Green Ways to Keep Your Family Healthy During Cold & Flu Season

Go to any elementary school, restaurant, airport or government office and you’ll see this information posted in bathrooms:

“Please Wash Your Hands”

It’s that simple!  FDA-approved, affordable, and convenient, hand-washing is the #1 way to stay healthy during cold & flu season.  Consequently, well-intentioned people are pushing anti-bacterial soaps into our grubby, germ-infested fists like a sales girl at Harry & David’s pushes free truffle samples.  Almost 3/4 of all the soap sold today is anti-bacterial, but is this really the best product for keeping us healthy?

Enviro Girl doesn’t believe it.  Her sinks are stocked with rectangular white bars of plain old Ivory Soap (the soap that floats!).  She insists her kids wash their hands before meals and before bed, she makes them get 9-10 hours of sleep every night, and she puts plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables on their plates.  Three kids — all attending public school and a variety of extra-curricular activities — only one cold since last winter.  No multi-vitamins or other chemicals were involved in this success rate.

But Enviro Girl is not a virologists or a biologist or a doctor.  She’s a SAHM.  Let’s see what the experts say about this topic.  To find out, Enviro Girl went to “How Stuff Works.”  She already knew how soap works — it provides a slippery surface for things to glide off your skin’s surface and down the drain.  But how does anti-bacterial soap work?  Does it work any better?  Is her family’s health just a fluke?  She learned four things:

1.  Most colds & flus are viral, not bacterial by nature, so anti-bacterial soaps do not provide any tactical advantage against them.

2.  Because bacteria is a living thing, it can evolve and it does evolve to become resistant to anti-bacterial chemicals.  Consequently, anti-bacterial soaps stop working after a while.

3.  Bacteria benefits us — and anti-bacterial soaps do not discriminate between good and bad bacteria.  It kills them all, leaving us with fewer defense for our body’s health.

4.  The anti-bacterial components must sit on a surface for about 2 minutes before they work. If your kids are anything like Enviro Girl’s, you know that anti-bacterial soaps aren’t going to be effective because kids speed-wash.

This information made sense to Enviro Girl.  She considers pesticides that do not discriminate between helpful bugs like honeybees and bugs she despises like mosquitoes.  Of course anti-bacterial soaps will destroy helpful bacteria.  And she knows our bodies become resistant to antibiotics, so why would anti-bacterial soap be any different?

How Stuff Works referred to a study Enviro Girl saw years ago:  Extensive testing of anti-bacterial soap has proved it’s no more effective than regular soap and water washing. Even the CDC endorses this stance.  They agree that the best way to keep germs at bay is to wash your hands with soap and water, scrubbing well, for 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing the ABC song.  And if soap and water isn’t an option, the only practical hand sanitizer is one that’s alcohol-based because that will kill germs.

Enviro Girl sez:  Quit buying anti-bacterial soaps.  Save money and buy a six-pack of Ivory bars to keep your family healthy and germ-free.  Antibacterial soap is not better for your health and the environmental impacts are yet unknown.  We do know this:  bacteria keep mutating in response to the widespread use of these products and that’s potentially more hazardous to our health.