Do the East Asians smell better?

Maybe they do.

See:

"here’s another reason few Chinese consumers buy deodorant: basic biology.Scientists in recent years have shown that many East Asians, a group that includes China’s ethnic Han majority, have a gene that lowers the likelihood of a strong “human axillary odor” — scientist-speak for body stink.
That lowers the likelihood that they will use deodorant to begin with, according to a 2013 study by researchers at the University of Bristol and Brunel University in Britain, after a survey of nearly 6,500 women of various backgrounds.
“It is likely that deodorant usage is not widely adopted because there is, for much of the East Asia population, no need for it,” it said. (For those curious about such matters, that same genetic difference also leads to drier earwax.)"

The derived snp in question isABCC11. The G is ancestral or strong body odor.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018...dorant/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Here is the paper:

I probably have the worst BO on this forum, i need to abuse the speed stick otherwise my stench covers a 50 ft radius

edit: I think it also stems from what I eat

davef said:

I probably have the worst BO on this forum, i need to abuse the speed stick otherwise my stench covers a 50 ft radius

edit: I think it also stems from what I eat

Click to expand...

Have you ever been stuck in an elevator, or a cab with somebody from ........; OMG
I’ve been told that is food they eat that cause it. But I think that they don’t shower daily either. [emoji2]

I shower 3x per week and rarely brush at all but my teeth are healthy and I rarely get sick from bad hygiene. I can do what I want, it's my digestive tract and brain that's screwy

Oh my God. I sometimes shower 3x a DAY, in genera at least twice! LOL. But I think that having a mostly European and African ancestry and living in a tropical and very sunny place, like I do, naturally inclines a society to develop such habits. Otherwise, people like me would stench really bad. Brazilians are consistently the people that takes showers more often in the whole word in the surveys about personal hygiene, with an average around ~12-13 showers per week.

It's certainly partly due to the climate, but also a very strongly enforced custom (yes, people will stigmatize somebody very openly and even mock someone if he or she doesn't look or smell clean enough for their high standards). The hot sunny climate can't be the sole explanation since, if I'm not mistaken, Russians apparently take a bath much more often than Indians on average (and the worst in that survey which I read were... the British - yes, not the French!).

I think the food that you consume or if you have enough exercise will influence your body odor more than your genes.
I have been in Korea once and they all smelled very strong because of some ginger-like spices they eat all the time.
Whenever I took an elevator, I held my breath during the whole ride.

Ygorcs said:

Oh my God. I sometimes shower 3x a DAY, in genera at least twice! LOL. But I think that having a mostly European and African ancestry and living in a tropical and very sunny place, like I do, naturally inclines a society to develop such habits. Otherwise, people like me would stench really bad. Brazilians are consistently the people that takes showers more often in the whole word in the surveys about personal hygiene, with an average around ~12-13 showers per week.

It's certainly partly due to the climate, but also a very strongly enforced custom (yes, people will stigmatize somebody very openly and even mock someone if he or she doesn't look or smell clean enough for their high standards). The hot sunny climate can't be the sole explanation since, if I'm not mistaken, Russians apparently take a bath much more often than Indians on average (and the worst in that survey which I read were... the British - yes, not the French!).

Click to expand...

Here you go...

Americans, like the French, shower about once a day on average. The Brazilians are indeed the world leaders.





Having taken the tube in London, I can confirm the above. I think some countries need to get on the stick here. I never understood the whole "French" thing. I'm there very often, and they're generally very well groomed. It must be a holdover from the past.

I think people must get nose blind in certain areas. They probably literally can't smell the body odor any more. I don't know how they can miss the stringy, greasy hair and bad skin though.

Food smells, i.e. spices, beer etc. coming out of the pores are very distinct from the smell of actual body odor. I do think the latter is highly individual for whatever reason. It's terrible to say, but even after a work out, some people just stink more than others.

I have also heard some horror stories about taking the subway in crowded areas of London, too. LOL But strangely enough, if body odour is thought to be mostly caused by that ancestral allele, and not just as determined by other alleles (a veritably polygenic trait), I have also heard from fellow Brazilians awful accounts of the sour stench in the subways of Japan and Korea. And they also told me that apparently nobody felt the same, they were the only ones seeming to complain about the heavy odour coming from everywhere in the tube. I guess the strict Brazilian habits of hygiene (not only showers; for instance many people in my family regularly use perfume even inside their own homes, when they won't meet anybody but their own relatives), ended up making us particularly sensitive to any degree of body odour.

I think this study has to do with natural odor and not how you smell after eating certain foods.

Ygorcs said:

I have also heard some horror stories about taking the subway in crowded areas of London, too. LOL But strangely enough, if body odour is thought to be mostly caused by that ancestral allele, and not just as determined by other alleles (a veritably polygenic trait), I have also heard from fellow Brazilians awful accounts of the sour stench in the subways of Japan and Korea. And they also told me that apparently nobody felt the same, they were the only ones seeming to complain about the heavy odour coming from everywhere in the tube. I guess the strict Brazilian habits of hygiene (not only showers; for instance many people in my family regularly use perfume even inside their own homes, when they won't meet anybody but their own relatives), ended up making us particularly sensitive to any degree of body odour.

Click to expand...

That's nose blindness for you, I guess.

I think it probably is polygenic, going by my own results.

However, perhaps what your friends noticed was from the food consumed.

I've told this story before, so ignore if you've read it. Our insurance guy, Irish, has an inordinate love of garlic, which is not really typical of Irish descent people in my experience. He blames it on a Sicilian wife.

We were away on vacation and had gone to an Italian restaurant the night before. I don't use much garlic, because more than a little bit disagrees with me. Having smelled the plates going by I asked if they could go weaker on the garlic for me. Not Gerry. He asked for EXTRA garlic. The next morning we were the first ones down and shared an elevator. Two people got on at the next floor and immediately said, "What's that awful smell?!" We studiously avoided looking at each other until they got off and then burst out laughing. I told you so, I said. Now, everybody is going to walk five feet away from us.

I'm that way about unfamiliar food smells too. Sorry to say, but I really don't like the smell of Indian spices, and I can't stand the sour smell people, especially men get after drinking a lot of beer.

Until I read your post and investigated I thought my husband was the only person who routinely took two to three showers a day: morning before work, after sports, again later in the evening. He always wears men's cologne, and all shirts or tops have to be freshly laundered. Even suits are dry cleaned constantly. He's fired people because he thinks they don't smell "fresh". I think he may have an overdeveloped sense of smell. I always have to air out the house after cooking too.

I tell him it's actually not supposed to be good to wash your whole body more than once a day: it supposedly dries the skin. He just moisturizes.

Personally, as an Italian, I'm sorry, but I consider any country without bidets to be unhygienic.