How important is smell in gay dating

Your breath might smell like the food you eat, but not your sweat. Body odor is created when the bacteria on our skin metabolize the compounds that come out of our sweat glands. Now, of course, at a time when good hygiene and deodorant use are commonplace, is the smell of our sweat a big concern? I put that question to the happy hour crowd at a bar down the street from the NPR headquarters in Washington, D. That evening he was ordering a burger on a bun and a side of fries, along with a beer.

When I told him about the findings of the study, he laughed it off. Carroll says people who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables are more likely to be interested in their health — "feeling good, looking fit" — than their smell. What we can eat can influence more than our waistlines. Evolutionary scientists wondered whether this might play a role in attracting a mate.

And as NPR's Allison Aubrey reports, a recent study finds that women prefer the body odor of men who eat a certain diet. Sometimes a study finding makes for good cocktail-party banter. So a few evenings ago, I ducked out of the newsroom, wandered down to a happy hour just a few blocks from the NPR building here. I was in search of guys who were willing to talk to me about their diets, their sweat and their dating status.

I met up with Stefan Ruffini and Jack Newman. They're friends.

They work together. But when it comes to food, they have very different habits. Newman says he goes heavy on the greens.

His buddy Stefan Ruffini tends to go heavy on the carbs. Tonight, it's a beer, a burger on a bun and Now, according to the new study, one of these guys diets creates a body odor that women find more attractive. But all those leafy greens that Newman eats could also be making him smell good to the opposite sex. We've known for a while that odor is an important components of attractiveness, especially for women.

He recruited a bunch of healthy, young men and tracked their diets. He also gave them clean T-shirts and instructed them to exercise. Afterwards, a group of women were asked to sniff the sweat on the T-shirts.

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We asked them to rate how much they liked it, how attractive they thought it smelt, how floral, how fruity. Neither the researchers nor the women knew beforehand who had eaten what. But the results were very consistent.

In sheep and goats, the mother learns to recognise its newborn young by smell within 24 hours, and in the following days will allow only that lamb to suckle. And the lambs themselves learn to identify the right mother to suck from in the same way, though they are, perhaps understandably, a bit slower and it usually takes a couple of days' exposure to the mother's smell. In fact, smell provides one of the best markers of who you really are. The reason for this is that your smell is determined by the same set of genes, the major histocompatibility complex genes MHC , as your immune system.

It is part of who you are, your personal chemical signature. The MHC gene complex is particularly susceptible to mutation, producing new immune complexes with each new generation. This is probably just as well, as these are our first line of defence against bacteria and viruses which are themselves undergoing constant genetic change. Our immune-system genes have evolved to be almost as changeable as virus genes in an effort to track the ever-changing biological threats that we face from them.

So smell may be one way of checking out who's a good bet and who's not, but it's not the only function of smell in this context. Female moths famously dribble molecules of an incredibly powerful scent into the air. Male moths can detect these scents in the tiniest quantities from hundreds of yards away and find them quite irresistible. These sexual attraction scents are known as pheromones and occur widely in the animal kingdom, including monkeys.

There has been some debate as to whether or not they occur in humans, but, in fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest that they do. There do appear to be significant differences between the sexes in their respective sensitivity to odour: There is now quite a lot of evidence that women in particular are quite good at identifying their children and their lovers by scent alone. However, we are by no means perfect at this, it must be said, and it is probably just as well that we don't manage our social world by smell rather than by vision — we would be likely to make an inordinate number of embarrassing mistakes if we did.

However, it seems that, having identified the right person, smell plays a very important role in sexual arousal for women in a way it doesn't for men. Perhaps as a result, women rate smell as more important in mate choice than men do, whereas men rely much more on visual cues, reflecting the fact that men tend to make up their minds about a prospective mate from further away than women do. Women need to get up close and personal. In a large questionnaire-based study, Jan Havlicek, Tamsin Saxton, Craig Roberts and their colleagues found that women rated odour as more important than visual cues in a range of non-sexual contexts such as meal choice, flower choice and attention to unfamiliar landscapes as well as in contexts of sexual arousal and lover choice, but men did not.

For men, visual cues were much more important, especially in sexual contexts and lover choice. Two important because it's really important, at a strong.

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