why take bath everyday

The act of taking a bath doesn’t necessarily need gussying up. Simply submerging your body in hot water and rubbing yourself with an emulsifying agent will get you clean enough, with the potentially added benefits of wicking away stress and inducing relaxation. But in this age of high-tech shower heads and limited free time, the utilitarian shower has won out over the bath. You don’t have to wait for the tub to fill, you’re not stewing in your own juices, and the added pressure of the shower helps blast dirt, skin cells, and natural oils from your body. The bath just can’t compete with the shower for its cleaning prowess.

Who takes baths for cleanliness, though? Let’s face it: a bath is about relaxation. It’s about treating yourself, soothing sore muscles, catching up on a good book, and letting go and forgetting about the madness of what just transpired that day. It’s a mini-vacation. And there may even be some health benefits. Like anything with those qualities, it can probably be improved upon, or “hacked,” if you will. If we care about our health – and how much we enjoy the little things that make life worth living – we owe it to ourselves to take a better bath.

Here’s how to do it:

Add epsom salts or magnesium chloride flakes.

If you could make just one change to your bath routine, it should be to add a source of magnesium to your water. Epsom salts, available in every drug store I’ve ever entered, contain magnesium sulfate. Magnesium chloride flakes, available online and in aquarium supply shops, contain magnesium chloride (obviously). Both are helpful additions to your bathwater, and both can increase serum levels of magnesium when applied to the skin.

In one study (PDF), subjects took daily epsom salt baths for a week straight. Each bath was 12 minutes in duration and varied between 50 and 55 ºC. When the week was up, magnesium levels were significantly elevated in the majority of the subjects. In a few people whose pre-treatment levels were already replete, urinary excretion of magnesium increased, suggesting that excess magnesium does get absorbed but not retained. As an added bonus, epsom salt baths also provide ample amounts of bioavailable sulfate, a hugely important mineral in mammalian physiology.

Topical magnesium chloride has also been shown to increase serum levels of magnesium in human subjects (PDF). Every day for 12 weeks, subjects were given 20 sprays of magnesium chloride to the body and took a 20-minute foot bath in a magnesium chloride solution. After 12 weeks, hair mineral analysis showed that participants increased magnesium levels by an average of nearly 60%. They also improved their calcium:magnesium ratios.

Because they’re so heavy, epsom salts just aren’t very economical to purchase online. The shipping precludes it, unless you buy 25-50 pounds a time. Even then, most drug stores offer epsom salts for around a dollar a pound.

Add other salts.

It’s tough to get real information on actual bath salts, because googling “bath salts” returns page after page of information on the notorious designer drugs masquerading as bath salts. As far as I can tell, the only significant body of bath salt research in existence deals with Dead Sea salts. It seems that bathing in Dead Sea salts, also called Tomesa therapy, improved the skin health of patients with psoriasis and normalized the levels of Langerhans cells (a kind of macrophage that helps with tissue healing and can get out of control in certain skin diseases). A bath in regular sodium chloride (salt) had no effect. Another study found that magnesium-rich Dead Sea water improved skin hydration, skin barrier function, and reduced skin inflammation in atopic dry skin.