Imagine, if you can, the plight of a 13-year-old with a body odor so unbelievably bad that his family actually took him to a hospital clinic s dozen times to see what could be done for his problem.

Imagine a boy with a body odor so severe that when his family red to sell the house, they couldn’t because potential buyers were overwhelmed by the smell of “dead fish” in all the rooms of their home.

Doctors told the boy to practice good hygiene, but the odor persisted. Ridiculed by his peers, the boy became depressed and his grades rapped; he got into fights and was even thrown out of school.

Now: Imagine all that anguish disappearing with a simple change diet. Warren A. Todd, M.D., reported in the Journal of Pediatrics (June, 1979) that when he examined the boy, the “putrid fish odor” immediately suggested “a possible defect in trimethylamine metabolism.” The boy was then put on a diet excluding foods whose metabolic breakdown can give rise to a substance called trimethylamine. Such foods are high in choline and include eggs, fish, liver and legumes. By no small coincidence, these happened to be among the boy’s favorite foods. In just one week, the odor was gone. After a year, the odor was still gone, and the young man had high grades, was dating and had many friends.

For someone with a sensitivity to trimethylamine-producing foods. body odor can wreak havoc. Even a breastfed baby who is sensitive can develop a “fishy odor,” which goes away when the mother stops eating choline-rich foods.

Here’s another strange tale that’s no fish story. The mother of a 15-year-old girl took her to the doctor because she had a “peculiar odor.” The girl herself couldn’t smell it, but her bedclothes smelled so bad—despite repeated washings—that they often had to be thrown out.

Luckily, her doctor was reminded of a similar smell that occurred in another patient taking a penicillin-like drug, so he questioned the girl about drug use. As it turned out, the topical benzoyl peroxide she had been using for acne was the very thing that caused her bad smell. While not using the product she was odor-free, but as soon as she dabbed it on again, the odor was back in three days (New England Journal of Medicine, May 28, 1981).

Naturally, the body odor cases I’ve described are not ordinary. Bu: they are interesting because they remind us that metabolic imbalance` can manifest themselves in strange ways.

What about plain old under-the-arm odor? For most people, a little baking soda dusted under the arms will keep the underarms fresh smelling. Or try a splash or two of white vinegar.

Ordinary body odor can sometimes graduate into Ph.D. phooey no matter how many times you scrub yourself or how many deodorants and powders you use. For years, Prevention readers have said that supplemental zinc knocked out their body odor (one Pennsylvania mar  came up with the slogan “Think zinc, don’t stink!”), and now the medics community is catching on. Morton Scribner, M.D., of Arcadia, California, says that patients with body odor respond to even low dosages of zinc. He discovered the zinc connection accidentally when a patient who was taking zinc for leg ulcers reported that his troublesome body odor had vanished.

Magnesium is another mineral that can control body odor. Like zinc, no one knows exactly why or how it achieves this, but the mineral is involved in an extraordinary number of metabolic reactions within the body. Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., of Kent, Washington, says, “I find that in just about any case, magnesium can lessen the odor.”

B. F. Hart, M.D., of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, prescribes a combination of zinc, magnesium, PABA (para-aminobenzoic acid) and vitamin B6 to combat offensive body odor. As a bonus, he says, the breath becomes sweeter as well.

Tags: control body odor, troublesome body odor

Posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 1:26 am filed under Health.