Slashdot Mirror
Four Weeks Without Soap Or Shampoo
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."
She sounds hideous.
If you want subjects who don't mind not bathing for four weeks, just go to any CS lab.
I suspect there are slashdot readers who, uh, know someone who takes long spells between showers...
Most people have known this for some time. I haven't washed my face in years. It was the only thing that stopped acne. By "not wash", I mean don't use soap or cleaners. Obviously, some shampoo trickles down on it and I rinse with water each day.
Hair can be handled the same way if you have naturally dry or frizzy hair.
Captcha: untidy
Scientists know that the gut microbiome is important to proper digestion
Gut bacteria is more than proper digestion, it's a second mind.
It's interesting as well that one of the most important parts of a cell are the mitochondria, which by all rights are their own separate critter that set up a successful house in just about everything alive.
What a menagerie.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A 4 week test on something related to skin and they used a female journalist? Could by chance her skin complexion improved because of her menstrual cycle? There's about a 75% chance that she wasn't coming off of her period right before application so of course she probably noticed improvements to her skin, especially her face, over a 4 week test.
IIRC from the book "The Life That Lives On Man," the skin count of undesirable bacteria is maximized by daily showering. That's just frequent enough to wash away the desirable strains, and to keep things moist enough for the undesirable strains to proliferate. That research is over 20 years old, so I'd love to see an update.
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.
Reading the article, she was subject 26 of who knows how many. For all we know, she was in the control group, or there may have been separate control groups present. The article recaps her personal experience, not the complete conditions for the experiment. Maybe with the initial findings, they'll do multiple rounds with different variables as you suggest above.
Using soap in general isn't something I feel is needed since a regular rinsing leaves me non smelly.
According to your nose you may be non-smelly. Perhaps you're like a coworker of mine that could not smell BO. He didn't think he needed to wash regularly or use deodorant since he couldn't smell himself. Being an avid runner, he STANK most of the time; I mean he reeked to the point of making people's eyes water.
You really don't want to be 'that guy'. You might want to get a second opinion from an unbiased source (not "friends and family").
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Ya know what I'm thinkin'? D&D conventions.
Have you ever walked into a hobby store on a Saturday with gaming tables set up? Fucking unwashed pigs.
"Shut up!!! It's Baron Harkonnen cosplay! >:-( "
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Where are the control groups? Shouldn't there also be at least a few of these:
Perhaps I missed this, but it doesn't seem that TFA is reporting official results of a study -- it's just the anecdotal description of somebody who participated in a study that's been going on. All she says is: "I was Subject 26 in testing a living bacterial skin tonic." I don't think there's anything in TFA that mentions what control groups there may have been, nor does it imply that there were not any.
This is just one subject's experience that she decided to blog about... so should we really be questioning the validity of the study or its design when she doesn't even discuss methodology (and perhaps doesn't even know the details, since she was... you know... a PARTICIPANT in the study)?
About the only thing in TFA that suggests anything about research design is this:
A regime of concentrated AO+ caused a hundredfold decrease of Propionibacterium acnes, often blamed for acne breakouts. And the company says that diabetic mice with skin wounds heal more quickly after two weeks of treatment with a formulation of AOB.
Soon, AOBiome will file an Investigational New Drug Application with the F.D.A. to request permission to test more concentrated forms of AOB for the treatment of diabetic ulcers and other dermatologic conditions. "Itâ(TM)s very, very easy to make a quack therapy; to put together a bunch of biological links to convince someone that somethingâ(TM)s true," Heywood said. "What would hurt us is trying to sell anything ahead of the data."
"A hundredfold decrease," "wounds heal more quickly" -- these imply that there are comparison groups. And if they are applying to do testing with the FDA, they're going to have to do control groups.
Seriously -- what is it with Slashdot and the "But didn't they think of doing a real science experiment, with, you know, data and stuff" comments? This is a link to a blog post by subject in a study. You want details? Wait until an actual study comes out.
But if this company is planning on getting its stuff approved as a medical treatment or marketing it on its particular benefits, it would actually be incredibly counterproductive to design poor experiments, since they wouldn't allow them to refine or further develop their products.
Do you really think these people are idiots?
That's the theory, but it's a theory established back when we thought all microbes were bad, or at best harmless. Now they're re-evalutating the theory to see if perhaps it's not actually counterproductive.
The thing is those pathogens are going to get on your skin again almost immediately after washing anyway (think of everything you touch both before and after bathing), and if you've washed away the beneficial bacteria then the more virulent ones can recolonize your skin virtually unopposed. Meanwhile all your traditional symbiotes have been washed away, so you're not getting their benefits either. Could be a recipe to make people considerably more vulnerable to infection than otherwise.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.