You Should Wash Your Shoes. Here's How

You wash your shirts, your pants, your jacket—all the things that bring you into contact with the outside world. But you probably don’t ever wash your shoes.

That should absolutely change, says Anne Sharkey, a podiatrist in Cedar Park, Texas, who views shoes as mobile petri dishes of germs. “You might walk through a school bathroom, you might walk outside in a dirty parking lot,” or you might step in a pile of dog poop or goose droppings, she says. Plus, “If there are a lot of allergens outside, those can sit on the exterior of your shoes, and there’s so much other dirt on them.”

Some research estimates that about 421,000 units of bacteria live on the outside of a shoe, and nearly 3,000 thrive on the inside. But machine-washing shoes can get rid of 90-99% of the bacteria in both place