Eating meat and dumplings during the Spring Festival is a spiritual "partner", why do people become smelly after eating them?

When eating meat or dumplings at home during the Spring Festival, garlic is indispensable. It is full of flavor and the garlic aroma is really refreshing!

But although it tastes good, after eating garlic, I always feel as if my whole body has a lingering smell. Not only do I dare not open my mouth to speak, but the hint of garlic, which is both fragrant and stinky, always makes social contact a little awkward.

Here comes the question: Garlic doesn't smell when you peel it and it just tastes spicy when you eat it, so why do people become smelly after eating garlic?

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Why after eating garlic,

Will people become smelly?

The bad smell that garlic brings to people is not only reflected in the breath, but also reaches the whole body through blood circulation, making other parts of the body smelly as well.

After eating garlic, your breath will become smelly

Garlic is rich in allyl sulfur compounds, the most important of which is S-allyl alliin. This substance has no smell when it exists alone. However, garlic also contains a substance called alliinase, which is specifically used to decompose alliin.

When the garlic cloves are intact and the internal tissues are not damaged, alliin and alliinase coexist peacefully. Once the garlic is cut, crushed, or bitten, the two will begin to react and produce allicin , which is why garlic feels spicy and irritating when eaten raw.

Allicin and other sulfur compounds in garlic are not stable in the air. After we eat raw garlic for a period of time, they will gradually decompose into some smelly decomposition products, such as methyl allyl sulfide and other sulfides. These substances mix in the mouth and make our breath smelly.

After eating garlic, your farts will smell worse

After eating garlic, the "exhaust gas" we expel will be particularly smelly, and even have a distinct garlic smell, which allows the person who smells it to instantly understand what we ate in our last meal. This is also caused by sulfur-containing compounds.

The odor of farts is usually caused by substances such as indole, skatole and hydrogen sulfide. People who eat a lot of garlic will excrete more sulfides, such as hydrogen sulfide, making the odor of farts more obvious.

After eating garlic, the poop smells weird

Not only do some friends fart, but after eating a lot of garlic, even their feces have a strange garlic smell. This is still a normal phenomenon caused by sulfide metabolism.

If you eat garlic while eating a lot of protein-rich foods, combined with the hydrogen sulfide produced by incomplete protein digestion and decomposition, the smell of feces will be even more unbearable.

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How much do Chinese people love eating garlic?

Even though it makes people stink, people's love for garlic remains undiminished. This is related to the spicy taste of garlic and the garlic aroma brought by some volatile substances.

Not only Chinese people, but people all over the world love garlic. After all, it goes well with red meat, white meat, fresh seafood, and is good at stir-frying, frying, or baking.

If we look at the list of delicacies from various countries, we will find that there must be a lot of delicacies that rely on the aroma of garlic. In addition to Chinese garlic cuisine, you can also see French red wine garlic baked snails, Indian oil garlic crabs, etc. Germans love garlic and even make garlic ice cream, and there is a garlic festival every year.

Garlic is not native to my country. It was first brought back by Zhang Qian during his mission to the Western Regions and began to be cultivated in the Central Plains.

The love of garlic by Chinese people can be said to be integrated into our lives and engraved into our blood. "A head of garlic and a bowl of noodles are worth a thousand gold coins", "If you eat meat without garlic, you will lose half of the nutrition", "Eat dumplings with wine, the more you eat, the more you have; eat dumplings with garlic, and your life will be brilliant", these old sayings are enough to prove it.

Northerners love to eat garlic, especially raw garlic. Whether eating noodles, pancakes, meat or vegetables, they cannot do without a few cloves of garlic, and the more they eat, the more delicious it becomes, and they never get tired of it. In the eyes of real northerners, the slightly gentler ways of eating, such as cutting garlic into slices, mincing garlic, and pureed garlic, are not "eating garlic", but just using garlic.

For northerners, raw garlic is not only a seasoning, but also a very healthy food - it kills bacteria, stimulates appetite, removes fishy smells and enhances flavor. When eating raw garlic, allicin is not destroyed by high temperatures, so it is more intact and the health benefits are indeed greater.

Most southerners are reluctant to eat raw garlic, as they do not like its pungent taste. Therefore, the garlic taste is greatly reduced through high-temperature processing such as heating and frying. When used in cooking, it is less pungent and more fragrant, becoming a versatile ingredient that does not overshadow the main ingredient but can brighten up the flavor.

For example, the seven-tenths cooked garlic in the zezhe pot, the golden and silver minced garlic piled on the grilled seafood, the thin white meat covered with mashed garlic, the chopped pepper fish head sprinkled with minced garlic and chili...

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We Chinese people use garlic for much more than that. In order to extend the shelf life of fresh garlic, or slightly reduce the spiciness of raw garlic so that people who cannot eat spicy food can also taste the deliciousness of garlic, our ancestors also used pickling and sauce making techniques to invent delicacies such as sugar garlic, Laba garlic, and garlic chili sauce.

Over the long years, the production of these foods has gradually taken on cultural imprints and has become a symbol for our people to express their expectations for a better life.

For example, the elders insist that Laba garlic must be soaked on the Laba day, so as not to disappoint the ritual of eating dumplings on the first day of the Lunar New Year. For example, the pickled garlic served with mutton soup steamed buns must be jade-like in color, white and yellowish, and taste sweet and sour, crisp and without residue.

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How to get rid of bad breath after eating garlic?

"How to enjoy the delicious taste without paying the price of bad breath" is probably a topic that we garlic lovers are very concerned about. There are endless ways to remove the garlic smell circulating on the Internet, but which ones are really effective?

Covering method, poor effect

Some people choose to spray breath freshener or chew gum after eating garlic to try to cover up the garlic smell, but the effect is usually not very surprising because it cannot prevent the continued production of sulfides. If it cannot be completely covered, will the combination of breath freshener and garlic odor be even stranger?

Digestion method, somewhat useful

Some people try the "old method" of chewing tea leaves and eating peanuts after eating raw garlic to try to "hedge" the garlic smell. Since tea contains tea polyphenols, it can decompose some of the sulfides that produce the odor, so it is theoretically effective. However, chewing tea leaves is not as good as rinsing your mouth with tea directly, which can also play a role in flushing the mouth .

Similarly, fruits and vegetables with high concentrations of polyphenols, such as apples, bananas, avocados, mint, lettuce, and chocolate, can also break down some sulfides and eliminate the garlic smell.

Peanuts are also a popular way to remove garlic smell. The basis behind this method is that protein can combine with allyl sulfur compounds that bring garlic smell, reducing the odor. So, compared to peanuts, drinking milk or yogurt directly will be more effective .

Removal method, no effect

Brushing your teeth and rinsing your mouth as soon as possible after eating garlic can remove some of the garlic smell through physical means, but just like spraying breath freshener, the effect will not last long because it does not remove the source of the garlic smell.

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Finally, I want to say that you may not need to be too concerned about the smell of garlic. After all, no matter how refined our lives are, it is normal to be unable to resist the temptation of garlic-flavored food!

For those who really mind the smell of garlic but want to enjoy the aroma of garlic, there is also a fundamental solution - eat cooked garlic to eliminate alliinase from the beginning. Finally, whether you eat raw or cooked garlic, I wish you all a happy meal.

Planning and production

Author: Wang Lu, Chinese registered nutritionist, Master of Public Health, Peking University

Review丨Zhang Na, PhD Supervisor, Associate Researcher, Peking University School of Public Health

Planning丨Lin Lin

Editor: Lin Lin