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Despite the fact that the vast majority of experts in Health agrees that care is an important part of personal hygiene and that we need to take a shower regularly to avoid infections or other illnesses, an expert made headlines by rejecting such a statement and announced that he did not take a bath. five years. Could he be right or does his theory simply have no basis? Draw your own conclusions.
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In 2015, James Hamblin, who works as a professor at the public health school at the prestigious Yale University and a specialist in preventive medicine, has stopped taking a shower for one purpose: to prove that there is no “medical need” to do so.
He himself explained the reasons behind his decision: “We spent two years of our lives bathing. How much of this time (and money and water) is a loss? “But why did he do it?” “I know of many people who bathe very little. I knew it was possible, but I wanted to try for myself to see what the effect would be. “
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Now, five years later, he says he is more than happy with the decision: “Over time, your body gets used to it more and more, so it doesn’t smell so bad if you don’t use deodorant and soap. And your skin doesn’t get as oily when you stop using harsh soaps. Many people use a shampoo to remove oils from their hair and then apply a conditioner to add synthetic oils. If you can break that circle, your hair will look like it did when you started using those products. “
In the conversation with the BBC, Hamblin explained that “the main thing is to understand that it takes time to see the effects, it doesn’t happen overnight, it’s not immediate. There were times when I wanted to take a shower because I missed it, it smelled bad and I felt fat. But that’s starting to happen less and less to me. “
He also explained that excessive bathing “changes a kind of balance between skin oils and living bacteria. When you go aggressive, you destroy ecosystems. They repopulate quickly, but the species become unbalanced and tend to favor the types of microbes that produce odor. Your ecosystem is in a stable state and you stop smelling bad. You don’t smell like rose water … You just smell like man ”.
“I have my own smell and my wife likes it. It’s not bad for other people. Nowadays we hope that people don’t smell anything or that they smell of perfume, cologne, body wash or otherwise it means that they smell bad. If there is a detectable human odor, it is negative, “he added.
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“I rinse when I need or when I want, only with water, quickly, especially when my hair seems to have just woken up or if I have something visibly dirty. But you can exfoliate, you can remove the oils simply by rubbing your hands and combing your hair occasionally. And that’s it “, he explains.
In addition, he explained the reasons why he considers the shower to be a “very modern” concept: “Before, I didn’t have running water. Most people have not had access to running water until the last hundred years. It was something that perhaps the king could do, kings and queens, but that people could only do occasionally. Maybe they went into a river or a lake, but it wasn’t something we had to do every day. “
“It is a very new event in human history: we have to spend so much time, money and resources bathing and if this is combined with the knowledge we have about the skin microbiome. I’m curious to think that maybe we do too much and it could be beneficial to reduce “, he adds.