This can’t be very good news for men’s cologne and deodorant makers! No need to buy these products anymore to smell nice and attract the opposite sex – just grab some broccoli and an apple!
It’s been known for a while that male body scent is to women like a flower is to foraging worker honey bees. Mighty attractive. But apparently, not all male scents have equal power in this cavort. A new study says that females prefer the body odour of men who ate a lot of fruits and vegetables to those who pork out on carbs such as bread and pasta.
While this finding may seem silly at first glance, the important role scent plays in human sexuality has been researched before. Ian Stephen of Macquarie University in Australia and this study’s author, said, “We’ve known for a while that odour is an important component of attractiveness, especially for women.” This all goes way back in our evolution when our sweat signalled our health status and therefore our ability to procreate and perpetuate a species.
Back to the study. Dietary habits of 43 young men were determined with a spectrophotometer which uses a light to find pigments from colourful plants on the skin, and from info provided in subjects’ self-questionnaires. These men then put on a clean shirt and exercised to sweat. Nine women were asked to rate the odour of the shirts. “We asked the women to rate how much they liked it, how floral, how fruity,” and to give a few other descriptors, Stephen explained. The bottom line? “Women basically found that men who ate more vegetables smelled nicer.”
As studies go, this one is small in scope but it may be a pivotal one. There are other studies that link plant-based diet to good health and longevity, and they— hopefully—made converts out of some men. But this one links a plant-based diet to something that may be more important to men than living a long and healthy life: scoring a hot date for Saturday night
