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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, welcome to What's Up Docs, BBC Radio 4's health and wellbeing podcast. I'm Dr Chris. I'm Dr Zand. Today we're talking about something that affects every single person listening to this, whether they know it or not. That's right, Zandi. We're talking about body odour. And some of you may be thinking, well, that's not me. But we're not just talking about bad smells.
We're talking about the smells that we all emit and produce. We all have a smell. And our smells change with our health, with our age. It's a very interesting biology. And body odour is something, I think it's fair to say, Zandi, that can affect our lives socially, emotionally, romantically, and it can be an early sign of certain illnesses. So it's really important for our health.
So today's episode, we're exploring body odour, where it comes from, how it impacts our lives, why some people struggle with it more than others. How should you think about the way you smell? Sandy, this is something you wanted to talk about. Why? I wanted to talk about body odour.
Not just body odour as we think of, like, smelly armpits, but a much broader conversation around the role that smell plays in our health and the way that we think of it culturally. Probably the most memorable and uncomfortable, embarrassing part of puberty for me was getting body odour. And there were...
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Chapter 2: What does body odour indicate about our health?
Feeling very uncomfortable about it. And they didn't think it was a big deal at all, obviously. But I remember feeling really embarrassed. Our smell does change as we get older. We make different chemicals in our skin. And that is quite important medically to understand as a marker of ageing. And these are not questions that we ask enough in healthcare. It's a delicate thing to talk about.
I think every physician with different patients, young and old, do have different smells. And Chris, I think the other really big thing about scent and body odour is that it has been important culturally for a very long time. How long? So the Lascaux Caves, famously the great cave paintings, 17,000 year old. And the wicks in the cave were made with juniper, which is a very fragrant plant.
Well, yeah, I don't know if they were painting and having a few gins. There's famous things like ambergris. Or the musk glands, you know, the anal glands from different animals being used to create perfumes for a very long time. So perfumes, commonplace in ancient Egypt and Rome. Almost all cultures have some way of managing the smells that they are surrounded with.
And we know from our episode on nature that scent is important for human health, that there are scent molecules from plants that get into our bloodstream that can alter our health in all kinds of ways. It's so interesting to me that humans have decided to do this when my understanding is...
Scent is very important for animals to establish who they want to mate with and who's their friend, who's their foe, everything from ants to dogs. And then at some point in history, humans are like, yeah, no, we're going to remove this information from each other. My question is, was it a strategic thing Like, is it a thing about yourself you want to conceal to your own advantage?
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Chapter 3: How do our smells change with age and health?
Or is it just a weird thing where we'd actually all have much happier, healthier lives in lots of ways, friendships, romantic lives, if we all stopped wearing deodorant? questions. We have the perfect guest. Matthew Cobb is Professor Emeritus of, not body odour, but zoology at the University of Manchester. His research includes how smell evolved, how animals use it to navigate and communicate.
Matthew is joining us down the line. Let's get him on the phone. Or the computer. The video. Digital laser display.
Music
Matthew, hello. Welcome to What's Up Docs. Great to be here. We are thrilled to have you. So, Matthew, tell us about body odour. What does it mean to you?
Well, it depends on the context. If I haven't had a wash, then it means I'm a bit embarrassed. I mean, part of the issue about body odour is that it's incredibly culturally charged. Yes, it always means a bad smell, doesn't it? Well, if I said perfume or fragrance of your body, then that would mean something very different. So the words are charged, you know.
And if you say body odour, then you think, OK, well, I'm a bit stinky. And for the last 150 years, especially in the West, we've got into this situation where we're trying to keep ourselves clean and not smelling of anything. And that is culturally very significant. But, you know, we're animals, and so we are just charged with these glands and so on that are producing all kinds of odour.
We've got sebaceous glands, we've got apocrine glands, both of which are around our hairs. The apocrine is sweat, sebaceous glands are producing sebum. We've got urine, faeces, saliva... various odours from the anogenital region, vaginal secretions, feet, and, you know, belches and farts. So there's an awful lot going on.
Basically, you're producing odours, whether you want to or not, from your basic physiology, 24-7.
From what you're saying, humans have a smell in the same way other animals have a smell. If you go and...
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Chapter 4: What cultural significance does body odour hold?
It might be true. Proving it would be really, really hard because you'd have to get people who had no experience of bonding with a baby and therefore smelling it and saying, OK, well, what do you think about this? And I mean, it would be really, really hard. Very difficult experiment.
You can design the experiment, but it involves a lot of deodorising babies, essentially.
Well... So part of the problem with smell is it's incredibly difficult to define and control. There are hundreds of odours produced by our armpits. You mentioned roses. There are about 150 different volatile compounds in the odour of a rose. That doesn't mean to say we are detecting all those 150, but potentially we could be.
So most odours are in fact really complicated blends of different things. And studying the laboratory is very, very hard. That's all I'd say.
You said 150 years ago, we started to deodorize ourselves and manage our body odor. Can you tell us more about that and the culture that led to that and how that's changed modern life?
I mean, it partly began much earlier than that. So historians have studied the role of smell in the French Revolution. And perfumes started to become much more a symbol, obviously, of wealth. And it's still the case today. You know, perfume adverts are just full of glamour and expense. It gives you access to a different lifestyle. That's the promise of the perfume advert.
