The Truth About Handwashing

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Regular (and effective) handwashing is important for disease prevention

  • More people say they wash their hands regularly than actually do (see today’s main feature for how we know)

  • Soap and water (no matter whether “antibacterial” or not) still beat sanitizer gel, but the gel’s not a bad option if soap and water aren’t available or practical

• Losing weight (healthily!) can be a challenge. Keeping that weight off can be even harder.

  • Today’s sponsor, the Mayo Clinic Diet, is a medically-backed, globally-trusted method that focuses on changing your daily routine by adding and breaking habits that make a difference to your weight.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

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🧼 MAIN FEATURE

Washing Our Hands Of It

In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:

• About 54% said "More times per day than [the other options]"

• About 38% said "Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen

• About 5% said "Once or twice per day"

• Two (2) said "Only when visibly dirty"

• Two (2) said "I prefer to just use sanitizer gel"

What does the science have to say about this?

People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?

True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…

Source: Do they really wash their hands? Prevalence estimates for personal hygiene behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic based on indirect questions

Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.

Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…

Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)

Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?

False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:

UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer

There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:

Situations Leading to Reduced Effectiveness of Current Hand Hygiene against Infectious Mucus from Influenza Virus-Infected Patients

In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.

Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?

False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of many bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.

Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…

Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial

Want to wash your hands more than you do?

There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).

Take care!

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Mayo Clinic Diet: effective, practical, and healthy weight loss

Losing weight (healthily!) can be a challenge. Keeping that weight off can be even harder. But, you don't have to do it alone:

The Mayo Clinic Diet is a medically-backed, globally-trusted method that focuses on changing your daily routine by adding and breaking habits that make a difference to your weight.

The benefits are far more than we could list here, but include:

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down – by Prof. Corey Keyes

We’ve written before about depression and “flourishing” but what about when one isn’t exactly flourishing, but is not necessarily in the depths of depression either? That’s what this book is about.

Prof. Keyes offers, from his extensive research, hope for those who do not check enough of the boxes to be considered depressed, but who are also definitely more in the lane of “surviving” than “thriving”.

Specifically, he outlines five key ways to make the step from languishing to flourishing, based not on motivational rhetoric, but actual data-based science:

1. Learn (creating your personal story of self-growth)

2. Connect (building relationships, on the individual level and especially on the community level)

3. Transcend (developing psychological resilience to the unexpected)

4. Help (others! This is about finding your purpose, and then actively living it)

5. Play (this is a necessary "recharge" element that many people miss, especially as we get older)

With regard to finding one's purpose being given the one-word summary of "help", this is a callback to our tribal origins, and how we thrive and flourish best and feel happiest when we have a role to fulfil and provide value to those around us)

Bottom line: if you’re not at the point of struggling to get out of bed each day, but you’re also not exactly leaping out of bed with a smile, this book can help get you from one place to the other.

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May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team

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