Addict Nation (35 page)

—Anne Katherine, author of
How to Make Almost Any Diet Work

Together, we can learn to spot quick diet fixes for what they are: a $40 billion a year rip-off industry. Recovery lingo says: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We’ve all done the diets. They didn’t work. As they say in
Alcoholics Anonymous: Big Book
, “We thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not.”

A hopeful aspect of one study about diet is that when somebody loses weight, starts eating healthy, exercising, and basically turning their life around, their friends and relatives are more likely to follow suit. You can set the example for your circle of friends and loved ones. It could save your life and theirs.

Chapter Ten
THE SCRUBBERS: Addicted to Cleanliness

H
owie Mandel may be the world’s reigning germaphobe. The popular comedian, who hosts
Deal or No Deal,
has courageously opened up to his fans about his severe obsession with germs. That signature fist bump he does with contestants on his hit TV show? Turns out it’s not just theatrics. It’s actually a symptom of his irrational fear of germ contagion. Mandel told ABC News, “In my mind [my hand] is like a petri dish. . . . Otherwise I would spend the day, as I have in the past in my life, in the men’s room rubbing and scrubbing and scalding.”
¹

Howie Mandel’s fixation on organisms so small they’re invisible to the human eye has impacted every facet of his life. He shaves his head because it feels “streamlined” and “clean.” He refuses to touch money unless it’s been washed and shuns handrails and buffet serving trays. He acknowledges having donned surgical scrubs before and after public performances. When he has shaken hands in the past, he admits to having kept hand sanitizer under his desk and obsessively soaking in it. “My hands were raw and I had no antibodies and I started getting warts and it was—I was a mess.” It takes guts to share secret compulsions that are clearly embarrassing. I applaud him for his honesty. Mandel says he suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). He’s one of about 4 million Americans who’ve been diagnosed with OCD.
²

But for every clinical case of OCD, legions of consumers are coming down with a behavioral dysfunction that has the appearance of being a not-so-distant cousin. America’s 300 million citizens are being fashioned into a zombie army of Stepford Wives and Mister Cleans whose never-ending war against dirt—real or imagined—is not only irrational and self-destructive, it’s also killing the planet.

“I’m a clean freak,” people often say now with more than a touch of pride. “You could eat off my floor,” is another popular refrain. “I can’t think unless my house is spotless,” is a chant that echoes across the well-manicured cul-de-sacs of suburbia. These people are
bragging
about their fixation on a behavior that’s usually a waste of time. At worst, it’s a neurotic habit with a host of disturbing repercussions and possible side effects. This trend has, in recent years, turned into a social contagion that approaches the level of mass hysteria.

“We’re seeing advertising on TV everyday where women are set up . . . If you are not thoroughly cleaning your house all the time, if you are not running around with a spray cleaner and wiping up the counter after your child, you might just not be a good enough mom.”

—Erin Switalski, executive director of Women’s Voices for the Earth

Are Clean Freaks Super Freaks?

How did we get this way? Behind every addiction there is a pusher. A drumbeat of TV commercials have—for decades—not so subtly signaled that if we’re not using the latest “new and improved” cleaning product, and if our kitchens don’t look as gleaming as the sterile ones we see on TV, then we’re somehow dirty, smelly, low class, substandard, and inferior. The backstory of how this maddening meticulousness developed begins long before the invention of the television.

