invite a friend over and discuss topics like one of those podcasts where dudes just talk about stuff…but they don’t record it or post it anywhere.
I was stunned. Is this generation really so socially starved by the attention parasites that human beings are starting to reinvent “hanging out” or “just having a conversation”.
It’s so ridiculous I just refuse to believe this is how they actually think and this has to be some kind of rage bait. I pray that it’s rage bait because if it isn’t we failed our children badly.
All that to say that I get similar vibes from the “grtting your hands dirty is actually good for you” thing. It just screams that entire generations of people have been stunted by helicopter parenting that this just seems like novel information. It seems we’ve completely abdicated our duty as parents and dumped our responsibility to educate our children onto profit seeking media companies. And that terrifies me.
When you get older you've seen a lot of people who do things like that and are serious about it. Of course we haven't seen the podcast angle exactly but plenty of other things and it's common enough to make you cynical and so then you would fall for such jokes. assuming it is really joke which isn't clear
There's absolutely no reason to assume that getting your hands dirty would be "good for you". Playing outside and getting dirty is fun and is arguably great for enrichment and character building, but I think it would come as a surprise to just about anyone that it has health benefits.
When I say "come as a surprise" I mean they would be unable to articulate the exact mechanisms behind the health benefits before being told what they are or that they exist. Liking a thing and presuming it must have health benefits aren't the same.
after i switched to washing my hands with antibacterial soap (the orange kind they use in hospitals), i've gone from a bimonthly cold-analog disease to maybe being sick twice a year
The mechanism is somewhat dubious imho - why would dirt selectively have beneficial bacteria that other environments don’t? I could come up with some just-so stories about how more “virulent” (haha) bacteria are the only ones to conquer our more sterile world but it’s just a plausible tale.
I do subscribe to it myself but not out of evidence. It’s just vibes. Built my daughter a little dirt box with grass and edible herbs so when she would muck around at five to six months she could do it in there on the balcony of our San Francisco apartment and she enjoyed destroying the plants so at the worst she got some fun out of it.
Your insides are different from your outsides. Your skin has a different microbiome than your gut. Hyper cleanliness on your skin kills beneficial microbes that maintain an equilibrium when they're alive.
Ecosystems have niches for aggressive behavior against participants that reduce diversity. It's why you find higher concentrations of Lyme disease in new housing developments than you do in the deep woods: it's the activation of a defense mechanism (in the Lyme disease case it has to do with there being a higher proportion of competent hosts for the pathogen: mice, but in general evolution has myriad ways if implementing this pattern).
If it's just you and one species of bacteria, you're closer to a circumstance that would call for the activation of such behavior than if diversity is high.
So it's not that the bacteria are intrinsically good or bad, but that the different circumstances call for calm or aggressive behavior, and all your friends going missing cues aggressiveness in species who have evolved by filling that niche in the past.
For one it's just competition.
If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.
Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.
As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.
Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.
My partner is an estate gardener; early on in our relationship she came home with a green thumb. Apparently, the adage is about getting fungus under your nail beds and not keeping plants alive
My experience with gardening is that you also get bitten and stung all the time by a range of bugs and plants so you get resistance training, too ;) British false widow spiders have nothing on me at this point...
My point was more that articles like the one on the BBC (or the Guardian for that matter) just contradict themselves every year. I completely stopped reading those "pop science" takes that are only there for clicks.
(To its credit, the Guardian makes place for long form articles that go more in-depth on known knowns and known unknowns.)
Maybe there's a benefit to having diverse natural memetic microflora on your cognitive convolutions. Like it could innoculate you against aggressive viral ideological infection.
I look forward to seeing a lifehacking hyper-optimizer streamline this to a polished daily workflow...
"I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning.
Every weekend, I inoculate at a 1:5:5 ratio with biologically active stream dirt (after petri-dishing to check for activity), and a mix of poor-quality soil cover, and some compost; I finish by adding a 10-10-10 balanced fertilizer.
Recently, I've been seeing if there are any additional benefits to smearing all over my arms; I'm conducting a 3 month/3 month comparison experiment, with a washout period in-between...
Don't forget to buy my exclusive eBook!"
They'd be copying the greats! I have seen a distinct pattern of artists and photographers doing self portraits while rolling around in shit or mud.
There’s a startup opportunity: a body cream with concentrates of beneficial microorganisms.
“Pair it with our full spectrum sun lamp and you can have all the benefits of playing outside from the comfort of your standing desk”.
FDA: “You’ve got E. coli in here.”
“Yes.”
You folks are having fun with the idea, but, well, in 2026 there’s absolutely a viable market for this.
I thought sun exposure was bad. Or is it good again? Was it good all along?
