Four Weeks Without Soap Or Shampoo 250
An anonymous reader writes "A biotech start-up from Massachusetts has an unusual product: a bottle full of bacteria you're supposed to spray onto your face. The bacteria is Nitrosomonas eutropha, and it's generally harmless. Its main use is that it oxidizes ammonia, and the start-up's researchers suspect it used to commonly live on human skin before we began washing it away with soaps and other cleaners. Such bacteria are an area of heavy research in biology right now. Scientists know that the gut microbiome is important to proper digestion, and they're trying to figure out if an external microbiome can be similarly beneficial to skin. A journalist for the NY Times volunteered to test the product, which involved four straight weeks of no showers, no soap, no shampoo, and no deodorant. The sprayed-on bacteria quickly colonized her skin, along with other known types of bacteria — and hundreds of unknown (but apparently harmless) strains. She reported improvements to her skin and complexion, and described how the bacteria worked to curtail (but not eliminate) the body odor caused by not washing. At the end of the experiment, all of the N. eutropha vanished within three showers."
Control Groups (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the control groups? Shouldn't there also be at least a few of these:
1) One group that showers daily and uses the spray.
2) One group that showers daily and sprays plain water.
3) One group that doesn't shower for 4 weeks and sprays plain water.
Number 3 is almost required for any accurate study and I would think it would
the other 2 wouldn't hurt either.
Bathe for health (Score:4, Insightful)
You bathe for health. You don't bathe for an optimum natural balance; you do it so you get nasty pathogens off your body, and don't get infected wounds.
Apparently some health comes at the expense of some other health, like how antibiotics destroy gut bacteria but save you from death by sepsis.
Does shower mean soap? (Score:3, Insightful)
I ask myself if the showers that kill the flora is just water or use soap.
Shampoo is something I long ago stopped using and after a short period I stopped producing excessive amounts of oil. The only times I have to shampoo is when because of a skin condition.
Using soap in general isn't something I feel is needed since a regular rinsing leaves me non smelly.
Question is if I am actually breeding these little microbes and my lack of soaping is why I don't smell or if it's simply because I'm not a smelly person as some of my friends and family asserts?
Re:Why make a journalist suffer? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem there isn't the lack of showers but the repeated use of clothing.
Re:Bathe for health (Score:5, Insightful)
the byproducts of the ammonia processing by these bacteria produced nirites and nitric acid which inhibited staph growth,
And this sort of thing is going to become very important once antibiotics stop working.