The history of America’s journey to obsessive cleanliness is a long and tangled one that is brilliantly outlined in Suellen Hoy’s book,
Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness.
She explains how, in the Mexican-American War (1846 –1848), far more American soldiers died of disease than from combat. In the Civil War (1861– 1865), dysentery, diarrhea, and disease led to an effort by the Union Army to improve the personal hygiene of soldiers. The emphasis on cleanliness survived the war, having made a lasting impression on many of the soldiers. Cleanliness began making its way into the American psyche. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, and flu—particularly in cities where the poor lived in filthy, overcrowded conditions—led to cleanliness campaigns in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
³

European immigration peaked shortly after the turn of the century, and by 1910, more than 13 million immigrants—from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe—were living in America.
⁴
And, just as is the case today, bigotry greeted these new arrivals. Hoy writes, “Most Americans considered the ‘unwashed’ to be the millions of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe who recently arrived in the country’s newly plumbed cities. Seeking employment and opportunity they were quickly told that ‘Good Health is Wealth,’ which could be obtained by keeping clean. . . . Not wishing to appear inferior or recalcitrant, these newcomers tended to agree that ‘the American way was the best way.’ With few resources and great difficulty, they adopted American habits of hygiene as best they could—not only to stay healthy but also be accepted and ‘get ahead.’ . . . There was an American way to brush teeth, and an American way to clean fingernails . . . By linking the toothbrush to patriotism, Americanizers clearly demonstrated that becoming American involved a total makeover of personal habits and loyalties.”
⁵
Cleanliness has always been a very loaded subject precisely because it can trigger deep-seated insecurities about one’s status in life, insecurities that may trace back generations.

Cleanliness Has Often Been Used as a Code Word

Cleanliness movements often have a subtext. Dirt can become a code word betraying prejudice against the poor, people of color, or people with different cultural values. Is it any coincidence that genocide is often described as “ethnic cleansing”?

By the 1920s, the then-modern American bathroom had become “the shrine of cleanliness.”
Chasing Dirt
shows us soap advertisements from that era that cruelly goad eastern and southern European immigrant women into trying to “live up to” American standards despite their “primitive” training.
⁶

This association of “cleanliness”—as it’s defined by the powers that be—and “class” is still alive and well today, a cultural parasite that can’t seem to be wiped out. There’s always been a puritanical quality to America’s obsession with cleanliness, an
out damn spot
shame over perceived inadequacies in this department that hints this entire subject is about way more than just physical dirt or germs. Showing off one’s cleanliness can act as a validation of one’s social status. It’s a way of saying, “I’m not from the wrong side of the tracks.” Advertisers know this and play to that insecurity.

“If you are a competitor, you certainly cannot win at everything. However, if you have an ability to control something and win, which is ‘I will kill the dust bunnies,’ it is satisfying. It quiets the voices. I have gained control.”

—Anonymous cleaning addict

From Cleanliness to Craziness

Addiction is always about excessive behavior. At some point along the hygiene highway, we crossed an invisible border and entered a landscape where sanitation, instead of merely preventing disease, became a
threat
to our bodies and our planet. This line seems to have first been crossed sometime in the early 1900s. Centuries of gritty, strenuous labor were giving way to mechanization and automation. Horses and dusty roads were being replaced by cars and boulevards. It all conspired to make people measurably less dirty than they had been in previous eras. Soap manufacturers, fearing a shrinking market, began inventing new reasons for people to buy their products.

Suddenly Smelling Like Ourselves
Became a Cause for Shame

In the book
The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History,
Katherine Ashenburg describes how the soap industry, over the course of several decades, kept raising the bar on cleanliness. In a brilliantly Machiavellian move, corporate America ramped up the definition of “clean” by introducing the notion of . . . BO.

She describes how her mother, who’d emigrated from Germany, “first heard of a newfangled product known as deodorant . . . for ‘problem perspiration.’” Ashenburg writes that the shame-based cleanliness campaign intensified over time. “In my generation, standards reached more absurd levels. The idea of a body ready to betray me at any turn filled the magazine ads I pored over in
Seventeen
and in
Mademoiselle
in the late 1950s and ’60s. The lovely-looking girls in those pages were regularly baffled by their single state or their failure to get a second date or their general unpopularity, and all because their breath, their hair, their underarms, or—the worst— their private parts were not ‘fresh.’ . . . There was no way we could ever rest assured that we were clean enough.”
⁷
If that’s not a prescription for addictive fastidiousness, I don’t know what is. And attitudes toward cleanliness have gotten even more warped in the half a century since those ads appeared.

