Parents who wash their own dishes will reap the benefits of the time-consuming chore.
A new study published in the journal Pedatrics, reportedly suggests that the dishes being squeaky clean might not be helpful to children’s immune systems, as it’ll lower their exposure to bacteria in early life, according to TIME.
The recent study reportedly supports the “hygiene hypothesis,” which speculates that the reason kids develop so many allergies today is because their environments are too clean, especially starting from an early age when being exposed to a little bacteria can be helpful.
“If you are exposed to microbes, especially early in life, you stimulate the immune system in various ways and it becomes tolerant,” explained study author Dr. Bill Hesselmar of Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden.
He continued, “We thought [hand washing dishes] might be important, but we didn’t know, so we asked that question.”
The recent study reportedly involved 1,029 children aged 7 and 8 from Sweden. Researchers reportedly found that out of the families that filled out questionnaires about their children’s history of asthma, eczema and rhinoconjunctivits, those who did their dishes the old fashioned way were far less likely to have these common allergic conditions, according to CBS News.
Researchers reportedly found that a history of eczema was reported in 23 percent of children of parents who used hand dishwashing compared to 38 percent of kids whose family used machine dishwashing. 1.7 percent of children in hand-washing homes reportedly had asthma compared to the 7.3 percent of children in homes that used dishwashers.
The children who were exposed to “traditional cooking,” which includes washing dishes by hand, eating fermented food and buying food directly from farms, reportedly generally had a lower rate of allergies, according to the LA Times.
“Even though we do not currently have strong support for recommending any of these lifestyle factors in allergy prevention, they are already commonly used and most often regarded as harmless,” the authors of the study wrote.
