Some people scrub them every day while others say letting water run over them in the shower is enough. So are you cleaning these important appendages enough?

When you jump into the shower and reach for the soap and loofah, it's fair to say that certain body parts probably receive more attention than others. The underarm region no doubt gets the full lather, rinse, repeat treatment. Your feet, by virtue of being located at the end of your body, can be easy to overlook. However, according to some experts, your feet are just as, if not more, deserving of attention.

Both the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), for example, advise washing feet daily with soap and water. One reason for this meticulous care is to prevent odour. The soles of the foot contain 600 sweat glands per square centimetre of skin, more than any other region of the body. Although sweat itself doesn't smell, it contains a nutritious broth of salts, glucose, vitamins and amino acids, which serves as an all-you-can-eat buffet for bacteria that live there. And there a lot of bacteria.

"The foot – especially between the toes – is quite a moist, humid, and warm environment, so it can be a breeding ground for microbes," says Holly Wilkinson, a lecturer in wound healing at the University of Hull in the UK. This is exacerbated by the fact that most people encase their feet in socks and shoes, trapping the moisture inside.

If you zoom in on any square centimetre of human skin you will find between 10,000 to one million bacteria living there. Warm and moist areas of the skin, such as the feet, are considered prime real estate and are home to the greatest numbers of species. Feet are idyllic havens for Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus bacteria, for example. When it comes to fungi, your sweaty feet are considered a utopia to genera including Aspergillus (a pathogen often found in soil), Cryptococcus, Epicoccum, Rhodotorula, Candida (a kind of yeast which naturally lives on the body but can become an opportunistic pathogen), Trichosporon and others. In fact, the human foot contains a greater biodiversity of fungal species than any other body region.

This is probably a good reason to clean your feet. In one study, researchers swabbed the soles of 40 volunteers. They found that foot washing had a significant impact on bacteria numbers. People who washed their feet twice a day had around 8,800 bacteria living in each square centimetre of skin. Those who reported washing every other day had over one million bacteria per square centimetre.

However just because the soles of your feet are brimming with microbial life, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily smelly or that there is anything to worry about. As always, it's not just the number, but the type of bacteria that's important.

Staphylococcus are the

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