The Link Between What You Eat and How You Smell
When people think about how they smell, they generally think about the scent of their personal hygiene, using deodorants, and wearing clean clothing. Very few probably consider their own natural scent or that the foods you eat affect the way you smell.
The saying, “You are what you eat” could be very accurate. Your body odor is a combination of personal hygiene, genetics, and diet, reported the Kuwait Times. Your sweat is odorless but when mixed with bacteria on your skin, it produces odors, which are influenced by what you eat.
How Does Food Influence Your Smell?
Diet can influence how you smell, some of them negatively and some positively. Food not only affects the way you smell but also how attractive you are to others, according to a study published in Experimental Dermatology.
How you smell has been used to diagnose illness so it makes sense that odor can also influence how you feel and how others feel about you.
Food affects your odor in two ways, reports The BBC, through your gut and through your skin. As your gut metabolizes food, the chemicals in the food interact with gut bacteria and that produces gasses. This can lead to bad bread but there are other causes of halitosis too.
The second way is through your skin. Chemicals in your food also travel to your skin via the bloodstream. Some end up being perspired.
Which Foods Cause Odor
While different foods have chemical components that influence your smell, the most pungent almost always contain sulfur. These include some of the healthiest vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and other cruciferous vegetables. When these make their way through your blood to your skin, it can make your sweat very stinky. Other foods like red meat and fish produce odors when broken down and beans also contribute to body odor.
This is also true of foods from the allium family like onions and garlic which affect the smell of your skin and your breath. But very surprisingly, a study published in Appetite, with 42 male participants, suggested that although garlic causes smelly breath, it actually makes people’s armpit sweat more attractive.
Although it seems unlikely, the more garlic consumed, the BBC explained, the sexier the smell.
“We replicated this study three times because we were really surprised,” the scientist behind the experiment, Jan Havlíček, who studies human ethology and chemical communication at Charles University in Czech Republic, told BBC.
The study also found that people who ate diets rich in carotenoids – found in orange vegetables and fruits were more attractive but men who ate carb-heavy diets had the least sexy scent.
What Does it Mean?
So how much of a role does food really place in attraction? According to Craig Roberts, professor of social psychology at University of Stirling in Scotland, scent is just one of the factors that influence how attractive people find you. “We are mammals, and like all mammals, odor almost certainly has an important influence on social interaction,” he said.
But there is no clear path to better body odor and much more research is needed to discover what food can influence attraction. If you find that some food makes you smell bad, it’s best to steer clear of consuming them during dates or other social events.
