Five foods that could give you bad body odour

Brits are being warned their favourite foods could be contributing to bad body odour.

Health and nutrition experts at Prepped Pots powered by MuscleFood have revealed how consuming food and drinks like garlic and caffeine can cause us to smell.

Body odour can come down to many factors from medication, hormones and underlying conditions.

The foods which we consume also play a large part in our body odour with certain foods leading to more unpleasant smells than others.

Ashleigh Tosh, health and nutrition expert at Prepped Pots said: “Body odour is completely natural but the smell of it often comes down to a mixture of different things including the foods you consume.

“When we sweat, we have bacteria living on our body that essentially eats the sweat and that’s what causes us to smell. The types of foods we eat play a part in the kind of sweat we release.

“Red meat for example causes our bodies to produce fatty sweat, the bacteria on our skin thrives off of this and can cause an unpleasant scent.

“Our sweat is actually odourless and there’s a reason they say you are what you eat.”

Foods that could be making you smell:

1. Garlic

It’s no surprise that garlic could be worsening the smell of body odour. However it’s a great vegetable to have in your diet and shouldn’t be removed. Instead you can neutralise the strength of garlic by adding spinach or mint into your dishes to make the smell less intense.

2. Red meat

Too much consumption of red meat can also give off an unpleasant body odour. This is to do with how our bodies break down their high level of fatty acids. These make the food hard to digest and when this comes out into sweat it can have an unpleasant smell.

3. Dairy

When our bodies digest dairy, the food releases a compound called trimethylamine which has a fishy smell when released. If your body can’t digest trimethylamine properly then it may be released through sweat, causing a smell.

4. Caffeine

Unfortunately for coffee lovers, the stimulants within coffee and other caffeinated drinks can increase the production of sweat. Caffeine goes to our apocrine sweat glands which are responsible for producing fatty sweat that bacteria on our bodies eat – as the bacteria eats this sweat, it causes body odour. Caffeine leads to more sweat which gives the bacteria more to eat causing a bad smell.

5. Alcohol

Excessive amounts of alcohol can also come through your sweats and even your pores too. This is the body’s way of cleansing itself from the alcohol.