Want to feel younger? Live on a street with more trees. That’s the finding of University of Chicago researchers who studied the impact of street trees on the real and perceived health of residents of Toronto, Canada.
In recent decades, the so-called hygiene hypothesis has been proposed to explain the rapid rise in allergic diseases during the 20th century and has even been linked to a broader range of chronic illnesses. The basic idea is that that when exposure to parasites, bacteria, and viruses is limited early in life, children face a greater chance of having allergies, asthma, and other autoimmune diseases during adulthood.