I wonder about brushing without toothpaste?
I regularly brush without toothpaste. It works fine. The toothbrush tends to squeak a little when the teeth are clean. It might help that I'm vegetarian and have a pretty simple diet.
I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#22I use soap on my nasty bits, and that's about it.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#23My experience with going soap free at various times in my life is that it works a lot better for me if I'm not showering in hard water. In soft water (I've mostly lived places with naturally soft water), I can scrub my armpits a bit and they are scent free pretty quick. In hard water the stink doesn't seem to come off quite as easily.
Wherever I've had soft water, I've felt a lot cleaner even with soap. The difference between soaps is nothing compared to the difference between hard and soft water.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#24I wonder about brushing without toothpaste?
I'm not sure. I think it depends a lot on the diet. Here's a related article about that and the accompanying HN comments.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-toot... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543293
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#25What about when he actually gets dirty? Some stuff doesn't come off your skin without soap.
use olive oil like the ancient Greeks and Romans?
Or just use a plain old, natural soap. Soap is nothing but an alkali fat pressed in to a bar. If you can find natural soap without tons of fragrance and anti-bacterial, it's not bad for you or your skin. Overuse or overly harsh soaps are what kill your skin.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#26Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Betcha that only works if you match an ancestral diet.
In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismi…
"In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismiss its impact on our longevity out of hand."
I'm not a huge fan of the life-expectancy argument. Goto any hospital or old folks homes and see how many people are basically the walking-dead. There are patients who basically died 20 years ago but can afford to be kept alive for quite some time.
I'm not saying we should live like a caveman, rather just that I'm not a fan of the life-expectancy argument b/c I think there are too many holes in it.
And remember, most people are not living longer b/c of things like diet, nor did our paleo ancestors die b/c of diet. We are living longer b/c of medicine, advances in science and other things....people died in the paleo era from sprained ankles. We can't readily compare them.
It just isn't fruitful to compare the two eras b/c we can't control the variables to make a valid conclusion. However, using common sense, modern medical findings on diet, we can deduce that eating like our ancestor is actually quite beneficial and coupled with our modern medicine we can get the best of both worlds.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#28There was another article of this sort too. I'm curious about how soap itself originated though. It's alright if someone somewhere had an 'aha' moment and started using soap for hygeine, but for practically the whole world to use it, something interesting must've been happening?
I grew up on a farm. A pig farm. Between getting home from school and eating dinner, I had chores to do, in the pig barns. I usually came back from chores with pig shit all over my hands. If I hadn't had soap to wash my hands before biting into my hamburger, I probably would have invented it. Considering it wasn't that long ago (historically) that virtually all of the worlds population was agrarian, I suspect being d…
In the comments he clarifies that he still washes his hands with soap.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#29Depends on what you do for a living, or even what you do on occasion. There are days I come home and my hair is so grimy it's sticky, and my hands are black with grease, oil, and road grit. Water does not, I repeat does NOT even touch any of that.
Right, oil and grease are hydrophobic. This is the purpose of soap. It acts as an emulsifier, bridging the water and oil molecules together and allowing you to wash off grease and oil (often trapping dirt) off of your skin.
Antibacterial soap also kills bacteria that can cause odors but most shower soap/shampoo is not antibacterial.
So maybe we could get away with only using soap when we are actually dirty.
Re: I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year
#30There was another article of this sort too. I'm curious about how soap itself originated though. It's alright if someone somewhere had an 'aha' moment and started using soap for hygeine, but for practically the whole world to use it, something interesting must've been happening?
People were generally pretty dirty back in the day... You're going to struggle to get grease/oil off you without something like soap. Remember high school science and learning to make soap, how it worked, etc?
I can imagine showering without soap (I already don't bother with shampoo) but you'd probably want to keep it around for washing your hands after cleaning the house, gardening, working on anything greasy+, etc.
+ cue jokes about hair without shampoo...