Why Do You Have Body Odor?

For us to have body odor, another thing has to happen before body odor can occur...and that is that we have to sweat. But it isn't the sweat that gives us our unique body odor. This is mainly due to the fact that sweat is primarily water and nutrients or minerals excreted by our body during the process of cooling down from being heated.

We sweat as a mechanism to cool our body down from when we have become too warm or too hot, either through our environment warming up or through some form of physical activity. There are other forms of heating involved with our body, like sickness sweating, a sweating fever, or disease sweating, but physical activity and environment are our main two reasons for 'sweating up buckets'.

During our sweating process, where the water is brought to the surface of your skin and then cools in the surrounding air, thereby cooling you off, the minerals and nutrients are left behind by the evaporating water and they remain on your skin.

After a period of sweating and you have dried off, just rub your hand or fingers over those parts of the skin that you have sweated from and you will notice the skin is a little rougher than normal. That is the mineral/nutrient deposit!

Now, we have body odor because of what does happen next in the cycle. This is where bacteria becomes involved as you perspire, and the bacteria starts to process the minerals and nutrients on your body. The bacteria that attack your sweated remnants they process those bits of nutrition through their own systems, and of course they have their own waste byproducts that they excrete. This is where your body odor comes from, the bacterial waste byproducts, not your sweat as such.

This is the unfortunate part of sweating, and unless you sweat whilst taking a shower where you can wash the sweat and bacteria straight off of your body, there is very little chance that you are going to be able to get away without some form of body odor when you sweat. Your are nearly always sweating, sorry about that!

Some people may have strong, pungent and excessive body odor, whilst other people may only be affected by a slight smell, and it has nothing to do with your age or your sex. But there is a case for your diet playing a role in your body odor smell. So if you are going to exercise, play sport, or be strenuous, try not to have a dinner the night before that is loaded with loads of garlic, otherwise you may not have too many exercise partners that day...peeehew!

So become aware of how your diet does interact, and impact, with your sweating and your body odor.