And that very much took off in the 19th century with the development of commerce and all the rest of it. And it's no good, you know, splashing yourself with lovely eau de cologne if you've got stinky armpits. So people started to take much more time cleaning themselves.
And then by the time we get to the 20th century, then we get deodorants and a whole, you know, I don't know, you're too young probably. I remember there used to be adverts for Lifebuoy soap in which you couldn't tell your friend that they smelled, right?
So you'd have to whisper it to them, B-O, body odour, and then Lifebuoy, or other soaps are available, Lifebuoy was then preferred as, you know, you'd have to clean yourself up so you no longer stink. But it seemed so shameful when I was growing up, you know, this idea that you'd have this terrible bodily odour.
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Chapter 5: How does body odour affect social interactions?
And women are supposed to be these beautiful, fragrant individuals. And you've only got to go into the supermarket and see the range of products that are available for women to deodorise themselves compared to men. But I don't think that's because women smell more. I think it's because... women are more attuned to this current cultural norm that we've adopted. There's a cultural expectation.
I love, Matthew, your framing of this, trying to imagine the experiment that would answer the question. It's such a great way of thinking about these scientific problems. And there's so much of this kind of small research that is rumour and myth. And am I right that we want to believe it? I think it's lovely to think, oh, there's some secret thing out there.
Can smell or body odour tell us about our health?
Yes. And this goes back a long way. So, I mean, in the early days of medicine or what passed for medicine, one of the ways that you'd, for example, be able to tell if somebody was diabetic was smelling and even drinking their urine because you'd find it was very sweet. And so they've clearly got a problem metabolising sugar.
There's a great deal of interest in how odours may reflect early stages of diseases. And this is particularly the case in Parkinson's disease. So about 10 years ago, a woman called Joy Milne, who used to be a nurse, she was at a Parkinson's Society meeting where an expert in Parkinsonism was describing the symptoms. And she said to him... do people with Parkinson's smell different?
Because I noticed before my husband had any symptoms that his head started to smell different. And this led to a great interest both in Joy, who's what's called a super smeller, she's got an extremely sensitive nose, she can detect lots of different odours, and trying to identify the causes of this and are there links between this apparent ability to
to detect earlier stages of Parkinson's, before there are any symptoms, by particular smells. And it has been very, very hard. Huge interest around the world in this. They have come up with a number of potential odours that may be biomarkers of the earlier stages of Parkinson's, but there still is no test.
I filmed with Joy for a kids' show for Operation Ouch, and it is the most extraordinary thing to watch her detect these scents. I mean, she's really the only person I've ever met, I think, with what I would describe as a superpower. If you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.
She is extraordinary. There are other people like that, you know, people who are trained as analogues to develop wine or perfume who can do this kind of thing. But then using them as a probe to try and get to some underlying physiological disturbance is very, very hard to know exactly what's going on.
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Chapter 6: What role do bacteria play in body odour?
They only grow in a couple of places on the West Indian coast. They're Alfonso mangoes. So you can get them from late April through to the end of May each year. It feels to me what you're delighting in is the fact that you have these things that are hard to get hold of and rare, and that's what makes them delicious.
Well, that if you could buy them year round, it wouldn't be special or interesting. We record in the same studio as Kimberly Wilson, counselling psychologist. Host of our sister podcast, Complex. And I came in one day and Kimberly was eating a big container of blueberries. Not like having the five, but, you know, eating the whole thing. And it absolutely blew my mind.
And she said, well, look, this is the way it works. You know, blueberry season, you just eat a massive amount of blueberries. And it really sort of stuck in my head. And I honestly, from Feb, I am like, oh, mango season's coming. And it's like a thing I look forward to.
I mean, the seasonal eating is very interesting because I see, you know, just at the end of the summer, the blackberry season, and last year when it was about 1%. Our son Rex must have eaten, I mean, hundreds of grams of blackberries a day, just shoveling them in as though he had sort of scurvy or something. You know, it was just guzzling them down.
Something in these fruits and plants is terribly good for us. And maybe we are a bit evolved to have a sort of glut at one point of the year and that'll get you through. Can I say that I buy the mangoes once a year in these big boxes and it's way, way cheaper than buying the fruit and veg at the shop at the end of the road?
Chris, I think the case for seasonal eating for me is that there is nothing better than really gorging on fresh berries. But the only way at least I think most people can afford to do it is foraging, you know, towards the end of the summer. Go and find some bramble bushes that aren't like right next to a railway or a public toilet.
Zon, do you think one of the really joyful things about foraging for, you know, blackberries is the sense of money saved? Fruit... Is expensive. Find a good bush at a good time of year and someone else hasn't had access, you can get like 50 quids worth of berries off it. I like that. But you always pick above the level of a tall dog. Well, that's it for this episode.
We do love getting listener messages, comments. Keep them coming. Zandi, we've also got a few people to thank at the BBC. Assistant Editor Greg Smith and Commissioning Editor Rhian Roberts. And here in the studio. Thanks to the lovely team at Loftus Media. Our producer was Joe Rountree. Dr. Samara Linton is our assistant producer and researcher for this episode.
Andres Albert was our studio engineer. Leon Gower is our visual producer who expertly crafts our socials. Do check them out. Along with all the previous What's Up Docs episodes, they are available in the feed on BBC Sounds. That's it from us. Until next time, take care of yourselves and your smells and each other.
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