Short Stuff: Your Dirty Bed

it's Barry Manal of University Golden Pirates Love. I saw that guy in person in concert front row center. Yeah. When was that in Vegas? I don't know, two thirteen, fourteen fifteen? Was it great? Oh? One of the best ever. I mean that was a huge, huge Berry Manly fan as a kid, four or five of his records, And I'm sure my mom was just like, what is going on? Don't right? But we're not talking about that. We're talking about your gross bed and the fact that you lay

in it every night. Yeah. How often do you change your bed sheets? Once a week? Yeah? Same here. I think that's normal. Yeah. Um, And I mean it's not like it's not like I, um, like I used the bathroom, take my clothes off, and then just go to bed

without cleaning myself off every night either. But it turns out that from investigations into the human bed, you would get the impression that all of us do something very similar to that every night, because apparently human bed is, like you said, really really gross on the microbial level at least. Yeah, and then the point is not to gross you out, but it because it shouldn't gross you out.

Kind of my point. If you're doing it once a week, changeover, that's that's not too bad, no, because you know, we don't live on the microbial level, so we couldn't care less, that's right. But when you get in your bed, there are trillions of microbes that make up your own human microbiome, and you are you're shedding this stuff. Um, you're shedding well, kind of gross stuff at times, but it's on that microbial level, so you're just try not to think about it.

But there are fecal oral and skin bacteria, fecal bacteria that you're shedding in your bed on a nightly basis. Yes, under normal circumstances outside of this episode, you don't really think about that. But that's also the reason that your parents taught you never to lick your own sheets, you know. Yeah, well you gotta get the food stuff out of there first,

so you lick it. Then, well you just you you make a cup with one of your hands, the palm one in your hands, and then you use the other hand to scoop that stuff into the cup and then you eat it like that, like a handful and nuts. Don't ever lick your sheets. It's just right. That's a good point. So the the point of all this is, like you said, it's not that gross. Everybody out chuck. It's to basically say, um, humans are primates. Let's find out how much our beds differ from other primates. Bets

isn't that correct? Yeah, And these researchers at NC State University, I think, I think inen did this and they found as far as we go, about thirty of the bacteria and our beds come from us. Uh. Like I said that, the oral and skin and fecal bacteria, and they're like, well, that makes sense coming from our own bodies. And we are really curious because chimpanzees are close to us. What the deal is with them. Because here's the thing I

never knew about chimpanzees. They make a new nut, make their bed, They build and construct a brand new bed for themselves every single day. I did not know that either. I think that's a very refreshing fact that I had no idea about chimps. I I see them in a different light now, and I feel like kind of a jerk for thinking they were a little dirty before. Yeah, so they wanted to find out like what's going on in a chimpanzee bed and what they were kind of

zeerring in on. It's not like how dirty are they, but how much of their own microbiome is in their bed compared to um other stuff from their environment since they're you know, these beds are up in trees, Like are their tiny little insects all over the place, and like gross stuff from them? Or is it mainly just stuff from the chimpanzee. Yeah, the researchers were like, it's gross enough talking about human beds. Let's try to make

everybody barth by talking about chimpanzee beds. Should we cliffhanger right there and take a break? You bet your your sweet, but you bet your sweet chimpanzee. All right, we'll be back with Zippy the Chimp right after this as skuld Okay, we're back and we're with Zippy the Chimp. Is that a new chimper? Is that like a throwback from the fifties? Um, Zippy was an actual uh lovey as my daughter calls, some little stuffed animal that I had when I was little,

and it had a hand that you could squeeze. It was he wearing red overalls in a red cap. I think Zippy had red. Do you remember remember when we used to make like galleries on the blogs as part of our job. You made you made knockoff lovees, right, they I found like the I made it one of the best galleries ever. Was like the most unsettling dolls of all time, and that it was like fifty or sixty of them. But Zippy was definitely in there. Those are those are weird times when they were like the

page views equal money, guys. I know, if you could come up with like a hundred pictures, let's say, yeah, it was a step up from the knockoff wallets. They had a sewing prior to that. I thank god for the blogs coming along. Yes, A Zippi with war Red and then uh, my mom was so great. Also, my one of my favorite books growing up was Cortu Roy the Bear, the Department Store Bear and Corturoy war green

