Whether it’s on a busy bus, in a sweaty gym, or on a crowded dancefloor, all of us have experienced an unpleasant whiff of someone’s body odour.
The pong might have you covering your nose, or reaching for the closest can of deodorant.
But if you can bear to sniff it, scientists say the exact aroma can actually divulge a lot about someone.
From the unmistakable pong of elevated stress levels, to the stale beer aroma of a tuberculosis infection, your body odour can reveal key clues to your health.
And for some ‘super-smellers’, even complex diseases like early-onset Parkinson’s can be detected with a simple sniff.
Dr Bruce Kimball, a smell expert from the Monell Chemical Senses Centre, told Daily Mail: ‘There are a variety of diseases that have long been known to alter bodily odours.
‘In fact, there was a time that physicians would commonly sniff patients’ urine to detect some conditions.’
So, can you pass the smell test?
Body odour might not be pleasant, but scientists say it could be a vital early warning sign of multiple diseases and conditions (stock image)
Rancid beer
If you’ve sat next to someone who stinks of rancid beer, it might not just be a sign that they’ve had a big night on the town.
In fact, a strong odour of stale beer is a common sign of a tuberculosis infection.
This is because the bacteria which infest the lungs to create the tuberculosis condition produce a strong odour.
Since these make their home in the respiratory system, the smell is often strongest on the patient’s breath.
However, in some cases, a person with tuberculosis will emanate an odour from their skin which has been described as ‘wet cardboard’ and brine.
Professor Perdita Barran, a smell researcher from Manchester University, told Daily Mail that we likely evolved the ability to smell this infectious disease as a survival trait.
She says: ‘The same as we have evolved to smell rotting food, it’s easy to understand how we might have retained the ability to diagnose something that’s infectious.’
A smell of rancid beer is a common sign that the bacteria which cause tuberculosis have started to build up in someone’s lungs. This method of diagnosis has been used since at least the third century BC (stock image)
Fish and urine
If your body odour starts to take on a fishy and ‘urine-like’ smell, this could be a seriously bad sign.
These odours can be a sign of severe kidney disease, which is interfering with your body’s ability to process toxins.
The kidneys are essentially the body’s filtration system, responsible for taking harmful chemicals out of the blood and removing them through urine.
If the kidneys aren’t working, the chemicals that our bodies would normally expel simply build up in the blood.
As we sweat, some of those chemicals leach out onto the skin, where they evaporate and produce an intensely unpleasant smell.
In some rare cases, a fishy smell might also be caused by the condition ‘Trimethylaminuria’.
This is a genetic condition which leaves the body unable to break down a chemical compound called trimethylamine.
A smell of fish can be an indication of kidney disease. When our kidneys are weakened, they aren’t able to remove the toxins from our blood, and these then seep out through the skin in sweat (stock image)
This chemical then escapes the body through sweat and produces an odour similar to rotten eggs, fish, or rubbish.
Overripe fruit
One of the best-known uses of smell to detect illness is the warning that comes from sweet-smelling breath.
Although that might sound pleasant, if someone’s breath smells like sugar or they have an odour like an ‘old fruit bowl’, it’s likely a sign that they are seriously ill.
A sweet smell is a sure sign of critically low insulin levels in your body, which can be a sign of undiagnosed Type 1 diabetes.
When levels of insulin, a hormone which our body needs to turn sugar into energy, get too low, the body starts breaking down fat for energy instead.
This process releases chemicals called ‘ketones’ into your bloodstream, producing an unusually sweet smell.
Professor Barran says: ‘That process releases ketones and we humans are good at smelling ketones.’
This process also turns the patient’s blood acidic, which can be fatal in some cases.
‘Paramedics are taught to smell the breath of people who have collapsed in the street and check for a ketone smell, because that’s a sign that someone has become hyperglycaemic,’ points out Professor Barran.
Pungently sweaty
If you’ve ever had a stressful day at work or had to run for the bus, you might have noticed that your body odour is much worse than normal.
This is because stress sweat really does smell worse than normal sweat.
Our body is covered with about two to four million sweat glands, of which most are a type of cell called eccrine glands.
However, when we become stressed, we start to sweat much more heavily through a second type of gland known as apocrine glands.
These are concentrated in hairy areas like our armpits, and produce sweat that is rich in proteins and fatty chemicals called lipids.
An intensly sweaty smell, especially from your armpits, is likely a sign that someone is very stressed. Stress sweat contains more fats and proteins that feed the bacteria on our skin (stock image)
Dr Kimball points out: ‘Our odour profile is not just a result of our own metabolism. We support millions of microbes, and they can respond to changes in our metabolism too.’
