Do Vegetarians Smell Better?

A Czech survey showed that men who don’t eat meat smell more attractively. Do you agree?

Survey of smell

Pavlina Lenochova and Jan Havlicek, scientists at the  Department of Antropology at Charles University in Prague, conducted a survey about the effect of food on the attractiveness of physical odour. They focused on the smell of armpits, which, besides genital smell, transmits a great deal of information – its function is supposedly communicative.

Smell plays an important role when we choose a sexual partner

The human odour is made up of the smell of skin, hair, breath, armpits, feet, perineum, the smegma, vagina and menstruation. The main sources of body odour are the final products of exocrine and endocrine glands, sebaceous glands and bacteria on the skin. Body odour plays an important role in choosing a sexual partner. Women supposedly prefer men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is greatly different than theirs and they would thus ensure heterozygotic children.

Our diet affects the attractiveness of our smell in a very important way

Other influences on the human sweat, besides genetics, are: the reproductive status, emotional state, diet and diseases. Havlicek and Lenochova studied the effect of food and focused on meat. The available data doesn’t make it clear on what they based their assumption that meat is a key factor which affects the attractiveness of smell.

The survey included 17 male odour donors, who were on a meat or vegetarian diet for a fortnight. Researchers collected the sweat from under their armpits on pads and 30 women who weren’t using contraception pills then smelled the pads.

They graded the attractiveness, pleasantness, masculinity and intensity of the smell.

Vegetarian sweat supposedly smells more attractively

They repeated the experiment in a month, but this time the men were in reverse roles – the ones who ate meat before were now eating vegetarian food and vice versa.

After they repeated the analysis, they measured the variance and found out that the same donors smelled much more attractively, pleasantly and less intensely on a vegetarian diet. We weren’t able to find the data about the masculinity of the smell of vegetarians.