Do I need to wear sunscreen in front of my desk too now? Will the body cream include it?
Too many questions. I'm going outside.
I have some beef with the sunscreen people, mostly because of 3 things:
- Skin cancer is by far the least deadly type of cancer and nearly always just requires some low-risk skin removal.
- Getting a light tan feels amazing. Your whole body feels warmer.
- Vitamin D.
and now i'm bummed out
"sign up now and get free peptides your macrocolony needs to immunemogg those bacteria!"
So if I sign up for like 6 months, could I get 25% off?
I'm sure the comments will be full of detractors scoffing at this claiming that all one needs is not to wash their hands. Or just go outside to handle that mud. With luck you might come across the king of Briton.
You forgot the app! You can connect our app to your smart dirt bucket so you can track that the correct composition of bacteria reaches your hands at all time! Collect points by completing challenges and watch a few ads for premium guides!
I made the mistake of looking at /r/sauna on Reddit once or twice recently, and there was a lot of people doing very similar things.
"I take my preworkout, do my exercise, then I sit for 12 minutes at 90 degrees in sauna, before three minutes in the cold plunge-pool at 8 degrees, before going to sauna again for 19 minutes and I finish with a seven minute warm shower".
Just the thought of looking at a watch in a sauna, and timing things minute by minute sounded exhausting.
I assume going to sauna takes an hour, it might be I leave it on for a couple of hours, but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery and I like it like that. Same story with being outdoors in a cabin/cottage. I might dig up some plants, or move the hammock around, but whether I get (literally) dirty is just down to whatever random things I've done that day!
Do you mean you literally sit in the sauna for hour?
I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Just this summer I was at a cottage by Vänern (the largest lake in Sweden), the sauna was built right at the lake with a pier setup for jumping into it, we had a party going late into the night where you constantly moved from the sauna into the lake, out of the lake, have chats, a beer, into the sauna again, rinse and repeat for some 8-10 hours. I have no idea exactly how long I was in the sauna but it was definitely more than a couple of hours in the whole affair :)
>I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Yes, I definitely do agree with that. I too love what you're describing - we have some of that in Poland too :)
However, I was not sure if we're talking about it - or some American version I know only from various memes - where people are coming in with phones and in shoes.
If you ever basta in winter, try bringing ice into the sauna. Smearing yourself with ice while in the heat is really nice :)
> I assume going to sauna takes an hour, [...] but beyond that the minutes inside/outside are a mystery...
I understand that as the general act of getting up, starting the sauna, going for your clothes change, resting a couple times, going to the kitchen for water, shower, switch off, kitchen again, whatever... you've filled an hour of your time.
That interpretation does make sense. Just heating the sauna can take even longer.
No, you would be cooked, but I had a hunch that obviously people already tried to see how long you could stay inside and yes there was a competition in Finland exactly for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Sauna_Championships#2010...
I said "was" because 2010 was, in fact, the last edition of the event:
> On 7 August 2010, two competitors were removed from the sauna and brought to the hospital in critical condition after six minutes of 110 °C (230 °F) heat
Your comment reminds me of
The Hustle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
I don't know about you guys but if I started timing my sauna visits, I would get MORE stressed out.
> "I have a bucket of mud, in which I stick my hands for 15 minutes every morning.
Not quite but close enough :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWzWwx8T3nE
Celebrities and influencers will be selling their own brand of mud, with their own special flavor!
Reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg?is=HpS4BWeDbVRsnBPI
There's something very sad about all these people spending so much energy on crazy intensive n of 1 experiments.
If we could only get them to collaborate, we could get some real knowledge out of it!
We have this already: "touch grass" for the normies and "grounding" (standing barefoot on the earth) for the more hacker inclined
Curious what people's thoughts here are on grounding as another benefit. Article talks about benefits of bacteria on the skin, but I'd say the other and maybe bigger benefit is discharge of electrical energy in our bodies to the ground. Which, can sounds weird depending. Some papers on the subject[0] talking about similar results as this article, almost implying that it's not the microbes, but grounding making the difference.
I also got a $30 "grounding mat" that you plug into the ground part of electrical socket, and I dunno, it feels amazing to have skin touching it. I put it in bed and literally slept the best I have in years in the last two night, by far. Comments online generally are snake oil, but many others are first person accounts saying that for whatever reason, the grounding mat worked for them. (I have theories that the people who it does nothing for are those who already have an outlet. Like a dog where you're in nature and on walks, and also a dog can do the discharge for you). Other comments online are stories of how when the mat is plugged to ground, their cats love sitting on it, but if unplugged, the mats are ignored. That seems like some study that would be interesting at animal shelter, seeing if animals can tell and prefer.
