By Janko Ferlič

Finland is doubling down on evidence from four years ago that definitively shows how children can avoid diseases and allergies throughout their lives if they’re permitted to get down and dirty in daycare.

Dozens of comparative studies have previously found that children who live in rural areas and are in contact with nature have a lower probability of catching an illness resulting from disorders in the immune system—and a lower risk of developing coeliac disease, allergies, atopy, and even diabetes.

A 2021 study conducted at a Finnish daycare and published in Science Advances showed that repeated contact with nature-like elements five times a week diversified the body’s microbes which offered protection against diseases transmitted through the immune system in daycare children.

“This is the first in which these changes offering protection against diseases have been found when adding diversified aspects of nature to an urban environment”, said Aki Sinkkonen, a research scientist who led the study for the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) at the time.

Each human individual is actually an environment in themselves: a host of trillions of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. These collectively outnumber our own cells 4-1, and are emerging as one of the most influential forces—if not truly the single most—in human health and function.

LUKE took its findings to heart in a big way, and is now launching a nationwide survey—of 43 daycares compared to the previous sample of merely 75 children at daycares—on how increased microbial exposure from yard landscaping changes the microbial composition of children’s skin, gut, and oral microbiomes.

A mixture of hair, saliva, and stool samples will be taken in addition to questionnaires about infectious diseases among the children by parents, in order to robustly measure the impact of a wilder daycare on children’s immune health.

The Guardian recently reported on some of the fruits of this initiative which saw €1 million in grants given out to the 43 daycare centers for the purpose of adding more garden space, planter boxes, compost heaps, and other such natural features to their properties.

Sinkkonen was there too—inspecting a “chocolate cake” baked with love out of mud and sand by a five-year-old at Humpula daycare center in Lahti, north of Helsinki. The daycare boasts a vegetable patch, which uses the daycare’s composter to provide dirt-covered, healthy veggies for the center’s kitchen. It was the location of the original study from 2021, and is now the flagship daycare in the new, larger trial.

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Sinkkonen’s original study with LUKE at Humpula identified lower levels of Clostridium bacteria—linked with inflammatory bowel disease—in the 75 kids’ gut microbiomes. Their blood samples showed higher levels of circulating immune agents called T cells, while their skin carried lower densities of infectious disease-causing *Streptococcus *bacteria.

If that profile can be replicated nation wide, a huge financial and health burden could be lifted from the national community.

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It’s no surprise then that Humpula has gone a little bit crazy with the idea. The daycare substituted its grass garden for a giant pizza slice of forest floor 107 square feet in area and 12 inches deep. It came pre-loaded with wild lingon and blueberry seeds which grew into plants which produced berries, as well as bugs, mosses and lichen, and, most importantly, God-only-knows-how-many trillions of microbes.

“This area has not been forested for 200 years so this is a substitute,” Sinkkonen told the Guardian.

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