Bacteria is everywhere, including your body. Some bacteria are harmful causing infections and diseases, while others are good for maintaining a healthy body. Your gut, for instance, requires good bacteria to fight the bad ones and improve the immune system.
Similarly, your skin is the largest organ in the body and is home to a wide range of bacteria. Some of these bacteria are good for your skin health. Unfortunately, with the growing range of cosmetic products, your skin may be prone to a number of skin-related issues and allergies.
If you want to maintain your skin health, you should also maintain the healthy skin bacteria. Here are a few ways you can keep your skin healthy.
Ways You Can Maintain Healthy Skin Bacteria
Here are four simple ways you can adopt to keep your skin healthy by maintaining the good skin bacteria.
1. Choose Healthy Eating Habits
What goes into your mouth plays an important role in how your skin looks. Research shows that your diet can influence the changes that take place on your skin.1 For instance, processed foods like cakes and cookies can trigger acne. Therefore, it is important to stick to a diet rich in good fats, proteins, carbohydrates, vegetables, and fruits.
It is also important to drink enough water (at least eight glasses of water) every day. Your skin keeps itself hydrated using the moisture present in the air and water that is present in the body.
2. Use Mild, Nontoxic Soaps
Showering is a part of keeping your body clean. However, with the wide range of soaps and personal health care products available in the market, many of us choose the fancy, fragrant ones over the plain products. This may be destroying the good bacteria present on the skin.
While showering, use mild, nontoxic soap bars that do not contain harsh chemicals. Experts report that certain chemicals like triclosan (liquid soaps) and triclocarban (bar soaps) can pose a serious threat to the health including bacterial resistance or hormonal effects.2 These may also disrupt the natural pH of the skin.
Therefore, it is important to use mild soap bars and other products that can keep your body clean at the same time retain the good bacteria on your skin.
3. Engage In Outdoor Activities
The skin is an important part of the human body that plays a role in detoxification. The skin helps in detoxifying the body by sweating. Sweating is a natural process and is useful to keep the toxins and other waste materials out of the body. Studies also report that the natural antibiotic called dermcidin can fight certain disease-causing germs.3
Engaging yourself in outdoor activities like gardening or outdoor sports can help you sweat naturally that can help improve your skin health and maintain the natural skin microbiome.
4. Control Your Stress Levels
Most of us are under some form of psychological stress due to mental, physical, or emotional pressure. You can experience this at your workplace or at home. Stress levels play a role in your skin health. Sometimes, stress can cause skin inflammation and may lead to skin issues like acne. Stress can also speed up the process of skin aging.4 Some studies also report that stress can have an effect on the skin microbiome to an extent where it results in impaired wound healing and may also cause you to be more susceptible to infections.5
So, avoid using cosmetic skin care products as much as possible and choose a healthy lifestyle to protect your skin and maintain the good bacteria to keep it healthy.
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