But anyway, wondering what others opinions on this topic are.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/
Note that all of the authors of this paper work for a company that sells this snake oil.
This entire idea of charging or discharging your body for some physiological effect is fundamentally flawed. It is indeed true that touching the ground will change your electrical potential to that of the ground, however that's as far as it goes, the rest is just nonsensical.
Let's start with the very first part of that, specifically changing your electrical potential to match the ground. The problem with this is that the ground is 0V because we define it as 0V, not because of any sort of fundamental property. Between two points on the Earth you can see hundreds of kilovolts. So the obvious question is why should the electrical potential of a particular piece of soil where your grounding rod is installed be physiologically preferable to whatever potential your body happened to be at before?
Now lets go on to the next part of what these scam artists usually claim. That is that the Earth's electrons enter your body and do good things of some description. When you touch the ground some small charge does enter or leave your body, however that stops nearly instantly when the potentials equalise[1]. How is the Earth meant to to keep putting electrons into your body if there's no voltage? That's just simply not how electricity works.
As an aside, note that I said enter or leave. A positive static charge and a negative static charge can both easily build up in your body. Therefore any claims that specify that electrons enter your body (or leave you body) is immediately nonsensical because it could go either way.
I'll leave it to someone else to explain all the nonsensical biological claims that follow on from the already fundamentally wrong electrical side since that's not my area. I will however note that none of these sponsored papers actually show and measurable biological effect, they all just hand-wave about redox reactions.
[1]: Yes, you're coupled to mains wiring and other changing fields that are around, however that's getting too far into the weeds for a short comment. If the claim made by the snake oil salesmen was that a current going through your body is good then they'd also suggest wrapping yourself in an electrical cord to maximise the effect, or just taping batteries to your skin.
This study had no control group and they didn't check for a placebo effect. Pretty big red flags.
Not just your hands.
Walking barefoot, over all manner of surfaces, feels good, increases your connection to your surroundings, and slows you down.
I've done it lots, both in the countryside and in the city. You have to watch out for spiky plants and fox shit in the country, and in the city you soon learn which surface textures require more care :-)
"Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it's as if the whole world has been covered." - Shantideva, 8th century Buddhist monk
I think I can live without my connection to asphalt, concrete, dirt, broken glass and literal shit while living in the city, which has nothing to do with nature.
Yeah, where I live there's constantly shattered glass, other people's dog's poo they don't pick up, etc.
Last week I was walking my dog and he stepped on glass or something that gashed open part of his paw pad.
Did you know that walking barefoot in the Southern US was how most people contracted hookworm? At is height an estimated 40% of the population in certain regions had the parasite which was know to cause a "mental haze". Some historians attribute the disease (again, contracted by walking barefoot outdoors) to have caused the stereotype of the "lazy slow southerner" [1].
Do you feel walking barefoot is worth the risk of catching this and other potentially hazardous diseases?
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
But also, hookworm infections are known to suppress allergies and asthma, help inflammatory bowl disease, and improve insulin resistance in people with type 2 diabetes.
> Those using the microbially-diverse soil saw an increase in the diversity of bacteria on their skin, and on the number of anti-inflammatory cytokines in their blood – while the other group didn't.
That's really remarkable.
Yeah, getting the immune system to tone down the responses is probably the best one can do for oneself health.
Our body didn't get the memo that for the last 200 years water and food are clean now and bacteria is fought with antibiotics.
Getting the immune system to not freak out at everything it detects via just touching grass is the best news I've read today.
I heard the most ridiculous thing the other day:
That GenZ and Gen Alpha have started doing this thing they call “private podcasting”. Where they invite a friend over and discuss topics like one of those podcasts where dudes just talk about stuff…but they don’t record it or post it anywhere.
I was stunned. Is this generation really so socially starved by the attention parasites that human beings are starting to reinvent “hanging out” or “just having a conversation”.
It’s so ridiculous I just refuse to believe this is how they actually think and this has to be some kind of rage bait. I pray that it’s rage bait because if it isn’t we failed our children badly.
All that to say that I get similar vibes from the “grtting your hands dirty is actually good for you” thing. It just screams that entire generations of people have been stunted by helicopter parenting that this just seems like novel information. It seems we’ve completely abdicated our duty as parents and dumped our responsibility to educate our children onto profit seeking media companies. And that terrifies me.
There is a certain style of trolling that isn’t as obvious to older people.
When you get older you've seen a lot of people who do things like that and are serious about it. Of course we haven't seen the podcast angle exactly but plenty of other things and it's common enough to make you cynical and so then you would fall for such jokes. assuming it is really joke which isn't clear
I mean it was so ridiculous that I do think it was trolling.
