A small urban garden can contribute to your health, especially if the garden contains rich soil, a new study shows.
A one-month indoor gardening period increased the bacterial diversity of participants’ skin and appeared to improve their response to inflammation, researchers found.
Growing, harvesting and consuming food produced in an urban garden every day could help city dwellers fend off disease, researchers suggested.
“The findings are significant, as urbanization has led to a considerable increase in immune-mediated diseases, such as allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases, generating high healthcare costs. We live too ‘cleanly’ in cities,” said lead study author Mika Saarenpaa, a doctoral researcher with the University of Helsinki in Finland.
“We know that urbanization leads to reduction of microbial exposure, changes in the human microbiota and an increase in the risk of immune-mediated diseases,” Saarenpaa added in a university news release. “This is the first time we can demonstrate that meaningful and natural human activity can increase the diversity of the microbiota of healthy adults and, at the same time, contribute to the regulation of the immune system.”
For this study, participants gardened using regular flower boxes, using plants bought off a store shelf. The crops included peas, beans, mustards and salads.
A group of 15 people gardened using naturally derived and microbially rich soil, while another control group of 13 gardened with microbially poor peat-based soil.
Peat is the most widely used growing medium in the world, researchers said.
However, the people in the control group had no improvements in inflammatory response or skin bacteria, indicating that peat-based gardening does not bring the health benefits of gardening in diverse forest soil.
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