Why do feet stink?

What causes stinky, smelly feet? Sweat and bacteria. Find out exactly how bacteria turn sweat into malodorous feet in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff Works dot com where
smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, why
do feet stink? Everybody is familiar with this phenomenon. Most
of us have a friend or relative who can clear

(00:22):
out a room when they kick off their shoes, and
even the sweetest smelling person can do a decent job
stinking up a pair of shoes by running a few
miles in them. So what's going on here? Why do
your feet have a stronger odor than the rest of
your body does. The main thing that feeds foot smell
is sweat. With more than two hundred fifty thousand sweat

(00:45):
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

(01:06):
waste that has a strong odor itself. 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. Of course, we
sweat all over. Our hands have a comparable number of
sweat glands, for example, and most of the rest of

(01:27):
our body doesn't particularly stink, the armpits being a notable exception.
So what's the difference with the feet. The answer is
our socks and shoes. The sweat that our feet excrete
can't easily escape into the air like the sweat our
hands excrete. It all collects on our skin and in
our socks. The bacteria love this dark, damp feast and

(01:51):
have a sort of feeding frenzy. When you take off
your shoes, the smell that hits you is all the
bacteria excretion that's collected on your feet, eat, and in
your socks and shoes. The main reason some people's feet
are more precisely some people's socks and shoes smell worse
than other people's is that some people sweat more than

(02:12):
other people. This is just one of the many variable
physiological qualities of human beings. This is also why sometimes
your feet smell much worse than at other times. It
all has to do with how much you sweat. For
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does that
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(02:32):
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