In 2006, a pair of Czech researchers published a quirky
study. They recruited 17 male volunteers to either eat copious amounts of red meat or avoid it completely for two weeks straight. On the last day, they collected samples of their body odor with cotton pads and asked 30 women not using birth control to rate how attractive, masculine, and intense their scents were. Lastly, they repeated the experiment a month later, but this time switched around who did and didn’t eat meat.
Despite the switch-a-roo, women consistently rated the body odor from non-meat eaters as more attractive and masculine, but less intense, than that of their meat-eating counterparts, with the researchers speculating the higher levels of fat in red meat may be the biggest smell factor.
Though the research only studied a small group of people, there's more than a whiff of logic behind its conclusions. The contents of our bodily fluids, be it sweat, urine or semen, are
influenced by the nutrients we process and the waste products we don’t. That's why one of the tell-tale
signs of diabetes is an unusually sweet urine odor — the glucose that would normally be converted into energy by insulin is instead left behind to flow right back out into the nearest toilet bowl. Eating too much meat at once, as anyone who’s participated in a wing-eating contest would know, can also wreak havoc with your digestive system, leading to constipation and other gastrointestinal woes that might explain why slovenly meat eaters are considered smellier.
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