Okay, this was a weird one! I’ve never been a super-smelly person, and even though I work out regularly (and sweat quite a bit during), I’d categorize my personal BO as pretty unaggressive and normal. However, I’ve never been able to wear natural deodorants without ruining my clothes (it’s almost as if they made me smell worse), and never in a million years would I have felt like I could go completely without deodorant Matthew McConaughey style. But then, a completely unhinged thing happened once I was a couple of weeks into my Sakara reset—I went to my normal 80-minute long Saturday morning workout class (which occurs in a warm, steamy room in which I produce buckets of sweat) and wait for it—I didn’t smell. Yes, I was sweating profusely, but there was not one iota of scent coming from any pore in my body. Since then, I’ve (finally) been able to wear natural deodorants, and if I forget to apply it’s no biggie.
Interestingly, there has been a long-time debate dating back to the 1940s that chlorophyll can naturally nix body odor (in addition to my three-daily Sakara meals I was also adding the brand’s bright green chlorophyll Detox Water Drops, $39, to my water each day), but according to DuBoise and Tingle, there’s even more to it than that! And, like many of the changes I noticed, it seems to tie back to gut health.
“Body odor can be a symptom of poor gut health,” they told me. “With our nutrition programs, you’re optimizing your gut microbiome and gut environment, which in turn can improve body odor. If you think about where your armpits are on your body, you can guess what’s surrounding them: lymph! It’s the lymph system’s job to “take out the trash,” so a high-quality diet means there’s less trash to take out, and consequently, less odor.”
DuBoise and Tingle also shared that when we’re stressed, the body secretes an odorless white fluid consisting of water, proteins, and fats, which, once combined with the natural bacteria on our skin, can produce that foul-smelling waste known as BO. Sakara’s nutrition programs, they told me, nourish the gut, remove toxins for the lymph to clear, and take away the stress of not knowing what to eat—all of which could explain the disappearance of any previous smell I had. Fascinating, right?
Erin Jahns
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