Stinky Feet!!!

Question: If your feet stinks, will you be able to smell it, even if you don’t bend down and bring your nose closer to your feet?

For me, the answer is yes. But I’ve always been sensitive to scents and odors so I don’t know if I just have a strong sense of smell to go with it…

I have a friend who complains that her seatmate’s feet stinks… all the time, in a very, very bad way. By bad, I mean that it smells sweaty, sour and rotten. It’s so bad that my friend can smell it even if she’s seated 3 feet away from the person.

However, her seatmate doesn’t seem to be aware of it. Does she just have a weak sense of smell or maybe she’s already so used to the odor that she doesn’t notice it anymore?

Anyway, I wanted to help my friend by suggesting tips that she can offer to her seatmate to minimize her foot odor problem. Though I’m not yet sure how she can do that given that it’s going to be very difficult to tell another person, “Your feet stinks!” if the other person is ignorant of it… but that’s another story.

Well, just want to share what I was able to find out through this site:

The main thing that feeds foot smell is sweat. With more than 250,000 sweat glands each, your feet are among the most perspiring parts of the body. In one day, each foot can produce more than a pint of sweat! Sweat is basically just salt and water, though, so it doesn’t have a distinctive smell of its own. The smell is actually caused by bacteria on our skin that eats the sweat and excretes waste that has a strong odor. It’s perfectly normal to have bacteria on your skin, and it doesn’t ordinarily produce a noticeable smell, but sweat attracts bacteria and gives them a whole lot to feed on.

This cute little foot has a quarter of a million sweat glands in it

Here are 10 useful ways on how to get rid of foot odor from health.howstuffworks.com and www.gettingridofthings.com:

1. wash your feet with strong anti-bacterial soap.
2. wear clean socks.
3. don’t wear the same shoes everyday – give a pair of shoes 24 hours or more to air out before wearing them again.
4. wear well-ventilated shoes instead of very constrictive shoes, such as boots.
5. always wear socks, preferably made of cotton or other absorbent materials that absorb a lot of the sweat so the bacteria can’t feed on it.
6. change your socks a few times a day.
7. buy some absorbent Odor-Eater type shoe inserts.
8. apply an antiperspirant to your feet.
9. avoid eating food that will make your feet smellier. Here is a short list: garlic, onions, curries, chilies and alcohol. People taking penicillin have also been known to clear a room or two.
10. try relaxing once in a while… excessive perspiration can be triggered by stress.

So there! Now that I’ve posted this, maybe my friend can just ask her seatmate to go to my blog and read this. Hopefully, this will help enlighten her.