Watermelon

The obsession with external cleanliness is emphasized in the cooked world for the same reason that exercise, dental hygiene and stress 'management' are, not to mention a few thousand other examples. The consequences of eating the wrong foods show up in many forms that we assume are just normal features of human existence. Rather than removing the cause of all these inconveniences, our culture teaches us to remove, battle or suppress the effects.
    There's no reason to believe that it is a necessary part of human health to shower daily or even regularly. Our ancestors (sorry to sound like a broken record) certainly wouldn't have always had access to water for bathing or showering. Since they all ate according to their biological design, they would have experienced no unpleasant body odor, so it wouldn't occur to them to bathe for this reason. Body odor is a result of the cleansing of waste products through the skin and mucus membranes. We raw fooders realize this because as we get healthier, we notice improvements in that regard. The more waste a person's diet produces, the more trouble his/her primary channels of elimination will have keeping up, which in turn causes the body to enlist the help of secondary channels of elimination (like the skin). It's common to hear natural hygienists reporting that they no longer need to use personal care products. However, we don't often hear about how frequently a person bathes or showers, so that's why it may be news to some that healthy people don't need to shower as much.
    Personally, there are times when I shower more often than others. A woman's sexual activity level and whether or not she is still experiencing monthly blood loss will obviously be factors in how often she bathes, of course. Notwithstanding these factors, the bodily waste that is eliminated via the genital membranes will decrease as a person gets healthier. It might take several years on a very clean diet for unpleasant body odor to completely disappear. Everybody has an odor to their body, it's just not supposed to be unpleasant.
    Dry brushing is not necessary, and is irritative to the skin. Our bodies have perfectly honed mechanisms for 'sloughing' dead cells, there's no reason for us to help it along and doing so only makes life tougher for our sensitive outer layer. :) About hand washing, my hands get wet incidentally everyday when I wash dishes and rinse my hair (I do this everyday with water only, mostly for cosmetic purposes :)). I hardly ever deliberately wash my hands, unless they're really (visibly) dirty. I don't engage in the popular 'germ' killing rituals, like hand washing after going to the bathroom. Those are behaviors that are borne of the idea that people get sick because they are attacked by germs, which is not the case, even if 99.9999999% of the people on the planet believe it is so. :)

(from Raw School forum)

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