Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

Certainly just with infectious diseases in general, it's really important to be aware of

the possibility for compromising your health through the spread of germs.

And so that is just, you know, hand washing is important and we have to be careful with, you know, the spread of germs.

But I do think that, you know, the sanitization of our environment has gone overboard with the, you know,

various things being impregnated with antibiotics, you know, shopping carts and things like that and toothbrushes.

And, you know, it's like antibiotics and, you know, things for killing microbes are everywhere.

And when we were raising, you know, when our daughters were young and we were making these decisions, the calculations that we would make were really, one,

how likely are they to encounter a disease-causing microbe?

If we've been out on a hike or in our garden, just kind of working in the dirt or whatever, maybe it's not as important to wash your hands before you have lunch, even if there's a little bit of dirt on them.

If they've been in a public playground where maybe there's other kids with germs or maybe even chemicals like pesticides and herbicides that are being used,

maybe it's more important than to wash your hands.

Certainly if you've been in the grocery store or on the subway, probably a good idea to wash your hands.

So I think you really need to think about kind of the context of it.

And exposure to microbes from the environment is likely an important part of educating our immune system and keeping the proper balance in our immune system.

And it's just a matter of figuring out the right way to do that safely.

So I think the first thing to say is buyer beware because it's a supplement market.

It's largely unregulated.

And that means that there are a lot of bad products out there and a lot of products that, even though they're not intended to be bad, just don't have great quality control.

There have been several studies that have taken over-the-counter, just kind of off-the-shelf probiotics, surveyed what's in there based on sequencing and shown that

what is in there does not match what's on the label.