Corturoy overalls. And my mom took a Teddy Bear lovey that looked like cot Roy and made homemade these little green coote Roy overalls for him. That is so sweet and I still have that now. My daughter has it in her room with her other fifty lovees. That is very sweet. That is a great story. I'm glad you you use that as a tangent and not because that this this article is a little thin. Well we are

killing some time, aren't we. So um, we're talking about this study where they wanted to basically compare um human beds to chimpanzee beds to just you know, basically make chips look bad, point out how great humans are. And they went back and they looked at their findings and they went what and found that no, no, no, chimps actually are pretty clean if you compare beds to beds

between humans and other primates including chimps. Yeah, I think they got They went to Tanzania, which is a great place to go if you want to get some chimps. And they got swabs from forty one chimpanzee beds or nests they call him nests too, and then they tested

those for the diversity, the micro microbial biodiversity. And then I think for fifteen of those nests they even use vacuums because I talked about the insects and stuff that you're invariably gonna get when you live in the woods in a nest, Yeah, and they wanted to see kind of what was in there, so they vacuumed up about

fifteen of them. And then, like you said, they thought they were going to see about the same thing, which is that chimpanzees had a bunch of gross stuff from their own bodies and their beds, and they found the opposite. They found almost entirely the bed were almost entirely lacking. Uh. They did find that the bacteria, environmental bacteria is what

dominated the nest and not chimpanzee gunk. Yeah, no oral, no skin, no fecal bacteria even And get this, everybody like if you sleep naked, yes, you're gonna get some fecal bacteria on your bed sheets. This is inevitable no matter how clean you are. I'm sorry, we're talking about microbes here. It's okay, it's okay, it's normal. Chimpanzees do not traditionally wear pants of any kind. They sleep naked all the time without variation, unless unless they live at

a house and they wear pants. But that is definitely not the norm among chimpanzees in the wild. No pants. And yet not a single type of fecal bacteria that's known to inhabit chimpanzees feces was found in their nests and any of the nests that they studied, which means it's sad to say everyone, chimpanzees are way cleaner than you.

When it comes to beds. Yeah, I mean, what we've done is we've gotten rid of you know, we don't wear shoes in bed, heaven forbid, and stuff like that, so we're not tracking in as much stuff from the outside. We generally changed into jammys or uh, heaven forbid. If he sleep naked in your bed, like you were just talking about, I can't do that, never have been able to.

I have a friend who warned me never to sleep naked because he was in a house fire once and his life was actually saved by the person whose apartment he was at, and um, he was sleeping naked and ended up outside in this condo complex totally naked in the middle of the night because of this fire that again his life had just been saved from. So he was grateful to be alive, but also ungrateful to have been naked. And I don't believe he ever slept naked

again after that. And he said one of the neighbors gave him like a blanket or something, but he was standing out there naked for a little while thanks to that house fire. Yeah, I sleep on top of the covers generally, like sometimes i'll snuggle up under and like the dead of winter, but I basically just sleep completely on top of the bed. And the thought of sleeping completely on top of the bed completely naked is makes

me feel vulnerable. I think it's disgusting. Nobody wants to see that, and you know, I don't know, I just I feel really vulnerable, like, oh yeah, like somebody could come along and punch any terrible place, just whatever. I just don't want my parts exposed like that all night, for like eight hours in a row. So instead you wear nothing but a blazer a porky biggott. Oh that's

good stuff. Um So, anyway, where I was going is is that our beds don't have a lot of that outside stuff because we change into other things and we don't get that stuff on our bed generally. So it's just a less diverse uh set of microbes that are in our bed. It's mainly from our bodies. Yeah, and there's no mystery to why chimp's beds are cleaner. They make their own nests their beds night after night from scratch.

They just get a bunch of twigs and leaves and make a new bed every single night, which is pretty neat that. They're like, it's gross to sleep in the same bed twice. I can't believe humans do it. That's right, So we want to shout out once again. N C State University in their paper the Ecology of Sleeping colon the microbial uh and Arthur Pod Associates of Chimpanzee beds. Very nice, quite a read, very nice, And since I said very nice twice, that means, of course short stuff

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