Warning: the things I am about to write about, I would not feel comfortable talking about with my grandmother. Because they are dirty.

Not the kind of discomfort I felt when Grandma and I were watching HBO, and the heartthrob of my pubescence, young Jessica Lange, was getting naked and steamy in "The Postman Always Rings Twice."

I’m talking about real filth. And bacteria.

Clean may not be all that great after all. That’s where my grandmother would have made a face. Just as soon as you sat in her spotless kitchen, roasted peppers, broccoli rabe and pepper biscotti magically appeared, and within seconds, pasta would be boiling on the stove. If you dropped a spoon, Grandma picked it up and gave you a new one, but there was no need because her floor was immaculate. And as dinner was complete and espresso was being poured, somehow all the plates were cleaned and dried and put away, and there was no mess, no crumbs.

No one kept a tidier house than Grandma, but lately this world has been obsessed with over-clean — or rather germ free. Hand sanitizer. Antibacterial soap. Antibiotic-treated meats. Bleach sprays for the bathroom. And dishwashing machines that almost give operating room sterility to the dishes.

Gastrointestinal illness seems to be growing. Just watch 20 minutes of CNN; there seems to be as much time devoted to talking about Donald Trump as there is to commercials for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease. Probiotics, kefir, yoghurt all purport to make our digestive tract a lot healthier, and most men will tell you that if they eat yoghurt, their wives are a lot less likely to yell at them for stinking up the bedroom. (Mine will.)

Recently, a colleague spoke about how the human microbiome, the collection of organisms — germs — that live in our body can be considered a newly discovered human organ. It is essential to keep those organisms healthy. Anyone who takes coumadin, for example, knows that antibiotics that kill gut bacteria will make their coumadin levels dangerously high, because coumadin counteracts the vitamin K, something that these bacteria produce for us.

Think of our colon as our world. There are populations of bacteria. Some are like good, decent people just doing their jobs. Others are terrorists. Usually, the good bacteria are in the majority, but when something causes the good bacteria to die off — an antibiotic, for example — then terrorist bacteria thrive. Clostridium difficile (aka C. Diff) is one such terrible bacteria and typically affects debilitated patients on antibiotics. My gastroenterology colleagues tell me that in recent years, C.diff is affecting young, healthy people, and some speculate it’s because we are killing too many of the good bacteria with bleach-filled detergents and antibiotic treated foods.

When the usual treatments fail for C. Diff, the one treatment that seems to work quite well is, well, just gross. It is a fecal transplant, literally inserting “healthy” feces from a donor into the colon of the patient with C. Diff. Apparently, it works like a charm.

Ironically, in my Grandmother’s day, living in war-torn Italy and sleeping under bridges or in barns to avoid the Germans, keeping clean meant avoiding other bacteria like cholera and food poisoning. Perhaps science, however, has brought cleanliness a bit too far.