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.

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

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.

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. ?

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.

Take bromelain.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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