When these microbes are suddenly doused in nutrient-rich stress sweat, this triggers a feeding frenzy on your skin.
The volatile chemicals released by the bacteria as they feed and multiply are what give stress sweat its pungent stench.
Garlic or spices
Sometimes, the explanation for someone’s body odour is very simple.
Foods that contain lots of volatile chemicals can directly influence the smell of someone’s sweat.
When you eat a lot of onions, garlic, or spices, the chemicals which give these foods their flavour stay in our bodies.
Eventually, those chemicals are expelled in the form of sweat, where they evaporate off the skin.
A smell of garlic or spices can simply be caused by eating too many of these fragrant ingredients. The volatile chemicals in our food can stay in our system and leach out in sweat, producing a pungent smell (stock image)
So, if you have a particularly fragrant meal, you may be able to smell it for quite a while later.
Greasy musk
Although not everyone will be able to detect this smell, it is certainly one to watch out for.
A handful of extremely talented ‘super-smellers’ have the incredible ability to smell Parkinson’s disease – even before doctors would be able to diagnose the condition.
Perhaps most famously, a 74-year-old retired nurse called Joy Milne amazed scientists with her claim that she could smell Parkinson’s disease.
In a trial, scientists gave Ms Milne 12 shirts to smell, six of which had recently been worn by Parkinson’s patients.
Not only did she correctly identify the six Parkinson’s patients, but she also identified an additional person who was diagnosed with the condition less than a year later.
According to Ms Milne, the smell of Parkinson’s is a musky, greasy odour that clings to clothes and fabric.
A few highly skilled super-smellers have the ability to detect Parkinson’s by odour alone. According to one super-smeller, the disease smells like a greasy musk (stock image)
Professor Barran says: ‘The smell of Parkinson’s is strongest when a patient’s symptoms are least well managed.
‘So that is usually before they are diagnosed or if their medication isn’t working.’
Ms Milne is able to detect this smell because she has a condition called hereditary hyperosmia, which makes her thousands of times more sensitive to smells than the average person.
While Ms Milne’s talents are unique, Professor Barran says that many women have reported noticing a sudden change in their partner’s odour before they were diagnosed with the condition.
‘HE BEGAN TO SMELL UNPLEASANT TO ME’: NURSE DETECTS ‘MUSKY, GREASY ODOUR’ IN HER HUSBAND A DECADE BEFORE HE WAS DIAGNOSED
Mrs Milne noticed a ‘musky, greasy sort of odour’ in her husband Les (pictured). He was diagnosed a decade later and died in 2015 aged 65
Joy and Les Milne were childhood sweethearts who started dating at just 16.
When they reached their mid-30s, Mrs Milne – then a nurse – noticed a change in her husband’s odour.
‘He began to smell unpleasant to me and although we always were a loving couple, I was always aware of it,’ she said.
Mrs Milne described it as ‘musky, greasy sort of odour’, and would nag her husband to shower and brush his teeth more.
It was a decade later, at the age of 45, that Mr Milne was finally diagnosed with Parkinson’s after battling the tell-tale tremors, as well as fatigue and impotence.
Around the time of his diagnosis, Mr Milne’s personality changed, with the once gentle doctor lashing out at his wife on two occasions, once bruising her face.
‘As it was happening, his eyes looked blank, like he had no idea what he was doing,’ Mrs Milne said.
Over the next 20 years, the former swimmer and water-polo player became dependent on a walking frame.
He was even forced to retire from his job as a consultant anaesthetist due to his tremors and reduced concentration.
The couple (pictured on their wedding day) started dating at just 16 years old
In 2005, the couple moved back from Cheshire to their native Perth, Scotland, where Mrs Milne made the connection between Parkinson’s and her husband’s odour while accompanying him to a support group.
‘After we left I said to Les: ‘The people with Parkinson’s in that room smelt the same as you’,’ Mrs Milne said.
In 2010 she contacted the Parkinson’s researcher Tilo Kunath, of Edinburgh University, who put her skills to the test a year later.
After asking 12 volunteers to wear a T-shirt for 24 hours, Mrs Milne correctly identified the disease status of 11 of them – with the only one she got wrong being diagnosed the following year.
Shortly after, Mr Milne lost his battle with Parkinson’s in 2015 aged 65.
Mrs Milne has since been keeping to her husband’s dying wish of assisting research into the ‘smell of Parkinson’s.
But Parkinson’s is not the only disease Mrs Milne can detect.
As a student nurse, she claims spotted those with gallstones before they were diagnosed.
And while training as a midwife, she could tell whether a woman smoked or had diabetes by the scent of her placenta.
