"Farang, stinky" revisited
I was really just putting my two satang in on the body odor thing, but have already learned not to try to lecture THIS crowd - HA! If you Google "body odor and red meat" you'll get a screenfull.
I agree with you, piston10 - sweat is just the body's way of cooling and dumping waste, so it makes sense. I'm not a vegetarian, either, although in the interest of perhaps a few more years I'm eating very little red meat. As an added bonus, my body odor is next to nil.
My friends there eat healthier than I do, as a rule, and certainly have less body odor than many of the farang I pass by there. There must be SOMEthing to the logic.
Until I figure it out, it's frequent showers there for me. It's a nice custom.
Re: Sweating, apocrine glands and earwax.
It is not only diet that affects perspiration (sweating/glistening/glowing or whatever you like to call it) and thus body odor but also the number of apocrine glands a person has. When sweat, etc, first evaporates on the skin there is very little smell on a normal healthy person but it is the build up of stale sweat that smells bad! The smell occurs when bacteria that live on the skin act on the sweat produced by the apocrine glands - the glands that cause the bad smell.
Certain racial groups smell less than others because they have fewer apocrine glands. Asians sweat just as much as other races but have fewer apocrine glands. Roughly 50% of Korean people have no apocrine glands at all and only about 10% of Japanese people have any underarm odor at all. I believe that in the past, Japanese men with body odor were exempt from military service!
Recently, Japanese geneticists have identified the link between ear-wax and sweating. Apparently, Africans and Europeans have wet earwax and thus sweat a lot, while Asians have dry earwax and don't sweat as much. See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/scien ... yt&emc=rss