Deodorize from the Inside Out

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 odor. 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 and 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. Studies showing the elimination of detectable underarm odors used doses on the order of 100mg a day. In other words, the amount of chlorophyll one could get in about a third of a bunch of raw spinach. So, before slathering aluminum onto your skin, I recommend first trying to deodorize from the inside out by eating a big salad every day, which may improve your body odor two ways: hitting the chlorophyll threshold and improving your health.

There is a scent to disease. Some diseases result in a characteristic odor emanating from sick individuals. For example, tuberculosis of the throat makes you smells like stale beer. Typhoid makes you smell like baked bread. That doesn’t sound so bad, though yellow fever makes you smell like a butcher’s shop. But it’s not just infection. I mean, evolutionarily, wouldn’t it be advantageous if you could smell the first signs of inflammation—immune system activation— to stay away from people before they become contagious?

What this team of researchers did was inject people with endotoxin, which is a highly inflammatory component of certain bacterial cell walls. Caused a big spike of internal inflammation, and the question is: Could you smell it on people? Within just a few hours, endotoxin-exposed individuals had a more aversive body odor relative to when they were exposed to a placebo––a significantly less pleasant body odor within hours. Moreover, the more inflamed they got, the worse they smelled, providing the first experimental evidence that we can smell inflammation on people.

And guess where endotoxins are found in the food supply? Where bacteria are found––in meat. And they’re not destroyed by cooking. I have a whole series of videos about that. We know meat causes inflammation. So, does that mean it makes people smelly? You don’t know, until you put it to the test. “The effect of meat consumption on body odor attractiveness.” Not just body odor, but body odor attractiveness.

For two weeks, male “odor donors” were placed on a diet that included meat or excluded meat, a no-meat diet. And then, during the final 24 hours, they had pads taped into their armpits to collect their body odor. Then, the researchers just needed some judges to sniff the pads off each of the men. So, fresh odor samples—hot off the pits, less than an hour old—were assessed for their pleasantness, attractiveness, masculinity, and intensity by 30 women.

A month later, the study was repeated with the same guys, but now following the other diet. The same poor women were used as judges. The men, incidentally, were paid 2,000 in Czech currency for their time and “potential inconvenience caused by the prescribed diet.” But the women who had to sniff all those armpit pads? The raters were not paid for participation, though did get a chocolate bar after the second session.

So, who had the most pleasant, the most attractive body odor? The results showed that “the odor of donors when on the nonmeat diet was judged as significantly more attractive, more pleasant, and less intense.” No differences were noted for masculinity. The researchers concluded that meat may have a “negative impact on perceived body odor hedonicity.” In other words, those eating more plant-based evidently smell significantly more pleasurable.

In our next story, we look at how shaving before applying antiperspirants can increase aluminum absorption and also the incidence of cancer.

A famous case report, called “The Mortician’s Mystery,” in the New England Journal of Medicine back in the 80s, described a man whose testicles started shrinking and breasts started growing. Turns out, he failed to wear gloves as he massaged embalming cream onto his corpse. They conclude there must have been some estrogenic compound in the cream that got absorbed through his skin into his body—one of the first such cases described.

This case was cited as inspiration by a group of researchers that came up with a new theory to explain a breast cancer mystery. Why do most breast cancers occur in the upper outer corner of the breast? The standard explanation was simply because that’s where most of the breast tissue is located, as the so-called tail of the breast extends up into the armpit.

But that doesn’t explain this. It didn’t always used to be that way; there’s been a shift towards that upper corner. And, it doesn’t explain this: “greater genomic instability”—chromosome abnormalities that may signal precancerous changes. There definitely seemed to be something happening to that side of the breast, and something relatively new—just in the last 50 years or so.

“Is it possible that the increasing use of [underarm] antiperspirant which parallels increasing breast cancer incidence could…be an explanation for [the] greater number of…tumours…, …and [the] disproportionate incidence of breast cancer in the upper outer quadrant” of the breast near where the stick, spray, or roll-on is applied?

