Your Body Odor,Your Destiny

body odor, it's generally two different situations. One is, I'm on the train and there's a lot of body odor going on, and it's generally an unpleasant situation because I realize I'm way too close to a lot of people and some of them smell varying degrees of bad or rancid, and sometimes there's a there's some spoiled pants in there as well, I'm sure, but there's also a body odor

component to it. Whereas after a yoga class, who good yoga class, there's also a kind of a um, you know, a milange of body odors in the air as well. And I tend like that because it's kind of a kind of a hey, we all just worked out, kind of a smell, and generally, and maybe maybe arguably, the body odors. The individual body odors I'm picking up in that yoga class are simply better body odors. Is that possible that that these are healthy body odors that I'm

picking up on the train or unhealthy body odors? So, in other words, on the train you get a cross section of humanity, right, And some of them I'm sure smell fabulous, but then some maybe on death's door possibly, But in a yoga class, for the most part, you probably have a lot of healthy people working out, and maybe that contributes to your sense that what you're smelling is quite good. Yeah, And I don't know, Lamb, I

don't know. Actually if there's some interesting information that may support that um and we'll get into that, but before we do, we should probably just sort of review the fact that we all have this invisible cloak of odor on us at all time times. An odor artist Cecil told us, who I think, it's just the greatest thing since Slice bread says that we are carrying a database of smells around with us at all times, on her bodies, in her hair, and in our clothing, and these culminate

into a kind of autobiography of smell. This is the smell artists the German lady. Yes, yes, yes, the woman who has collected seven thousand different smells, the woman who went to this high falutint gala wearing like this crazy gorgeous dress, looking like Marilyn Monroe on steroids, but then doused herself in molecules of dog crap just so that when she had interactions with people, she could um, you know, both elicit their they're sort of like gross response, but

also through our visual process have people come to her. Right. And she was the lady that was on the panel we saw the World Science Festival years back, uh, and she she was the most interesting person on the panel for a number of reasons. But one of the things I always come back to is her argument that we

don't give our children enough language to describe smell. That we have a very limited vocabulary genuinely generally speaking on an individual level and also just linguistically as a whole when it comes to describing smells, So we end up saying, oh, well that's stinky, or oh that's that smells gross, when there's really there's a lot more nuanced than any given uh, comparing any given smell to another. Right, because you always take a shoe with stinky cheese. Right for you, it's

not stinky, it's delightful blue cheese. Right, or at the very least, we should use a different term to describe cheese that is maybe a little too pungent for us, you know, uh, and even pungent. I feel like pungent is a better word for the cheese, but it's not

necessarily the best. I mean again, language kind of fails us to an extent when we start trying to describe the complexities of the scent world that we live in, well, it might fail us because you could make the case that humans really got the short end of the smelling stick. And if we don't have the full spectrum of smell smells available to us, then we might not have the

full spectrum of language to describe them. This is a metaphorical smelling stick, not the one that a like a third grade or might bring up to you and tell you to smell one end of it. As far as I know, and would you smell it if they offered it. Absolutely never smell the smelling stick. So one of the examples of how we got the short end of the smelling stick is that no two people smell things the

same way. Yeah, this is really fascinating because, I mean it matches up perfectly with with experience, because we're always encountering, you know, people who don't like a smell that we like, that we think that we think of smells is too strong,

and they love it. I mean, just think of individual perfume that you walk into a house, and they'll be a particular odor that is it might be an instance, it might be some sort of a cleaning product, and to our noses is just too much, it's just too abrasive. But to the other person, that's a pleasant smell to wrap your life in. And and indeed, when you start looking at the genetics of the situation, um, it's it's

pretty startling. According to the Thousand Genomes Project, they're about four hundred genes coding for the receptors in our noses, and there are more than nine hundred thousand variations of those genes. So, given odor is going to activate a suite of different receptors in the nose, creating a specific signal for the brain, and that signal is gonna going

to differ from individual to individual. Yeah. Hiroaki ma Tsunami at Duke's School of medicine and his colleagues found that between two people about of the odor receptors are different, and they think that's probably on the low end actually bearing out this idea that you smell, the smells you detect and the smell I detect could be very different.

