It's kind of like waxy, a little bit similar to earwax, but a lot more minute, and the bacteria living in your armpits eat that sweat and metabolize it and effectively poop out what is the body odor that comes from your armpit. It's called the apocrine gland, and it gets active at puberty - as many of us know.Īnd that one is not like salt water at all. It's actually an entirely different kind of sweat gland. That's the sweat that comes out in your armpits. Of course, there is another kind of sweat: The stuff that makes you really stinky. But most of the stuff that comes out in this watery sweat called eccrine sweat is just what happens to be flowing around your body. ![]() So helping the helpful bacteria thrive and trying to keep pathogens at bay. But in the process, your body also dispatches some proteins that do crowd control for the microbiome of your skin. What's coming out of your sweat pores - the entire medical role for it, is to keep you cool. What about the other components that sort of leak out into sweat? Do they have any role? And what makes sweat stinky? It's a funny little corner of the medical literature called chromhidrosis: chrome, light colored and hidrosis for sweat. But other people have turned their sweat all sorts of colors for all sorts of reasons. And so effectively, once she dialed down her predilection for these particular chips, her red sweat disappeared. They analyzed her sweat for the same colorants and dyes as the chips and got a match. She was eating multiple bags a day - so very fond. It turns out she had had a pre-appointment snack, and it was this corn chip called Spicy Tomato. One day she comes to the clinic for a follow-up appointment, and one of the doctors notices her fingers are kind of stained like a reddish brown color. But they could not for the longest time figure out what was going on because she was in her 20s she was perfectly healthy. She was really insecure about it and went to a dermatologist. And this is a very strange situation, right? She was a nurse and wore a white uniform and noticed that her sweat was red. There's a story that you write about in the book: the South African nurse whose sweat turned red. Evidence of the food we eat, evidence of our health or even how we're exercising. When I have a drink of gin and tonic on a hot day - definitely the alcohol comes out. So, evidence of my morning coffee comes out in my sweat. So literally anything that's in your blood that's small can percolate out. And when your body gets the cool-down directive, then your sweat glands source sweat from that interstitial fluid. You have this thing called interstitial fluid that's keeping all your organs damp and moist. When you think about sweat, it took me a long time until I was writing this book to be like: Where is it really coming from? It's effectively the liquidy parts of blood, minus the big stuff like red blood cells and platelets and immune cells.Īnd so if you open up a body, you're very wet inside. Oh, yeah! So this was the thing that really blew my mind. You write in the book that sweat contains so much more than water. In preparing for the Olympics in a really hot place, they will try to train in very similar conditions so that their bodies learn to cool down efficiently in that kind of environment. And so that's also possibly related to genetics but also possibly related to acclimatization and your body learning on the go. So some people are very efficient with their sweating and some, the floodgates just open right up. I have 3 million! And there's also the flow rate, right. Most people have between 2 and 5 million. And, perhaps you have more sweat glands than average. Some people and some families are just sweatier than others. And researchers are trying to figure out how much of the environment in which you spent your early years is ultimately going to affect how much you sweat as an adult. And so in those very early years of your life, your body is kind of learning about the climate that you're in. But these glands don't become fully active until you are in your toddler years. It's kind of interesting because these glands - they're called eccrine glands - you're born with all the eccrine glands that you'll ever have. How much someone sweats is sort of a mix of their genetics and also where they've grown up, right? In your book, you write that to sweat is human. This interview has been edited for clarity and length: Don't have time to read it? No sweat! You can listen to it by clicking on the audio link above. And did you know you can sweat in different colors? Yep, both are true.Ĭheck out Everts' fascinating interview below. ![]() ![]() Like get this: How much you sweat is affected by both nature and nurture. Short Wave's Rhitu Chatterjee talked to Everts about the incredible science of sweat, which includes facts most people don't know.
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