There’s a free flow of lymph fluid back and forth between the breast and the armpit. And, if you measure aluminum levels in breasts removed after mastectomies, “[t]he aluminum content of breast tissue in the outer regions [near the armpits] was significantly higher”—presumably due to “closer proximity” to the underarm region.

This is a concern, because, in a petri dish at least, “it has been demonstrated that aluminum is a [so-called] metalloestrogen,” having pro-estrogenic effects on breast cancer cells. “[L]ong-term exposure” of normal breast tissue cells in a test tube to aluminum concentrations “in the range of those” found in the breast results in precancerous-type changes. And then, once the cells have turned, those same concentrations can “increase the migratory and invasive activity” of human breast cancer cells in a petri dish.

This is important, because women don’t die from the tumor in the breast itself, “but from the ability of the cancer cells to spread and grow at distant sites,” like the bones, lungs, liver, or brain. But we don’t care about petri dishes; we care about people.

In 2002, a paper was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, in which the underarm antiperspirant habits of 800 breast cancer survivors [were] compared to those of women who never got breast cancer. The first study of its kind, and they found “no indication” of a link between the two.

Based on this study, Harvard Women’s Health Watch assured women that antiperspirants do not cause breast cancer. “Women who are worried that antiperspirants might cause breast cancer can finally rest easy.”

But, two months later, this study. “Frequency and early onset of antiperspirant/deodorant usage with underarm shaving was associated with an earlier age of breast cancer diagnosis”—as much as 20 years earlier—in women using antiperspirant, and shaving their armpits more than three times a week. And, the earlier they started, before vs. after their sweet 16, appeared to move up their breast cancer 10 or 20 years. They conclude that “underarm shaving with antiperspirant…use, may play a role in breast cancer” after all.

But what does shaving have to do with it? Shaving removes more than just armpit hair; it removes armpit skin. You end up shaving off the top skin layer. And, while there’s very little aluminum absorption through intact skin, when you strip off that outer layer with a razor, and then rub on an antiperspirant, you get a six-fold increase in aluminum absorption through the skin. So, good news for women who don’t shave, but “[o]n the other hand, [the] high [through-the-skin aluminum] uptake on [shaved] skin should compel antiperspirant manufacturers to proceed with the utmost caution.”

European safety authorities and the FDA specifically advise against using aluminum antiperspirants on damaged or “broken skin.” Yet, shaving before antiperspirant application “can create abrasions in the skin.” I’m sure everyone knows about the FDA warning, having read title 21 part 350 subpart C50-5c1 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

But, we get so much aluminum in our diet from processed foods—”anti-caking agents [in like] pancake mix,…melting agents in [American] cheese,…meat binders,…gravy…thickeners,…baking powder,” candy—that the contribution from underarm antiperspirants would presumably be minimal in comparison.

“But everything was turned topsy-turvy in 2004,” when a case was reported of “a woman with bone pain and fatigue” suffering from aluminum toxicity. But, within months of stopping the antiperspirant, which she was applying daily to her regularly-shaved pits, her aluminum levels came down, and “her symptoms” resolved. Although not everyone sucks up that much aluminum, the case “suggests that caution should be exercised when using aluminum-containing antiperspirants frequently.”

Recently, it was shown that women with breast cancer have twice the level of aluminum in their breasts, compared to women without breast cancer—though this doesn’t prove cause and effect. Maybe the aluminum contributed to the cancer, or maybe the cancer contributed to the aluminum. Maybe tumors just suck up more aluminum? Subsequent research suggests this alternative explanation is unlikely. So, where do we stand now?

The latest review on the subject concluded that as a consequence of the new data, given that aluminum can be toxic, and we have no need for the stuff, “reducing the concentration of this metal in antiperspirants is a matter of urgency.” Or, at the very least, it should say on the label: Do not use after shaving. Or, we could cease usage of aluminum-containing antiperspirants altogether.

But then, won’t we stink? Ironically, antiperspirants can make us stink worse. They increase the types of bacteria that cause body odor. It’s like the story with antidepressant drugs—how they can actually make you more depressed in the long run. The more we use antiperspirants, the more we may need them. Awfully convenient for a billion-dollar industry.