And so then that gives you this idea that we're not even all working off the same page when it comes to smell, right, it kind of gets down to that classic argument, you know, what if what if the color I see as our engine call orange actually looks very different to you? And that's generally generally a kind of abstract discussion to get into, because how do you

really break that down and improve it? But in this we see we see far more concrete evidence for the for the for the notion that, yes, each person, me, you, the listener out there right now, we're all living in slightly different sensory worlds, because again, the world we live in is ultimately just this, this this picture of of sight, sound, and smell that we form in our minds based on the information of feeding into our skulls, through our through

our organs, and uh, the the final product is slightly different with each person. It's kind of like the whole uh, you know, blind men in the elephant scenario. So, yes, of the sensory landscape, the human smell landscape is very

different from person to person. In addition to that, the reason why bloodhounds may be much better at seeking out sense and identifying them is because in humans were a bit hamstrung, and Professor Dorin Lancet of the Wiseman Institute's Molecular Genetics department discovered that more than half of these genes and humans contain a mutation that prevents them from working properly. Yeah. These are the the olfactory genes involved

in the recepting these different smells. Yeah, so it's kind of weird that we would have these but they'd be shut off. But there's another study that has come out that that gives us a reason for why that may be. Yeah. This is a March three, UH study from the proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Uh. The scientists looked at the obvious question that arises from from from door and lance it's u previous findings, and that is what what what? What's the deal with this genetic loss? Uh?

Is it relatively old phenomenon that affects all primates or only occur in humans. And they they looked at they looked at the data, and they were able to conclude that the drop and sharpness of spell is indeed a purely Homo sapien feature. Uh, and it probably stems from the development of our brain. Our brain ends up developing to depend more and more on visual data uh than it does on anything else where. When it comes to navigating the world around us, both the physical world and

the social world. We're depending more on distinguishing colors uh and the you know, remembering faces, etcetera, compared to simply going off on what does that person smell like? You know, Not to be crass, but from an evolutionary perspective, the more bipetle we got, the less we were on all fours. Yeah. The less we are on all fours, the less sort of sense we might be butting up against. Oh well, yeah, I guess that would be a decent argument to make

less less butt sniffing, if you will. Gosh, can you imagine mass transit that that was not bipeedle. Well, you know you say that, uh, you know, bear in mind that on any given train, some people are setting down and some people were standing up. So there are a lot of people that end up with strangers butts or groins, you know, just right there in front of their faces. So we haven't managed to get away from a completely In fact, public transportation is in a in a way,

kind of a return home I returned to form. Suddenly we are forced to, uh maybe not actively, but passively, uh you know, smell the rump and nether regions of the stranger on the train, and those rumps, those nether regions are telling us something. And we're gonna take a quick break when we get back. We're gonna find out what that is. All right, we're back. Before we start talking about humans smelling other humans, we've got to talk

about dogs smelling humans. I mean, and I'm not just talking about like, you know, a dog bounding into the room and automatically attaching it's nose to your crutch. I am talking about dogs that are actually ferreting out certain sense that might portend uh your degree of health or illness. Yeah, obviously dogs live in a far richer uh smell world

than us poor humans. I mean, anyway, if you've ever owned a dog, you know that they've basically just set around just going crazy with the smells in their general vicinity. And if you get them in a car, I mean that just must be like uh, you know, for for a dog putting it's his or her head out the window and smelling, it must be like that scene in UH in two thousand and one, a Space Odyssey where

all the lights start flashing past past your eyes. You know, it just must just must be a psychedelic experience for them. And so it shouldn't come as any surprise that dogs have been been observed to detect certain cancers by smelling breath and urine samples. The latest research, published in two thousand eleven in the journal Gut, showed a laborator retriever trained in cancer scent detection correctly identified of breath samples and ninety seven percent of stool samples from patients with

colon cancer. And of course that's because there are biochemical changes that would give a person a different scent, which would we think largely be undetectable by us humans. But there are a couple of studies out there that give us this idea that we might be picking up on things subconsciously. And I'm thinking about this this one research project, This is from the Caroline Scott Institutete, and they wanted to see if humans could detect illness and one another

through smell. They had eight healthy people who were injected with either Libo polly saccharide, bacterial toxin that produces a really strong immune response, or just saltwater, which doesn't have any sort of immune response. And four hours later, just four hours later, the researchers cut out the sweaty pits of t shirts that participants had been wearing and stuffed them into bottles. And of course you know what they

did with those bottles, They inflicted them on test subjects. Yes, forty universe these students had those bottles shoved up under their noses and they had to smell these samples and rate the intensity, pleasantness, and the perceived health of the odor.

