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Is showering every day bad for our health?

Woman in shower
[Photo: Getty/ ilarialucianiphotos]

People say that back in the 16th and 17th centuries, bathing was considered an extravagance for the elite.

Yet now, in 2017, it’s considered surprising if you don’t shower every single day.

This makes us smell like mint or chamomile or whatever flavour our shower gel is instead of sweat, yes, but it turns out it might not be that good for our health.

Some researchers now believe that showering too much can damage something called the human microbiome, which is a collection of microbes, bacteria and viruses that live in and on our bodies.

Shower head
[Photo: Getty/www.boelke-art.de]

While that sounds pretty gross, these things play an important role in our health – and according to the Genetic Science Centre at the University of Utah, “disrupting our microbial ecostystems can cause disease”.

The new study published by Science Advances has found that washing too much might damage those microorganisms that protect us.

A study on residents of the Yanomami village in the Amazon, who hadn’t previously had contact with Western people, found they possessed “microbiome with the highest diversity of bacteria and genetic functions ever reported in a human group”.

And despite having had no contact with antibiotics as we know them in developed countries, the people carried a bacteria that had an antibiotic resistance.

Woman in shower
[Photo: Getty/esthAlto/Frederic Cirou]

So the study concluded that “westernization significantly affects human microbiome diversity”.

It comes as no surprise, then, that scientists are beginning to wonder if showering often is doing our immune systems more harm than good.

Bacteria
[Photo: Getty/Science Photo Library – SCIEPRO]

Dave Whitlock, chemical engineer and MIT grad, has sworn by this concept and is so dedicated to the idea that he hasn’t showered in 12 years.

His company AOBiome, which aims to “reincorporate AOB’s [ammonia oxidizing bacteria] into the modern human microbiome for the purposes of moving people towards a more health[y] state”, told Mail Online: “Modern hygiene has selectively depleted the natural balance of the skin microbiome particularly affecting AOB.

“By restoring the appropriate AOB levels, we believe a range of human health conditions could be impacted.”

So in other words, perhaps the dirt we’ve been washing off in the shower could be protecting us from illness.

But not showering every day? It’s a tough call.

Would you shower less if it meant you were less ill? Tweet us at @YahooStyleUK.

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