Professor Scott Napper is requesting his pupils to investigate the possible health benefits of eating their mucous in a bid to understand the human immune system better.
He believes that eating mucous in the nose may boost the immune system by introducing small and harmless amounts of germs back into the body.
His theory follows others that suggest improved hygiene has led to an increase in allergies and auto-immune disorders.
His proposed study involves splitting his class into two. Half will eat their pickings whilst other will not engage in the antisocial behaviour.
They will then observe how the immune system responds to the new habit.
Professor Napper said: ‘All you would need is a group of volunteers. You would put some sort of molecule in all their noses, and for half of the group they would go about their normal business and for the other half of the group, they would pick their nose and eat it.'
‘Then you could look for immune responses against that molecule and if they're higher in the booger-eaters, then that would validate the idea.’
Professor Napper added that the greatest value of the snot-eating question is that, when he brings it up with his first-year science students they are instantly engaged in the class.
‘Get the student to think, rather than just sitting there taking down notes,’ Napper said. ‘[Science] should be about the exchange of ideas.’
But the associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Saskatchewan is a firm believer in the powers of picking your nose.
He said: ‘Nature pushes us to do different things because it is to our advantage to have certain behaviours, to consume different types of foods.
'So maybe when you have an urge like this 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 behaviours sterile isn't actually working to our advantage,' he told CBC News.
Experts such as Dr Hilary Longhurst, consultant immunologist from the Bart’s NHS Trust, believe a similar thing occurs when we bite our nails.
‘Unless your hands are filthy, the bugs we encounter when biting our nails could boost our immune system,' she said.
The immune system works by developing a 'memory' and making a note of how to fight each bug it has ever encountered.
When a bug is encountered a second time, the immune system reaches into its 'memory' and releases weapons — called memory lymphocytes — that know how to kill it.
Source: UKDaily Mail
