Foods that make you smell more attractive | Hacker News Reader

Foods that make you smell more attractive

bbc.com

62 pointsKorling58 comments

An interesting tangent here from the article:

  This is the first study on human axillary odour to sample a large number of subjects, and our findings are relevant to understanding the chemical nature of human odour, and efforts to design electronic sensors (e-nose) for biometric fingerprinting and disease diagnoses.

Individual and gender fingerprints in human body odour (2006)

~ https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsif.2006...

Any updates on how that's panned out in the past decade; robustness in the face of diet change, application in the field, overt or covert, marketing sales of magicTech to LEO adjacent bodies, etc. ?

Some ammunition for vegans:

> The odour of the men on meat-free diets was on average rated as more attractive, more pleasant and less intense.

…and vegetarians, and pescatarians…

> and pescatarians

The article goes on to say:

"Fish and beans, for instance, can cause body odour because they're filled with trimethylamine, a very strong-smelling compound. There's even a health condition, called trimethylaminuria – also known as "fish odour syndrome" – which arises when the body can't turn trimethylamine into a non-smelly compound, says Beeson. "This can lead to a strong body odour," she says"

I find rice pudding makes my sweat smell like pound cake. I figured this out, after going on a rice pudding binge for a week, and having my wife indicate that I "smelled funny."

She said that it wasn't bad, but it was certainly odd. I stopped eating it (which is good for me, anyway), and I returned to my usual stinky self.

Try Vitamin C:

"High-dose ascorbic acid increases intercourse frequency and improves mood: a randomized controlled clinical trial"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12208645/

In 4-Hour Chef, Tim Ferris mentions eating steaks from grass-fed cows… He became almost magnetic for women.

If I recall correctly, he was attributing it to his testosterone levels, which he was measuring. But in the book he also talked about garlic being part of his weight loss supplements, which this article mentions impacts attractiveness too.

it's all very scientific.

> Another study of adult men from 2006 by Havlíček's team can offer insights about whether meat makes us more attractive. The scientists looked at 30 men who were either eating a meat or non-meat diet for two weeks. Women rated their scent for their pleasantness, attractiveness, masculinity and intensity. The odour of the men on meat-free diets was on average rated as more attractive, more pleasant and less intense.

> "To our surprise, those who were eating meat smelled slightly worse than when they were not eating meat," says Havlíček.

The people in the study probably ate lower-quality generic meat. Perhaps the hormones (artificial and naturally-produced from stress) caused them to smell bad, not the meat itself. Although I’m skeptical there’s anything magical in grass-fed beef that “magnetizes” women more than a good vegan diet.

The book was exploring some about the nature of the meat eaten, particularly the fatty acid makeup. Tim Ferris was exploring grass fed beef against other meat, not meat against no meat. It could be some meat is better than others for scent?

> "To our surprise, those who were eating meat smelled slightly worse than when they were not eating meat," says Havlíček.

My guess would be non-adapted gut microbiome.

"What makes men more attractive to women? We asked a single man."

no mention of curry? the Jain guy that works with me smells so good of curry every day that i breathe deep whenever i talk next to him. it is quite pleasant. very much the opposite of stereotypical insults about men from india.

I hope you don't actually start inhaling deeply each time you're around your coworker.

Oh boy i did not say that the right way.

Probably because Jains don't cook with aliums

The article says that people who eat a lot of garlic smell better than without it.

(Although maybe not their breath. Last time I was in Japan I tried an iekei ramen place and smelled so much like garlic to myself I was too embarrassed to go outside for the next day or two.)

IIRC the lingering curry cooking smell is from fenugreek.

> i breathe deep whenever i talk to him

Imagine working at the office and whenever one of your co-workers comes up to talk to you he always sniffs incredibly deeply inbetween sentences.

Just needs some lick smacking and a very satisfied "mmmm..."

NB. Curry considered dangerous:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/24/d...

You must be one in a million. I can't even stand the smell of my (opened) curry jars. Where are you from

I don’t normally wear deodorant, and afaik normally don’t smell (I know, but I’m married and have discussed this, agree it’s not foolproof, I also have a really good sense of smell). I also exercise a lot and subscribe to the idea that sweating pushes out whatever would normally feed the bacteria and make BO.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that when I am stressed or nervous I definitely find my sweat smells different (and bad). Unless it’s just some heightened awareness and I actually always smell that way but don’t notice, I’m pretty sure there is a real causal relationship.

I've definitely had stressful days at work where I don't recall any feeling of being too warm, but I find my armpits, especially on my dominate arm, has a very rancid sweat smell that's different than if I were outside on a hot day or exercising.

Yes that’s exactly how I would characterize it

You may be interested to know that your sweat glands come in two distinct types: Eccrine for thermoregulation and Apocrine for the wild mess of emotions we experience.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/eccrine-glands

I love cumin (the spice) but stopped having it as it makes my sweat smell bad.

