James Hamblin kicks off “Clean:
The New Science of Skin” with a confession: He virtually
stopped showering years ago. Hamblin, a physician and staff writer
for The Atlantic, still sprinkles water on his head from time to
time, but shuns shampoos, conditioners, and the cavalcade of other
products that march across American shower shelves.
In polite company, Hamblin’s
confession tends to land like the Hindenburg, which reveals just how
obsessed we’ve become with surface notions of cleanliness — and
how reluctant we are to disavow them. But Hamblin thinks the
sensible-sounding idea that we should scrub up regularly is both
simplistic and wrongheaded. When you take a soap-slathered loofah to
your greasy pelt, he says, you’re actually destroying an
interdependent microbial universe, or microbiome, on the surface of
your skin........
But what soap hoarders and hawkers
overlook is that wiping out our symbiotic microbes may make us more
vulnerable to other, unexpected maladies. First-line eczema
treatments, for instance, include topical antibiotics, cleansers, and
drugs that dampen immune response, but some researchers say these
approaches can make the condition worse in the long run. “Perturbing
the skin barrier by washing or scratching can change the microbial
population,” Hamblin notes. “That can rev up the immune system,
which tells the skin cells to proliferate rapidly and fill with
inflammatory proteins.”
By scrubbing up regularly, the
author argues, we stymie one of evolution’s best strategies to
shield us from disease and keep out invaders. This observation lines
up with an older one that kids raised in highly sanitized
environments are more prone to allergies than farm kids like the
Amish. Wipe the body’s microbial slate clean too aggressively, the
theory goes, and the un-seasoned immune system roars back with a
vengeance.
I will admit to embracing this
regime, perhaps first learned in my youth from living in a cottage
with no running water were the weekly bath was a major operation
involving carrying buckets of water from the water supply to the
house and heating it on the stove top before filling the metal tub
brought in from the shed and placed on the kitchen floor. In my 70
plus years I have never been particularly fanatic about regular baths
or showers and have rarely had any sickness beyond a few sniffles
once in a while and cuts and scrapes heal quickly with little
attention, so perhaps there is something to be said for this once
common practice which continues to this day in some small rural
communities!
The ever increasing prevalence of
children with severe allergies may well be a result of society's
insistence upon it being necessary to shower every morning, maintain
a spotless house, keep kids out of the dirt and generally avoid being
'contaminated' by anything by some folks. Something to think about in
the current pandemic situation.
In no way is the forgoing intended
to encourage or condone those that do not take precautions against
spreading the most recent and dangerous virus that is killing
thousands of individuals world wide.