And what were the results. While the researchers found that when the students identified samples that were really intense or unpleasant, it turned out that those were in fact the the individuals who had who had been injected with the bacterial toxin. And moreover, the greater immune response to the toxin, the greater the unpleasant reading the sample received. Right, So, so what's happening here is that in a sense, you're anytime there's an infection in your body, there is a battle

in your body. Uh you know, their their enemy troops on the field. So you're a moon immune function sends out troops to do battle with them, and you end up with what with with what a lot of dead soldiers on the field, and then those dead soldiers are flushed out of your body. This is a very simplistic, uh explanation and simplistic metaphor, but essentially it's changing the

rest of of your excretions. And then too, if you could actually pick up on the smell of the excretion, which which this particular study seems to show that we can at least subconsciously pick up on those smells, then we are picking up on the dead from that battle over the infection. Right. There's there's a real message that's being communicated there. And if you doubt that, think about this next study, which is all about STD and sweat.

It's a Russian study from the two thousand and eleven issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, and again it involves armpit sweat and the human smell response we'd get armpit sweat collected from thirty four Russian men ages seventeen to twenty five. Now, thirteen of the men had gone rhea, sixteen were healthy, and five had gone a rhia in the past, but where they had recovered. The men were t shirts with cotton pads in the armpits for one hour.

Then the pads were placed in glass vials. Eighteen women sniff the vials and rated the pleasantness of the smell on a ten point scale. Now they were given some words to pick out from a list to describe the aromas. So they had putrid, floral, vegetative, woody, minty, and fruity as descriptors. The women rated the infected men's sweat as less than half as pleasant as a healthy men's sweat.

And the women said about of men who had gonorrhea had sweat that smelled putred, whereas only the healthy men were described as a putred. And of course this all makes perfect sense, right because if if an STD or just a simple you know, bacterial infection, you know, whatever the scenario, if some sort of of of health situation causes your sweat to smell differently, then that is a cue to other members of your species that hey, there's

something wrong with this particular individual. They might not be the best mate, they might even be an individual I need to distance myself from within the community, uh, to avoid and infection myself. Yeah, I mean the messages disengaged, engaged, something off. This is a potential other even within my

own community. Yeah. And to underscore this idea, just to make sure that they had a little bit more data to press this up against, they found a link between the concentration of disease fighting proteins called antibodies, of course, and the men's saliva and how pleasant they're sweat smells women. The higher the antibody concentration, the lower the score. So

again we have that correlation there. Now you think about this study and you think, well, is it possible that you know the this this wasn't a great representative of noses smellingness. I mean, after all, they were all women. It turns out that you would want a woman doing the armpit smelling, specifically a woman, because they may have better detection of smells. Exactly, according to a two thousand

nine research from the Monolf Center. Uh, it's it's more difficult to mask under arm odor when women are doing the smelling. Uh So, not only are women better smellers than men, but male odors were harder to block than

female odors. Uh So, this this is interesting because it it gets back into the the situation we all encounter when we're walking through the store and we're looking at the various under armed deodorants, and we might it's easy to think, well, what's the difference, Well, what's the difference between the women's deoterant and the men's deodorant? Like, it's we all have armpits. Why does it matter? Why does one smell stronger? Why does one need this fragrance? And

one needs some of its cultural right? Yeah, because otherwise we just all be using acts and we call it a day. Right. Well yeah, except that, Um, a couple of things. One is that again, guys cannot detect smells as readily as women can. And to test this, they gave some of the women and some of the men pure under armed wet and then some sweat that had

been mixed with another scent. And here's what happened. When fragrance was introduced, Only two of thirty two cents to fessively blocked under armed odor when women were doing smelling. In contrast, nineteen fragrances reduced the strength of underarm odor for men, so it's not as readily apparent to men that, um, there you know that some sweats might smell. In other words, that the detection isn't there. And in addition to this, the actual male odors that are omitting these molecules are