Cumin is an olfactory note in perfumery. When well-paired it adds a lovely and unusual note of spice. Example: The Different Company Rose Poivrée was created by Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer for Hermes before the current one. It has notes of coriander and cumin, subtle but distinctively there. If you like it, you like it. Unfortunately for me, after a while it starts smelling like a stinking armpit. Indole is another compound use in perfumery, at intense concentration it smells like poop.

Is there a list of the least and most attractive foods?

I came here to read about the pineapple and... nothing.

Ditto, but asparagus.

Take bromelain.

All of my girlfriends have mentioned being attracted to my scent. I always assumed it was a combination of pheromones and a vegan diet.

It could also just be survivorship bias - the girls who found you repulsive never became your girlfriend in the first place to comment on your scent.

No you should read the article. The effect of eating meat on odour has been researched.

The article says that meat diet people smelled worse than'non-meat diet, but it also said "But the same study suggests that people consuming diets with a little bit of fat, meat, egg, and tofu intake were also associated with more pleasant-smelling sweat. Carb-heavy diets produced the least sexy of scents.".

A lot of the vegans I know (a lot! I live in boulder) have a carb heavy diet.

Any way. The point isn't even about diet because diet is just one factor in body scent.

Most vegans I know consume a lot of nuts.

I eat a lot of peanuts/peanut butter, cashews, tofu

"has been researched" is doing a fair bit of work, although technically correct.

So has transmutation of metals.

Women sense your power, and they seek the life essence.

Never drink a café half/half, never eat gelato with milk, and never eat chicken parm. Otherwise you'll lose your powers after the third strike!

Sneed

I used all of the plants discussed, interesting meats like various types of game, lamb, offal, turtles, frogs, raw oysters, all shellfish in general, and a whole bunch of fermented foods including every kind of cheese, and all the curries, to filter out the squeamish during the partner search. 45 years later I think the strategy has proved itself spectacularly. During the pregnancy all that stuff was in the mix every day and the result was by 1 1/2 years old depending on the meal we called the kid The Broccoli Monster or The Asparagus Monster on account of the kid's hilarious enthusiasm. Fascinating watching the asparagus get inhaled. Also we didn't force it but when the crawler snuck into the fridge for raids invariably she grabbed the BBQ chicken or the ham. "Guess she's not a vegetarian...". We have pix. Kid recently got a food science MS from UC Davis.

Kinda figures this is in the BritishBC.

Edit: I'm very happy for the down votes, because it gives me new data on a subset of current HN commenters. Musk really needs you because those Mars rockets aren't going to be a culinary paradise. He's probably going to just put in a row of push button dispensers for that stuff they dish out on the ship in The Matrix. Unclear if the tubes go directly to a row of hungry mouths, or even more efficiently right down into the stomachs.

Rent free in your head.

What's happening here?

It would take a feastful of foods to make me smell more attractive. In other news, I used to be able to identify people by smell but I am thankful to have lost this ability.

"Carb-heavy diets produced the least sexy of scents."

Sounds like another win for my gym bros. The science is still catching up.

If I don't sweat enough, urea builds up in my skin and it begins to smell like pee/old people.

If I don't jog or do something strenuous for a week or two and then go for a hard sweaty run my shirt afterward smells like someone peed on it.

When I do jog/sweat regularly my body odor is completely neutral.

I would expect that it washes of? Why does jogging help but not a daily shower?

Sweating releases whatever is in your sweat glands - which builds up. If you sweat a lot really fast, it even ‘washes’ them out in a sense.

Sweat glands are under the skin, and a shower doesn’t touch them.

I've heard anecdotes that some athletes find they don't even need deodorant because they sweat so much during practice that it's nearly odorless.

Deodorant is also for when that sweat sits and things grow in it.

If they get cleaned up after their workouts, then yeah they probably don’t need it so much when actually working out.

Sitting in the cab/at home afterwards though will get a bit rank without it.

Aluminum-based antiperspirants, commonly called "deodorants" as a misnomer, do no such thing. Their purpose is to prevent sweating by sealing sweat gland pores. Many are dual action deodorant-antiperspirants but not that much of the former.

They have very strong antimicrobial action - the same aluminum salts are very strongly antimicrobial.

Maybe only female athletes who exercise in hot weather who have adapted to excreting extremely low sodium levels and also happen to have (relatively) low testosterone levels. Dudes with normal T levels are almost always going to stink no matter what because microbiology.

I had a work mate who also said he wouldn't need to shower because he doesn't stink. Boy was he stinking, lucky for us he left very quickly. Since then I treat all the arguments "but I don't stink" with a solid grain of salt.

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