We’re All So Brainwashed, We
Can’t See How Crazy We’re Acting!

One popular instant hand sanitizer on the market today offers ninety-nine reasons to use their product. It’s a head-spinning list that includes most physical things we’re liable to come in contact with throughout the day including: turnstiles, escalator handrails, handrails of stairs, subway seats and poles, bus seats, gas-pump keypads, car door handles, locks, computer keyboards, the computer mouse, photocopy machine keypads, calculator keypads, staplers, doorknobs, handles, light switches, elevator buttons, office phones, vending-machine keypads, ATM-machine keypads, plastic security buckets at airports, airplane blankets, in-flight magazines, TV remote controls, jump rope handles, weight-machine handles, refrigerator door handles, toys for pets, thermostats, shopping-cart handles, toll-booth tickets, currency and . . . . you get the idea.
⁸

Sounds like they would love all their customers to behave as obsessively as Howie Mandel, even though his behavior is classified as a disorder. Are ad campaigns encouraging dysfunctional behavior by trying to paint obsessive cleanliness as normal? It would certainly seem that way.

“We are getting a little nutty as a society with all these germ advertisements . . . On some of the TV commercials, some of the germs have personalities and they look pretty vicious.”

—Michael Jenike, M.D., professor of
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

An Unnecessary War Against Germs
That Really Aren’t Our Enemy

Today, commercials for household cleaning products anthropomorphize germs, turning them into ominous cartoon characters with menacing characteristics that are completely out of line with the threat most household microbes actually pose. This is a strategy to encourage people to use stronger, new “antibacterial” cleaning products despite the fact that mere soap, water, vinegar, and baking soda are known to be effective in keeping most household germs at bay.

Why this encouragement? Could it have anything to do with the fact that household cleaning products have become a $30 billion industry, which is continuously developing “new and improved” products to give Americans something more to add to their shopping carts?
⁹

American Women Bear the
Brunt of Our War on Germs

Women still buy and use most household cleaning products, which is why advertisers focus on them. As one scientist for the organization Women’s Voices for the Earth put it, “Companies are working hard to convince consumers, and especially moms, that they need to regularly disinfect every surface in their homes to protect their families from illness, but that’s simply not true.”
¹⁰
An FDA advisory panel has said:
There is no evidence that antibacterial
soaps work better than regular soap and water
.
¹¹
None of this would amount to more than a ridiculous, but otherwise harmless, expenditure of money and time except for one thing: the ingredients in these products are not necessarily harmless.

Disinfectant Overkill: How Too Clean May Be Hazardous to Our
Health
is a report that cites dozens of scientific studies to make a case that there may well be health risks associated with chemicals found in everyday cleaning products.
¹²

One antibacterial chemical found in a growing number of household and personal cleaning liquids is triclosan. It was first developed for doctors and nurses as a surgical scrub when somebody got the idea to add it to everyday household cleaners. That kind of reminds me of when Michael Jackson got the bright idea to use a surgical knockout drug called propofol to get some shut-eye at home. Can you say overkill? Tragically, Michael Jackson overdosed and died. While there’s no evidence you can experience a lethal overdose by obsessively wiping down your kitchen countertops with triclosanlaced antibacterial products, there are troubling signs that you may be doing yourself more harm than good.

The
Washington Post
reports it obtained a letter the FDA sent to a member of Congress, which said that recent scientific studies raise questions about whether triclosan disrupts the body’s endocrine system.
¹³
Keep in mind the endocrine system involves your glands, which release hormones into your bloodstream. Hormones regulate everything from your mood to your metabolism to your tissue function.
¹⁴
The scariest part? The
Washington Post
says triclosan is now found in the urine of three-quarters of our population.
¹⁵
And this is just one of several disinfectants over which health concerns have been raised.