How To Tell If Your Diet Is Making You Smell And What To Do About It

No one wants to be known as the smelly person. It could affect your work life, your personal life and your self esteem. It’s pretty easy to detect another smelly person in the room but not everyone is aware when they are the smelly one.

Halitosis, or bad bread, is largely influenced by what you eat. According to a recent study, certain foods such as animal products and junk food may be making you smelly. Adversely, the study found that people with diets high in fruits and vegetables smelled the best.

How Does Diet Cause You To Smell?

The old saying “you are what you eat” has more truth than most people realize. Halitosis occurs in the oral cavity and affects approximately 10-30% of the general population. It can be classified as either primary, which originates when the lungs exhale air, or secondary, which occurs in the mouth or upper airways.

Secondary halitosis occurs when foul smelling substances that contain sulfur compounds get trapped in the oral cavity. You may also experience bad breath or body odor because of a chronic sinus infection, post-nasal drop, upper respiratory infections, renal failure, gastrointestinal disorders, and nasal foreign bodies.

In addition to meat and junk food, garlic, spicy foods, alcohol and tobacco may contribute to halitosis. According to the aforementioned study, fast food, instant noodles and sweets were most likely to make you smelly.

Foods that are high in choline, a concentrated compound found in eggs, junk food and other animal products can make the body secrete an odor similar to rotten fish.

What Foods Should You Eat and What Foods Should You Stay Away From?

Many people have a faulty gene that causes Trimethylaminuria, a genetic disorder that causes strong body odor to accumulate in sweat, saliva, vaginal fluids and urine.

The smell is created because the body is not able to process trimethylamine properly. Trimethylamine is a chemical produced in the gut that is needed to break down choline-rich foods. Avoiding choline-rich foods is the best way to get rid of that rotten fish smell. The following foods are high in choline.

• Eggs
• Liver
• Meat
• Poultry
• Fish
• Dairy
• Wheat
• Shellfish

Fruits and vegetables are generally very low in choline and are considered to be safe to eat without making you smelly. Try including plenty of the following foods to keep smelling your best:

• Beets
• Celery
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Pineapple
• Berries
• Apples
• Cabbage
• Kale
• Lettuce
• Peppers
• Zucchini
• Tomato

How To Prevent Your Diet From Making You Smelly

The best way to make sure your diet isn’t the cause of any unwanted smell is to replace offending foods with safer ones. Here are some tips.

1. Increase Fruits And Vegetable Intake

Try replacing junk food for healthy snacks to keep you satisfied in between meals. The next time you feel the need to eat a sweet try, try some celery or apple slices with sunflower butter instead. Replace potato chips with kale chips. Or try some raw carrots and celery dipped in garlic free hummus or guacamole.

2. Limit Meat Consumption

Instead of having meat every day, limit your intake to two nights per week and keep the serving size small. Four ounces is the recommended serving size of meat. As you could be simply starting to smell more simply because your portion sizes are too big. Make sure you keep your meat portions confined to the size of a deck of cards.

3. Do a Cleanse

Cleansing the body of smelly foods is the best way to get rid of bad smells quickly. Taking a break from solid food allows your body time to pass whatever it is making you smell. 

4. Replace Junk Food with Healthy Snacks

Removing processed foods from your diet will not only help you feel better; it will help you smell better! Try experimenting with healthy recipes at home the next time you feel compelled to dive head first into a bag of chocolate chip cookies. These homemade pumpkin seed butter banana cookies are very satisfying and can be taken with you wherever you go. Keep a few cookies in your desk at work or to have with your afternoon tea. Here’s what you’ll need:

• 1 cup oats
• 2 tablespoons Organic Pumpkin Seed Butter
• ¼ cup raisins
• 2 ripe mashed bananas

To make, heat oven to 180 degrees centigrade and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. You could also grease a cookie sheet instead. Mix the mashed bananas, raisins, pumpkin seed butter and oatmeal together in a large bowl. The texture should be like wet cookie dough so you may need to adjust the amount of oats. Scoop the cookies into 12 equal sized balls and bake for 15 minutes. Enjoy with a cup of herbal tea!