Homo Consumericus

Totally my experience. After wanting to for years, but having difficulty, I finally gave up red meat about 6 months ago. Several months later I was looking for a new deoderant and discovered - much to my surprise and joy - that it really didn't matter: I hardly had any body odour any more, not even after 24 hours of hot, sweaty conditions.

I'm a meat lover and meat eater. Thankfully, I eat moderately; I may go an entire week without eating meat. I do see a difference in my body during periods where I eat a relatively unusual amount of meat (summer time and BBQs). I do understand that a vegetarian diet would probably be best, but I'm 22 and love food too much to give up meat.

how in hunter-gatherer societies the best hunters - who probably eat more meat and have more body odor because of less hygiene - are preferred by women? And how could meat eating ever become an aversive sexual stimulus?

When taken literally, your article's title "You want to smell better: Don't eat red meat" makes me laugh. Will my sniffer work better if I don't eat red meat?

On a tangential note (same theme/different food product), I spent some time in South Korea. There's this thing called the "Kimchee Bus." The body odor on that bus is quite odiferous to non-kimchee eaters. I've been told that non-kimchee eaters smell like dairy products.

Perhaps a clothespin attached to everyone's sniffer would make the world a better place. It's my rationalization for: I like my hamburgers and steak and I won't give them up!

Of course meat eaters stink! Did you really have to do research to come to this blinding glimpse of the obvious? After all, what sane individual wants their body to be a cometary for the murdered corpse of an innocent animal? People say they are carnivores. This is idiotic. They are necrovores. Not only do meat eaters stink - but their "ethics" are putrid too. I tell every woman I know. If a man is willing to kill a powerless animal for his own purpose, have no doubt he would do the same to you if necessary. If you really want to know what is in a man's heart, have a look at what he puts in his stomach. If it is cruelty - run like the wind. He is a criminal pending conviction.

I eat meat, and I have no intention of killing anybody. No matter how they smell.

is not the small sample size. But it doesn't look like the study accounted for differences in the MHC profile. Women would be rating the scents based on that as well wouldn't they?

It's not clear from the article whether the study accounted for that aspect by having them rate the men before as well as after?

I have a very sensitive nose and one of the reasons why I don't go to bikram yoga is because of the odors of meat eaters. I can instantly smell the meat and is disgusting. I can always tell when a person is a meat eater by their odor...I always feel they smell like pork. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one that found these smells offensive.

I'm not sure that I understand the article. It refers to red meat consumption but in the description it says that the men were controlled just for meat consumption; so which?

From the moral point of view if you are opposed to killing animals then not only will you not eat red meat but you won't eat chicken or fish and nor will you eat dairy products as calves are a by-product of the dairy industry even if you don't object to the awful lives lived by dairy cows. Their lives embody expoitation, in my view. And the egg industry requires hens to live in squalor and for day old chicks to be ground up alive because they are male and therefore useless.

From the the point of view of smell, you're not going to smell great if you eat cheese sandwiches and cola, are you?
high carb diet gives bad acid breath and in my experience the nicest smell and the best breath comes from eating raw veg. But that isn't going to be much fun indefinitely and certainly not in the winter where I live - I have tried. I do eat meat, eggs and milk btw.