Diet issues while travelling

[Bowyn Aerrow]

My friend did tell me to avoid most fresh food because we're not used to other countries' bacteria and that jazz.

the worst part is I love food xD so not being able to get to know foreign cuisine takes so much fun out

Thanks for the advice though! and yes our household is regularly disinfected >.> not my fault that I love the feeling of hand sanitiser.

Buy your own fresh foods, thing with skins like apples, oranges and bandannas. Wash before peeling. Lettuce, celery are more difficult to clean and often have things like e.coli and other interesting critters on them.

The others side of this is cooking foods to a temperature high enough to kill most bacteria. 60°C (140°F).

Its too late for me to tell you to go out and eat some soil out of the lawn. Babies/toddlers who eat soils (just a taste or a bit more than that) are actually inoculating themselves against a lot of things. You are too old to get the health benefits of 'inoculation'.

Hand sanitizer has a place - that place is if you are a high risk individual to various infections such as cold and flu. High risk means that a cold or flu readily becomes complicated or can kill you. If you are healthy then getting colds and flu (common ones not novel ones) is beneficial in the long run.

Too many otherwise healthy people are terrified of the cold and flu and do everything to prevent catching one - the upside is that they don't get sick, the down side is that their immune system is not put through drills and movements and gets the exercises of 'war-games' which make the immune system hardier, stronger and more able to confront and win wars with many other ailments.

I was reading somewhere that kids in daycare who get the common cold end up having less problems with asthma and autoimmune illnesses later in life. That was a study 30 years in the making as they followed a group of kids from day-care through adulthood and tracked many ailments of childhood.

http://phys.org/news106418144.html Lays out a few interesting details of use of antibacterial soaps over regular soaps.