Those who take off their shoes when entering the house are right. Science supports them

From time to time you go to visit someone you know and when you walk through the door, unexpectedly and treacherously, he explains that they don't wear shoes at home. So you take off your shoes trying not to put on a compromising face, you leave your shoes in that tiny shoe rack they always have at the entrance and you get ready to spend the rest of the evening in slippers. And it doesn't matter that you were deathly cute that night:

These people are rare, or at least it is the name that popular culture has reserved for this part for some time. Ordinary people look at the custom with strange eyes. Will the victim not be cold, will the guest not wear a particularly horrendous pair of socks or with the odd hole? The stream of adjectives we have forged for these hosts is long. But there is an absent and more precise one: correct.

Because if. They are right. And they have science on their side.

Although, today, not wearing shoes at home still seems a somewhat Japanese custom, the few studies that have been done suggest that it is gradually becoming more popular. It may seem strange to us, but if we stop to think about it, there are no shortage of reasons. There are several studies that tell us about what really happens in two places that we normally do not pay attention to, shoes and our own home.

For a couple of years, we have empirical evidence that shoes are a great source of information to know what a person is like: thanks to them we can estimate the age, sex, income level or even the level of anxiety of the owner footwear. What we didn't know until recently is that shoes carry much more than good information. A study by a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona, showed that after two weeks of use, more than 420,000 bacteria can be found on the outside of sneakers. 420,000. To get an idea, the average toilet has less than a thousand.

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According to Gerba's work, of the bacteria identified in the sneakers, 27% were E. coli. (Escherichia coli), a type of bacteria that lives in the intestines of humans and animals. The author suggests that the "abundance of this bacterium may be due to frequent contact with fecal material both on bathroom floors and on the street." Most E. coli do not cause problems. But some types can cause illness and cause quite severe diarrhea.

Also by insects

It is dedicated to urinary tract infections, pneumonia, sepsis, and other open wound or soft tissue infections. While S. marcescens is addicted to conjunctivitis, keratitis and other urinary infections (in some cases, also meningitis and endocarditis, but it is much rarer). These two bacteria are what, to understand each other, we call opportunistic infections; that is to say, they tend to attack when the immune system is weakened and are usually involved in diseases that occur within hospitals (the famous nosocomials that we are talking about here).

However, unless we suck on our shoes regularly, the probability that some of these bacteria will infect someone is very low. This, which is bad news for fetishists, is what explains that in the houses where shoes are used there are no constant diseases. But there are more things to keep in mind.

Another recent study tells us that, although we may not believe it, every day we live with more than twelve different species of insects in our own homes. According to the researchers, between 32 and 211 morphospecies live in each house, of which between 24 and 118 are arthropods. A real outrage.

According to the census results, which are still very partial and can change depending on the climate, flies and mosquitoes are the most common insects in our homes (representing 23%). Behind them we have spiders (19%) and beetles (16%). Although in many areas these roommates are harmless, in others creating climates favorable to mosquitoes or spiders can be a serious health problem.

Until recently we believed that after years of insecticides and chemicals, the biodiversity of our homes was at a low level, but it seems that it is not. Furthermore, it is very curious that most of the 93 species found are not what we would normally call "pests". From what it seems, insects go unnoticed by feeding on our waste (such as dead skin) or on the dirt that we introduce into the house. It is precisely when the balance is broken (due to lack of hygiene, due to climatic changes or whatever) when some population triggers its growth and the alarm arises

Being a shoe is hard. They are the kind of people who get into all the puddles, those people who are always looked at from above and who society does not stop trampling. That is why it seems excessive to leave them at the entrance of the house: but, the truth is that they are one of the main routes of dirt and contamination in the home. Natural allies of the invisible inhabitants of the house, now it does not seem so 'strange' to take off your shoes at the entrance. Above all, in homes where young children or people with health problems live.