But more like…what if this is actually true.
It sounds more like a joke or a lampoon of always-connected culture.
It's a joke poking fun at podcast bros.
Yeah I definitely hope so lol
private podcasting is right up there with using ChatGPT in your head.
There's absolutely no reason to assume that getting your hands dirty would be "good for you". Playing outside and getting dirty is fun and is arguably great for enrichment and character building, but I think it would come as a surprise to just about anyone that it has health benefits.
When I say "come as a surprise" I mean they would be unable to articulate the exact mechanisms behind the health benefits before being told what they are or that they exist. Liking a thing and presuming it must have health benefits aren't the same.
after i switched to washing my hands with antibacterial soap (the orange kind they use in hospitals), i've gone from a bimonthly cold-analog disease to maybe being sick twice a year
If you're getting colds that often (and you're not immuno-compromised) then it might be worth getting checked out.
I was getting sick constantly, and it turned out I had chronic sinusitis, and surgery made it much much better.
(Just friendly advice, I know nothing about your situation).
doctors kept pitching tonsillectomy to me; i'm just hesitant of the knife :(
glad it was just poor hygiene :P
If you have tonsilitis / tonsil stones, that means you have a biofilm there and it’s a very common place for that to happen.
Regular mouthwash and even antibiotics won’t get rid of it, but a solution of vinegar, lemon juice and salt will.
https://youtu.be/0he8BCs8VD0
The mechanism is somewhat dubious imho - why would dirt selectively have beneficial bacteria that other environments don’t? I could come up with some just-so stories about how more “virulent” (haha) bacteria are the only ones to conquer our more sterile world but it’s just a plausible tale.
I do subscribe to it myself but not out of evidence. It’s just vibes. Built my daughter a little dirt box with grass and edible herbs so when she would muck around at five to six months she could do it in there on the balcony of our San Francisco apartment and she enjoyed destroying the plants so at the worst she got some fun out of it.
It’s not dirt, it’s soil. Soil is a living ecosystem.
So is my gut but if I smeared my insides on my body I would likely fall ill. Even pathogens form a living ecosystem.
Or, to put it a different way,
> Cars have windows and can go. Houses have windows and can’t go. So it’s not the windows that make the car go
Speak for yourself. I know this guy called Howl...
Your insides are different from your outsides. Your skin has a different microbiome than your gut. Hyper cleanliness on your skin kills beneficial microbes that maintain an equilibrium when they're alive.
The Simpsons explained this one a while back, funnily enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8
Ecosystems have niches for aggressive behavior against participants that reduce diversity. It's why you find higher concentrations of Lyme disease in new housing developments than you do in the deep woods: it's the activation of a defense mechanism (in the Lyme disease case it has to do with there being a higher proportion of competent hosts for the pathogen: mice, but in general evolution has myriad ways if implementing this pattern).
If it's just you and one species of bacteria, you're closer to a circumstance that would call for the activation of such behavior than if diversity is high.
So it's not that the bacteria are intrinsically good or bad, but that the different circumstances call for calm or aggressive behavior, and all your friends going missing cues aggressiveness in species who have evolved by filling that niche in the past.
To keep it simple:
For one it's just competition. If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.
Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.
As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3980089/
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6827147/
Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.
I have gotten weird rashes on my hands after working in the garden, so maybe it's not all good all the time.
My partner is an estate gardener; early on in our relationship she came home with a green thumb. Apparently, the adage is about getting fungus under your nail beds and not keeping plants alive
Dirt is good to prevent you from getting sick easily.
My experience with gardening is that you also get bitten and stung all the time by a range of bugs and plants so you get resistance training, too ;) British false widow spiders have nothing on me at this point...
Ohhhh... that's why Indian poop festivals?!
... Wasn't there papers and articles showing getting in contact with soil was causing Parkinson's?
Feeling some pâro, again:
https://youtu.be/w7l2hUp0CkQ
I thought that was related to the insecticides/herbicides, not soil itself.
It's unclear.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/sep/23/medicalscience.wo...
My point was more that articles like the one on the BBC (or the Guardian for that matter) just contradict themselves every year. I completely stopped reading those "pop science" takes that are only there for clicks.
(To its credit, the Guardian makes place for long form articles that go more in-depth on known knowns and known unknowns.)
And no one has dirtier hands than the BBC
Maybe there's a benefit to having diverse natural memetic microflora on your cognitive convolutions. Like it could innoculate you against aggressive viral ideological infection.
So much dumb stuff in your brain that you are just immune to propaganda as you can't take it seriously (it's just as dumb as the other stuff)