Getting a little dirty while enjoying the great outdoors might mean that you end up toward the healthier end of the scale.
It’s bizarre to think that the city of Vancouver, cradled in Mother Nature’s arms, is filled with people that spend around ninety percent of their time sheltered from the blue (ish) skies. That’s according to University of Victoria’s Trevor Hancock, a social policy and health futurist.
According to Hancock, getting outdoors for a walk or muck about in the garden, is the most important thing that you can do for you personally.
By simply walking both mental and physical benefits can be had in measurable quantities. Social interaction and exercise of any sort may be instrumental in reducing blood pressure, chasing away depression as well as trim away at any excess baggage, physical as well as emotional.
Getting up-close and personal with the earth by gardening or wrestling in the back yard with the kids has lots of benefits, one of which is dirt. We evolved in close proximity top dirt and evidence seems to suggest bacteria and fungi found in soil helps to inoculate us, keeping diseases at bay.
Products like anti-bacterial soap, actually do a lot of harm and are, in all likelihood more dangerous to us than the dirt from whence we came … and will eventually return to.
There’s a Healthy by Nature conference here in Vancouver and Hancock will be appearing as one of the panelists as well as session chair. The conference will run September 20 until September 23 and more than 1,000 people from urban planners and scientists to doctors will attend.
Tens of dozens of studies have suggested that spending time in the outdoors can aid in preventing or alleviating serious diseases. Conference organizers state that everything from diabetes to high blood pressure is affected.
It seems that children reap the greatest rewards. Just by playing outdoors, the symptoms of ailments such as ADD, autism and obesity call all be reduced to some degree. It’s great to join them in the urban playgrounds, but better yet, head to the beach or local forest.
It’s good, I know that I’m a lot happier and healthier today because I ate dirt as a kid … that’s dirt … no it’snot.
