Not saying it’s a good idea, but how come we’re so much more prone to getting a disease?
In: Biology
I don’t think animals don’t get disease/parasites… but I don’t think just straight up not eating off the floor is why we don’t.
Kids chew things from off the floor all the time, and who can honestly say they’ve never applied the 5 second rule?
I think the way we farm/treat animals/refrigerate has more to do with it. We keep animals in too close quarters and so then we worry about disease spreading. We then butcher the animal and hope that everyone in every step of the way follows hygiene procedures, and then you need to follow them at home as well. That means proper hand washing, cleaning of the item at hand (or not! I’ve always heard that you should not wash a chicken because then you spray bacteria all around your sink, but many people still chose to do it. Am I right? No clue. I try my best.) refrigeration, no cross contaminating surfaces in your home, and proper cooking to kill off any bacteria. And we still sometimes get food poison anyways, so it’s not a perfect system. Food can begin to spoil before we notice.
Plus, the floor is dirty. We bring in all sorts of yuck from outside. Animals use the world as their bathroom, people spit, cough, throw cigarettes. The world is gross. So it would be wise to leave shoes at the front door.
I may be wrong, and I may be missing like 80% of the reason… but I assume this is why. I noticed no one else had posted by the time I wrote this so figured why not. Let’s toss my opinion out there.
Basically it is because we don’t that we can’t ,exposure to different bacteria and germs in general in small amounts is how we fight infection by or immune systems building tolerance. We have moved away from this exposure when babies so we don’t have any tolerance built to withstand attacks to our system later on.
Well, we can eat off the ground if we want to, and most of the time we’d be fine, the food would just have dirt and grit on it. Of course if you have your food sitting on a part of the ground where lots of animals poop, that would be a problem, but the ground itself isn’t inherently dangerous or contaminated. The ground is just some combination of decomposed organic matter, sand, clay particles, etc. Or if we’re talking about indoors, floors aren’t usually made of dirt, and aren’t particularly dangerous either, but we can certainly track in contaminants on our feet.
The main difference between us and other animals is that we have hands and know how to make things like plates. Other animals don’t, so they have no choice to eat off the ground. And since they have no choice, their bodies have ways of handling many common types of bacteria and other nasties. However, animals absolutely can get sick, and sometimes die, from contaminated food that’s picked up gross things from the ground (or food that’s rotten).
We also know how to cook food, unlike other animals, and so we have an ideal way to kill a lot of the little nasty things that would normally make us sick. And since we’ve been using fire for at least a million years or so, that’s enough time for our bodies to get used to eating food that’s cooked, and so we’ve gotten used to not having to deal with bacteria and parasites in our food as much as other animals do (though of course the cleanliness and safety of food does depend a lot on where you are in the world, cooking practices, etc)
And why can animals drink water directly from (seemingly) any water source, but humans cannot?
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