If you are asking whether such practices developed in response to health revelations, then, at least in my field, the consensus is no. Of course, there is a large minority who disagrees, but let me give you an example.

In the first-century C.E., Jews used ritual bathing pools called mikvaot (singular: mikva). These pools must be filled by natural means, specifically rainfall. No vessel could be used to fill them. These pools were used in relation to temple practice. If you were going to enter the outer court of the temple, you must bathe in a mikva. If you were going to send an animal or grain to the temple for sacrifice, you must bathe certain implenents that come in contact with the animal and produce in the mikva. We know this because of the number of Galilean agricultral villages with mikvaot on the outskirts of town, next to the fields.

Now, because of the rules of how water must be gathered (mikva derives from the word "gather" because it can only be watered gathered by God), the water often became stagnant in the dry months of the year. It may not rain for four months, but people would continue to use the pools. This is according to the Mishna (the Oral Torah--a list of Jewish Rabbinic law written in 200 C.E., but existing orally for at least a hundred years prior). We have no way of knowing if this rule was broken or not.

Additionally, other avenues of health contamination involve corpses falling into the water. The Mishna, in Mikvaot 1:4 begins:

If a dead person fell in to a shallow pool, or someone impure walked in, and then a pure person drank from the pool, they remain pure.

The person remains spiritually pure, but from a modern perspective, such a practice cannot be deemed healthy.

Some practices of religion may have developed congruently with healthy living habits. I am not opposed to this is one of many affecting criteria for development. My problem comes when people argue that this is the only reason that such practices developed. Further examination of Jewish (and ancient Israelite for that matter) practice reveal similar laws that oppose such a theory of development based solely on health.

I hope this helps!