My dad keeps telling me not to pick my nose and eat it. Will eating my bogeys [boogers] do me any harm?
鈥� Picking and eating are for cherries. Even if your bogeys do not affect your digestion, chewing them could affect the health of your social relationships. Try chewing gum instead.
Physiologically, eating your dried snot would not matter much. If that solid bogey that you find so toothsome had not dried out, it would have dribbled down your pharynx and been swallowed anyway, unless you intercepted it with your sleeve or handkerchief or stuck it on the underside of your chair.
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For the most part, any germs it contained would be digestible or would otherwise die in your gut, but this is not always the case. Some germs do infect people via the nose, and some toxic dust particles do stick in your phlegm and it is to the benefit of your health to ensure you expel such things.
It is not for nothing that your nose hairs stop bugs and dust from landing in your lungs or gut. Blowing your nose would not stop everything, but it is better than guzzling snot.
Jon Richfield, Somerset West, South Africa
鈥� The medical literature is a delightfully rich source of information about nose picking. Firstly, nose pickers should not feel isolated or guilty about the activity. A US survey in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in February 1995 of 100 adults in Dane County, Wisconsin, concluded that the activity 鈥渋s an almost universal practice in adults鈥�. The same publication in June 2001 carried another survey, this time of adolescents in India, which found that the average frequency of pickage was four times a day.
鈥淭he medical literature is a delightfully rich source of information on nose picking鈥�
However, too much of a good thing can prove to be a problem. , or compulsive nose picking, can lead to (better known as nosebleeds) or even septal perforation.
The cause of compulsive nose picking is unknown but in extreme situations may transcend habit and become a sign of a psychiatric disorder. The Wisconsin study identified one individual who spent more than 2 hours a day digitally excavating their nasal cavities.
Perhaps more worryingly, Dutch researchers reporting in the August 2006 edition of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology found that the frequency of nose picking correlated with the presence of nasal Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium carried by about 25 per cent of people but which in its most horrible form can cause lurid 鈥渇lesh-eating鈥� infections.
Alas I have not been able to find any studies into the effects of eating one鈥檚 bogeys, but it is almost certain that there is an Ig Nobel award set aside for anyone who is willing to tackle this important medical conundrum.
Digbeth D鈥橫arriotti, By email, no address supplied