The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marksissons

and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

How to support healthy skin bacteria.

Last week, I introduced the concept of the skin biome, the vast communities of microbes living

on our skin.

For some reason, it was unsettling.

Gut microbes are out of sight, out of mind.

But skin microbes are on us.

They're crawling, reproducing, digesting, and secreting various

fluids and lipids all over the surface of our bodies. In people who've been conditioned to use

soap and water to remove every last trace of bacteria from our hands and skin, the idea that our

hands, faces, arms, and torsos are teeming with microbes, and that

it's probably unwise to remove them all, is hard to swallow. We might even recoil at the thought.

I mean, viruses and mites living on us? Really? Yeah. And we need them to be healthy and vibrant because skin bacteria

help determine our skin's immune response, vulnerability to allergies, wound healing,

and susceptibility to certain skin diseases, to name just a few things they do for us.

We have a pretty good idea how to cultivate a healthy

gut biome. We may not know everything and we probably never will, but fermented foods,

prebiotic fibers, and nutrient dense fat, protein and carbohydrate sources are a good start.

How about cultivating a healthy skin biome?

You pick up a lot of your skin bacteria from environmental contact.

For example, you're more likely to share skin bacteria with your spouse,

...