"At first, I was an oily, smelly beast. The odor of bodies is the product of bacteria that live on our skin and feed off of the oily secretions from the sweat and sebaceous glands at the base of our hair follicles. Applying detergents (soaps) to our skin and hair every day disrupts a sort of balance between skin oils and the bacteria that live on our skin. When you shower aggressively, you obliterate the ecosystems. They repopulate quickly, but the species are out of balance ...and tend to favor the kinds of microbes that produce odor.
"But after a while, the idea goes, your ecosystem reaches a steady state, and you stop smelling bad. I mean, you don’t smell like rosewater or Axe Body Spray, but you don’t smell like B.O., either. You just smell like a person.
"Because, evolutionarily, why would we be so disgusting that we need constant cleaning? And constant moisturizing and/or de-oiling? If we do more to allow our oil glands and bacteria to equilibrate, the theory goes, skin should stop fluctuating between oily and dry.
"In our video series If Our Bodies Could Talk, we’ve been exploring the microbiome in a three-episode series. The final segment is out today, embedded below. In it, I talk with microbiologist Martin Blaser about the consequences of cleaning our bodies as avidly as many people do. I also talk with a scientist at a biotech company called AOBiome that is selling live bacteria for people to spray on their skin in attempt to create a more Earthy ecosystem."
Ver mais"Because, evolutionarily, why would we be so disgusting that we need constant cleaning? And constant moisturizing and/or de-oiling? If we do more to allow our oil glands and bacteria to equilibrate, the theory goes, skin should stop fluctuating between oily and dry.
"In our video series If Our Bodies Could Talk, we’ve been exploring the microbiome in a three-episode series. The final segment is out today, embedded below. In it, I talk with microbiologist Martin Blaser about the consequences of cleaning our bodies as avidly as many people do. I also talk with a scientist at a biotech company called AOBiome that is selling live bacteria for people to spray on their skin in attempt to create a more Earthy ecosystem."
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