Eating boogers (or bogies) is the key to a happier and healthier life. You might be reading that last sentence over for the third time, but that’s exactly what scientists are saying they’ve recently found. According to scientists, new research shows eating snot could help people’s immune systems fight respiratory infections, stomach ulcers, and even HIV. Not only that (oh yes, there’s more!), but scientists have found that people who go digging for nose-gold and eat the booger-booty are overall not only healthier, but happier, than those outside the booger-eating-community. Looks like you don’t need healthcare after all!

According to The Telegraph, the scientist conducting studies at both Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have concluded booger-eating is apparently no longer a thing children should be discouraged from doing because boogers contain ‘a rich reservoir of good bacteria’ that helps defend against illness when ingested, just like medicine does. The science on this is advanced that researchers are apparently already working on producing mucus toothpaste and snot chewing gum for those who want to load up on good-boogie-bacteria without the chore of mining it themselves. Although, if the boogers in the booger toothpaste and chewing gum aren’t yours…oh. OH, NO.

According to one researcher, eating boogers to live longer might just be the natural process of humans evolving, The Telegraph reports:

“Nature pushes us to do different things because it is to our advantage to have certain behaviors, to consume different types of foods,” said co-author Dr. Scott Napper, professor of biochemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. “So maybe when you have an urge to pick your nose and eat it, you should just go with nature. “From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved under very dirty conditions and maybe this desire to keep our environment and our behaviors sterile isn’t actually working to our advantage.”

See? Eating boogers is just our species way of adapting to our surroundings. It’s like chicken-booger soup for the soul.

UPDATE: A spokesperson from MIT reached out with a statement from MIT professor Katharina Ribbeck that seeks to clarify the type of research being done by her team.

I want to clarify that the ‘nose picking’ study that is being associated with our work is originally from Professor Friedrich Bischinger and not from my research group at MIT. Our study has been incorrectly linked with Bischinger’s conclusion, although there is no connection between the two studies. The study from my lab that is being cited (available here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25344244) is on salivary mucins, and our work more broadly suggests that mucus across the internal linings of our body (such as in the mouth, the lungs, the intestine and the cervix) has protective effects which we could potentially leverage for new lines of therapeutics. We did not study boogers, or even nasal mucus, so our research is not suggesting there are health benefits from boogers, or nasal mucus. The synthetic mucus we refer to in our study is not comparable to snot.

(The Telegraph)