Hand Sanitizer or Healthy Life Style?

I stopped into my local CVS pharmacy this evening to grab a bottle of cheap red wine and some sugar-free Reese's cups -- just for the antioxidants, really. ;-p I was startled to discover that the young women -- twenty-something, both of them -- running the cash registers were using hand sanitizer after every transaction. We're talking once a minute or so. They were also complaining about how dry their hands were. Uh, gee, I wonder how that happened? Maybe it's because you're rubbing your hands with alcohol gel every minute or so?

I recognize that money is germy. Indeed, I've long admired a statement by Mark Twain (who said many admirable things) that "Only kisses and money could be so full of germs and still be so popular." Still, once a minute ?! Do they really think they're going to catch a cold or flu through their hands, for heaven's sake? It's only when you touch your eyes, nose, or mouth with virus-laden hands that you even run a risk of contracting a virus. I trust they're not picking their noses or sucking their thumbs at the cash register. Too, I doubt that every customer they deal with is "shedding virus," as they say. Perhaps they could cut back to using hand sanitizer only after accepting money from people who have runny noses, or cough a lot?

It's especially useless because excessive hand sanitizer use has been shown to increase the risk of picking up a germ. How? By drying out hands till they develop cracks -- cracks that harbor viruses and bacteria.

"But, Dana," I hear you cry, "What does this have to do with low carbohydrate nutrition?" It's just another one of my rants about how far off-track Americans are from achieving genuine health. Bad enough that they think that fat is bad and grains are good! Too many people are wildly paranoid about germs, yet pay little attention to nutrition. Well, you know what? Eat sugar, and you reduce immune function for a good three hours or more. If you're eating junk, or drinking soda, even hand washing, much less constant use of hand sanitizer, is pretty much beside the point.

For the record, according to the Center for Disease Control, there were between 14 and 34 million cases of H1N1 flu in the 2009-2010 flu season. There were between 2500 and 6000 deaths from H1N1. Nowhere near all of that flu was money-borne. By contrast, as of 2007 23.6 million people in the US had diabetes, and another 57 million had pre-diabetes. In 2006, 72,507 death certificates listed diabetes as the underlying cause of death. Diabetes causes between 12,000 and 24,000 new cases of blindness per year. Over 70,000 people per year in the US have amputations caused by diabetes.
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To a large degree, how many infectious illnesses you contract is not so much a function of how many germs you're exposed to as of how strong your immune system is. Eating sugar reduces your immune function for hours afterward. Eating insufficient protein also reduces immune function.

My point isn't that you shouldn't wash your hands, though hand sanitizer once per minute seems insanely paranoid to me. My point is that Americans are way, way off track when it comes to preventing illness. In case you haven't noticed, the main killers, or even cripplers, are no longer infectious diseases, they're the Diseases of Civilization, which are overwhelmingly nutritional.

Go ahead and wash your hands -- but don't expect it to help unless you also stop eating junk.