I'm often asked my opinion about the cause or treatment of some medical condition,

but the question to instead ask is, what does the science say?

What is the best available balance of evidence published in the peer-reviewed medical literature

you have to say right now?

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today, what our body smells can tell us about the food we eat, and we start with how to treat body odor with diet.

Vision is not the only sense associated with physical attractiveness and partner preference, body odor, signals

a variety of information on matters such as eating habits, hygiene, health, and more.

Based on a survey of hundreds of college students, men rated visual and smell information

as being equally important for selecting a lover, while women considered

how their potential mates smell to be the single most important variable, in other words,

women ranked body odor as more important for attraction than looks.

I've talked about the concern around aluminum-containing antiperspirants.

What can we do to make ourselves smell better?

Clinical studies dating back to the 1950s show that chlorophyll can be used to improve body odors.

This led to a wave of commercial chlorophyll deodorant products, but, as one

chlorophyll scientist lamented, because of the unfounded fantastic and sometimes completely

idiotic claims made for chlorophyll by the promotion in advertising men, the buying public, as well

as the scientist, will remain skeptical, and rightly so.

To be an effective deodorant chlorophyll has to be taken internally at doses that far

exceed those found in so-called deodorizing chewing gums and lozenges.

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