I think that there is some merit on his reasoning, when it comes to the skin fauna and bacteria. However soap is not there just for disinfection, it’s also to remove grime, as it makes oily grime soluble. And with or without capitalism, you don’t want to be grimy.
Also, the body odour part screams “appeal to nature” from a distance. Sure, we are animals; and sure, we produce body odour naturally. However that does not mean that body odour is desirable.
We haven’t always bathed daily, but we’ve had perfumes for thousands of years. I think that’s probably significant as well.
I don’t know if I missed it, but I’d say a study like this probably would be better still rinsing/exfoliating/spongebath/swimming etc with no soap (or using unrefined soap plants when needed, or maybe sparing use of a very basic/homemade unscented castile or glycerine soap).
EDIT: I watched the video and he said he does rinse
Yeah, one of the oldest known methods is basically using mud from a riverbed to scrub. It exfoliates better than a lot of modern things (like those damned nylon scrubbies) because it’s basically pumice stone dust. The friction from the large surface area does a decent job at carrying grime away. And since the riverbed is made up of sandy particles that are large enough to sink and not get carried away, nothing “dusty” gets left behind afterwards. So you actually come away surprisingly clean.
I’ve used it while camping before, and can confirm it works. The big issue is that you can’t get your hair clean with this method, so you’ll still end up smelling like wet dog unless you have something to cut the grease in your hair. But if you can get ahold of some shampoo, you can avoid the BO issue everywhere else with simple river mud.
Daily bathing is a fairly new societal invention. We were driving cars and lighting our homes with electricity before we were bathing daily. I wonder how BO was thought of before now, it certainly couldn’t have been considered as offensive. Cultural attitudes plus smell adaption? I just couldn’t imagine some old west cafeteria during the lunch rush not being unbearably smelly.
This is far from scientific, but I swear I have better “luck” on dates when I don’t wear deodorant or cologne. Like, I’m obviously freshly showered so it’s not like I smell bad, but maybe there’s a subtle chemical communication thing going on? Or maybe I just don’t smell like every other douchbag, idk.
We can’t sense feromones like other animals apparently. But maybe you have a good body odor.
This article is wrong about collagen supplementation, which is very well studied and does improve skin elasticity and is important for ageing people’s skin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33742704/
I take this person’s point RE washing and frequency is something we should reevaluate, but being sweaty after a workout, bathing feels like the right thing to do, soap or no soap.
