cold shower

Showers are synonymous with fresh and clean. They are the hallmark of luxury living and all modern American homes have more at least 2 or 3. Showers are a consumerist pleasure driven by cheap water and cheap energy. They are pushed by soap and shampoo manufacturers and sold on fear. Yes fear, fear of being dirty and stinky. The worst kind of ostracism.

That is why no self-respecting American would dare to go without at least one shower a day. Showers are not only an enormous waste of drinking water but they also waste a fair amount of heating energy. Now it appears they are not good for you either. Rather than being fresh and clean, showers are a fertile breeding ground for molds, fungus, mycobacteria, and other micro-organisms. Despite a wealth of cleaning and scrubbing products, keeping your shower micro-organism free is an impossible task. At best you will end up breeding micro-organisms that are resistant to any and every chemical you throw at them, including bleach.

Daily showers are a fairly recent phenomenon. There is little evidence people fare better or are "cleaner" when they take shower, but there is a fair amount of evidence that hot showers are not so good for your health. To begin with, long hot showers, the kind most Americans cherish are responsible for a lot of skin ailments. Nothing dries out skin like a long hot shower and we could probably do away with 90% of the moisturizers, lotions, and skin care products we love if we just kept our showering to an absolute minimum.

Daily shampoos are even worse. They remove the beneficial oils that protect your hair and make it look good. The more you remove them, the harder your skin glands work to make more and the oilier your hair (and scalp and possibly face) becomes. Better to leave your hair alone and let it shine naturally. Cheaper too.

There is more. The micro-organisms that populate our showers aren't just lining the walls with visible or invisible films. They are everywhere and no place less visited than the ever wet and warm shower head. What better place to incubate bugs? Plastic shower heads with their many microscopic nooks and crannies are ideal for growing tons of bugs.

Furthermore, when you turn on that hot spray, you effectively vaporize and nebulize those bugs and make it so they quickly and effectively spread around the whole room. And there is more. When nebulized like that, the bugs can penetrate deep into your lungs. Fortunately for most people, these critters are not enough to make them sick, although we have to say that nobody has yet looked into asthma, chronic bronchitis (COPD) and other chronic lung ailments. Don't be surprised to read a few years from now that those refreshing clean showers are slowly destroying your lungs.

For those with compromised immune systems however, showers are a veritable death chamber. Even a cursory look in the literature results in tens of proven cases of lethal infections that could be traced to shower heads. And rest assured, those with compromised immune systems now number in the tens of thousands. If you are older, a heavy smoker, HIV infected, have severe lung allergies, are undergoing chemotherapy, or had a transplant, you are one of the unlucky souls who would do better to stay away from the in house death traps called showers.

There is an upside to this story. First, you won't get smelly if you don't shower. People lived happily for centuries without showers. Few people actually suffer from bad body odor. You certainly don't have to believe everything the soap industry tells you. And finally, here is another good reason to save water and energy and live longer and healthier.