美国国家公共电台 NPR Men, Listen Up: Women Like The Smell Of Guys Who Eat A Certain Diet（在线收听）

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

What we can eat can influence more than our waistlines. It turns out, our diets also help determine what we smell like. Evolutionary scientists wondered whether this might play a role in attracting a mate. And as NPR's Allison Aubrey reports, a recent study finds that women prefer the body odor of men who eat a certain diet.

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Sometimes a study finding makes for good cocktail-party banter. So a few evenings ago, I ducked out of the newsroom, wandered down to a happy hour just a few blocks from the NPR building here. I was in search of guys who were willing to talk to me about their diets, their sweat and their dating status.

So you guys are willing to talk to me for my story?

STEFAN RUFFINI: Sure.

JACK NEWMAN: Sure.

AUBREY: OK. I met up with Stefan Ruffini and Jack Newman. They're friends. They work together. But when it comes to food, they have very different habits. Newman says he goes heavy on the greens.

NEWMAN: Always a salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, extra lettuce, romaine, kale, all the mixtures.

AUBREY: His buddy Stefan Ruffini tends to go heavy on the carbs. Tonight, it's a beer, a burger on a bun and...

RUFFINI: Definitely some fries with it. Yeah, that's the way to do it.

AUBREY: Now, according to the new study, one of these guys diets creates a body odor that women find more attractive.

Have you ever thought about how your diet might influence how you smell?

NEWMAN: No, never. Never, no, it's all about how I feel, not how I smell.

AUBREY: But all those leafy greens that Newman eats could also be making him smell good to the opposite sex.

NEWMAN: That's surprising.

RUFFINI: (Laughter).

AUBREY: So how did researchers nail this down?

IAN STEPHEN: We've known for a while that odor is an important components of attractiveness, especially for women.

AUBREY: That's researcher Ian Stephen of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He recruited a bunch of healthy, young men and tracked their diets. He also gave them clean T-shirts and instructed them to exercise. Afterwards, a group of women were asked to sniff the sweat on the T-shirts.

STEPHEN: We asked them to rate how much they liked it, how attractive they thought it smelt, how floral, how fruity.

AUBREY: Neither the researchers nor the women knew beforehand who had eaten what. But the results were very consistent.

STEPHEN: Women basically found that men who ate more vegetables smelled nicer.

AUBREY: But men who ate a lot of carbs produced an odor that women did not like. Back at the happy hour, carb-lover Stefan Ruffini wasn't too upset.

RUFFINI: I'm definitely pretty OK with my smell right now I think, you know. I have a girlfriend. So I don't generally worry about these type of things.

AUBREY: There was another surprise from the study, too. Some researchers thought that meat might make men's sweat more appealing. From an evolutionary perspective, men who hunted were perceived to be good providers. But in this study, a meaty diet didn't make men smell any more or any less attractive. Turns out that the way food influences the way we smell is very indirect.

GEORGE PRETI: A lot of people walk around thinking that because I ate a lot of onions and garlic, my sweat smells like onions and garlic. And that's not really what happens.

AUBREY: That's scientist George Preti of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. He says our body odor is created when the bacteria on our skin metabolize the compounds that come out of our sweat glands.

PRETI: The sweat doesn't come out smelly already. It has to be metabolized by the bacteria.

AUBREY: So it's pretty complex. But given what we eat may make us smell more or less attractive, maybe that's another reason to think more carefully about our diets. Allison Aubrey, NPR News.