My mother claims that she can tell when my father has eaten garlic. She claims that he sweats it out.
I don’t believe that the “garlic molecule” can be sustained in tact and after traveling through at least part of the human digestive tract arrive in sufficient quantity in our sweat to be detected by some else’s olfactory senses.
My question: Is there any factual evidence or studies related to people eating garlic then sweating garlic aroma? I’d really like to know if this is at all possible. Seems like a straight forward experiment – have a subject eat a bowl of garlic then periodically sample their sweat for “garlic molecule” analysis.
Yes they do. The molecule doesn’t “survive intact”, as such; it is metabolised into compounds (chiefly allyl methyl sulphide) which have an odor, and escape the body in the breath and sweat.
I’ve done it, after having too much garlic bread at Buca di Beppo one evening. 6 hours later, I was exuding such pungent fumes out of my skin that my eyes were actually watering.
I got stuck on a freight elevator at Kimpo Airport in the fall of 1987. Indian summer, 80ish degrees and forty or so people packed in, the smell of garlic was tear inducing.
I still can’t eat kimchi. Smell is a powerful sense.
N=1… I do not eat garlic. When someone who eats garlic enters a space I am in… I nearly have to run away. What we eat becomes part of us and contributes to our personal atmosphere. Garlic is one of the less subtle elements of diet that affects all outgoing atmospheres.
Thousands of years of history of humans attempting to alter this atmosphere by additions onto the skin.
This seems settled but I’ll add another anecdotal data point. I loooove garlic, I literally don’t think the words “too much garlic” have ever come out of my mouth. I eat it raw, cooked, you name it. If I make out with a girl and can taste the garlic bread she had at dinner, I consider that a bonus
If I have an especially heroic portion of it for dinner, I can definitely detect it on my breath and on my skin the next day. It’s subtle but definitely there. I’ve asked friends who would give an honest answer if I reeked and they’ve always said no, but at the end of the day if I sniff my undershirt there’s a slight odor, like I walked through a kitchen. So in my experience it’s definitely true, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lot of person to person variation.
I won’t eat raw onions, because I can floss and brush my teeth, scour my tongue, and still taste raw onion hours after eating them.
The way I heard it originally explained to me is that the sulfur molecule in the allium family is metabolized similarly to alcohol, so the byproducts of the metabolism are excreted in the sweat and saliva.
(that’s why a drunk smells like booze–the alcohol is excreted in the sweat, saliva, and breath)
~VOW
