I hadn't heard about the nose picking study so I'm thrilled to hear about it! My toddler does this. I decided not to stop her.
My thought process went something like this:
1) She's not in immediate danger so I'll observe. (It's a different story for me if there are other adults nearby who don't share my inclination to observe first then react.)
2) Children learn by using all their senses. Smaller children learn by putting things in their mouth and tasting them.
3) Boogers, from my memory, are salty and a bit savory. Not foul tasting or bitter which one would expect from inedible or dangerous substances. Also, salt kills bacteria.
4) Children learn to do things either by watching those around them, or by instinct. Since I don't eat my boogers nor does anyone else in our household I assume it's instinctive. I also know from her older siblings that the inclination subsides with age.
5) Will a germ that already has access to the nasal passage do better in the digestive tract? I wouldn't think so. But i do know that children (and adults) do receive certain immunities by ingesting small quantities of otherwise problematic substances. Poison ivy for instance.
However, even with the study I can't be certain that its good idea. First, studies seem to come out on a daily basis contracting each other. Plus, the environment in which my child is growing up in is vastly different from any other generation so instincts can't be relied on. (Hating carseats with a passion is an instinct that I've decided needs to be redirected, for instance.)
However, even with the study I can't be certain that its good idea.
I do not know whether it's a good idea, but I have to say, the taste is still as good as in the first days. I have never been left unsatisfied.
I have absolutely no clue why I got into that habit, though. Probably eating chocolate at the same time, earlier on.
Today I received some shoes in the post, which included a couple of packets of silica gel. I don't think I have ever seen a packet of silica gel that didn't have "DO NOT EAT" printed on it, and it's always bemused me. It doesn't look edible, or smell appetising, and isn't even especially harmful to ingest in most circumstances. Chances are that if I ever did want to eat silica gel, I'd probably have a damn good reason, and a lifetime of being told to not eat it is an obstacle to that.
This has started me thinking about all the other things we internalise as serious hazards contrary to reality. As a child, I was told that picking my nose and eating it would have some sort of cumulative toxic effect. This was obviously a lie manufactured by my parents (or maybe their parents) to get me to stop doing it, but a couple of decades later I felt positively scandalised when I read about an Austrian pathologist who claimed the practise was beneficial to the immune system. (Although this is mentioned in the delightful Wikipedia page on nose-picking, the reference links are dead, so I'd actually treat this assertion with caution, but feel free to munch away on your own dried nasal mucus anyway).
Although nose-picking and eating the packaging that shoes come in are pretty trivial examples, I do wonder how many of these prohibitive false dire consequences I'm still labouring under, invisibly making my life more difficult. I also wonder how many full-grown adults still don't accept sweets from strangers.
Do you have any examples of an authority figure, or a prevailing piece of cultural conditioning, giving warnings of dire outcomes you later discovered to be false, misleading or based on an agenda you were naive to at the time?