– Why is achohol so potent on breath but nothing else seems to be? You don’t pass a random on the street and are like, dayum that guy been eating grilled cheese.
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Some of the alcohol in the blood stream is evaporated during the oxygen exchange in your lungs and exhaled. It’s not in the same form as the alcohol you drink, and has a pretty noticeable sweet smell.
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Ethanol is an example of a “volatile compound”, a substance that is able to directly transform into a gas and leave a liquid… like your blood. When your blood goes to your lungs to pick up oxygen, ethanol essentially boils out of your blood into the lungs, and you exhale it.
There are a lot of other compounds that can do this, most notably the allyl methyl sulfide from garlic. So you can pass a rando and say “Dayum that guy has been eating garlic.”
Most foods either don’t contain high concentrations of volatiles, or those volatiles are not as distinctive as the smell of alcohol or garlic. though.
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Nothing? I can at least tell you garlic is another thing potent on the breath.
In the Philippines, there’s a garlic heavy sausage called longganisa, and it’s pretty much an unspoken truth that if someone exhales in your general direction and you smell a heavy stench of burnt sugar and garlic, the person has had longganisa fairly recently.
Onion and turmeric are also fairly potent, considering my niece and sister could tell that from my breath from half a room after eating a dish heavy with them.
As someone mentioned above what you smell is VOCs or Volatile Organic Compounds. These compounds are released in large quantities at relatively low temperatures.
Other things you can smell from food sources…..
Sulphur from eggs
Asparagus has a unique voc smell-especially released in urine.
Cigarette smoke has several hundred vocs that contribute to smoke breath.
Coffee
And certain “stinky” cheeses like blue cheese can leave a sour smell on the breath.
Oh man clearly you haven’t been around cultures that keep a plate of garlic cloves on the table just for munching.
When a person fasts and pushes their body into ketosis, they develop keto breath. This is because your body starts to break down fat and produce volatile fatty acids to burn for energy. These can be smelled on the breath. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_acid)
I shared student accomodation with a Jordanian. After some months we discovered we were both vegan and he told me I was the only English person he had met who did *not* smell of sour milk. I’m no longer vegan.
There’s this guy in the gym and he has and 10 foot radius of smelling like a cigarette butt. It’s so strong. And Everytime. It emanates from him.
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