harder to block than female odors. So there's there's a case there for a different kind of concentration, a different kind of smell in men's deodorance versus women's deodorance. Well, this this brings me back to the train again, where UH any kind of public transportation system, you're gonna have individuals, while reaching up to grab onto a bar or strap, exposing that armpit perhaps to the face of other UH

passengers on the train. And in that situation you find individuals who are both tragically lacking in UH in fragrances as other than their own body odor. And then you have individuals who seem to be way overachieving UH in terms of their their their personal perfume. Yeah. I worked at a place once where, um, the majority of people that were there did not use deodorants. And really didn't um. They felt like it was part of the expression of

them themselves. And this was a printing room, it was very hot, and it was just a swirl of fetted armpit stink. But I wonder if if this information, if this would mean that that females are they going to be more inclined to use an overabundance of deodorant or perfume, Since if they're going to have a heightened sense of body odor, then it seems like they might be more inclined to overuse, or at least use an amount of perfume that would be interpreted by US males as too

much perfume. If they better detected them, maybe they would avoid certain ones um. But there, I guess you could make the case that they could enjoy certain sense more

and there that's right. We have to go back to our original statement about how everyone's sense of smell is slightly different everyone's since world is a little bit different from the next, and that's probably why we're just constantly encountering people who are using too much perfume or not enough perfume, too much body uh deodorant or not enough. It's because everyone is is everyone has the knobs on their their their stink speaker adjusted in a slightly different way.

Now I'm not bringing up the pheromone angle here because this is different. That's a that's a whole other color thing, right, which is pretty controversial. But if you think about it, you could take say match dot com, and you could splice it with armpit samples to gauge at someone's relative health and you might be able to get a greater match here. And I was thinking about this because I was thinking about the hologenium theory that we've talked about before.

Um Eugene Rosenberg took some flies and it was a single species of flies, and he cultivated them two different groups on two different diets, brought them back together to try to find out if they made it, and they found that that bacteria and their guts changed the mating preferences of those flies. So when I'm thinking here, of course, this is really all ground breaking stuff too, because this is what drives we think this is a possible explanation

for speciation. So I'm also thinking that you use splice, you know, sort of like I like peanut coladas and getting lost in the rain, along with armpit smell and diet and maybe you could get the most accurate match with a made possible. Well, you know, apparently that is a new trend that some some folks are exploiting. Is they smell based speed dating system. Sometimes they even market

is a pheromone based speed dating system. But again that that's a complicated issue, like cuddle up to someone's armpit or oh no, if I remember correctly, it's based in you know, smell samples, like you in an old shirt and they're kind of putting a pile and you kind of root around in the pile and decide which smells appeal to you more. And then that's used as like

the first level of elimination in choosing potential mates. Interesting, well, I kind of feel like if it were that easy, then the whole mating and dating process would be pretty like black and white. Yeah, so, I I just don't think if we're there. I think that's one of the things that colors our perception of people. But obviously we hope that we're deeper than the smell when it comes to connecting with another person. Oh yeah, well, I mean any given smell, there's so much more than just the

there's the sense experience of the smell. But then there's the additional information we're ringing to the scenario, the ideas about what the smell is. That's what we talked about before. You'll have a smell of a fine cheese and an athlete's uh, you know, sweaty foot, and the smells can easily be confused with each other. But the context, that's what that's what's key there, because that's what makes the

he's merely pungent and the foot grotesquely stinky, you know. Um. In Paris a couple of years ago, I took a perfume making afternoon workshop and I got to create my own scent and I did, and I decided that it smells actually like my husband's arm pit. I called it like husband down pits or something like that. And the person who was leading the workshop was horrified. Um, probably for a couple of different reasons, and one of them

definitely had to do with the scent. And then then everybody passed it around and they got that look on their face like they were smelling an armpit. I thought it was delightful, though, well there you I mean, it all comes down to context, It all comes down to the different sense worlds that we each live in as far as smell goes, and possibly other senses as well,

but but we can definitely say so with smelled. All right, So there you have it, a little insight into the world of a body odor and how it can help as root outs who's healthy, who's not, and maybe who is who's meant to be our soul man. That's right, your body order your destiny question mark. So I know a lot of people are gonna have some interesting tidkeets to share about this episode. We all have noses, we all use them to varying degrees, so let us know

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