Drop Dead Healthy

The Nose

The Quest to Smell Better

IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE the death of my grandfather, and I’m eating too many refined carbs. I’m barely exercising, feeling fatalistic. I keep going back to the Jim Fixx argument, that chestnut of defeatist reasoning: Whatever I do, I’m still going to die, so why waste all this time and energy? And it’s not like my grandfather consumed a strict diet of cruciferous vegetables. Why should I?

I’m bingeing. I’ll eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, and chocolate chips. Then a granola bar with twenty-four grams of sugar. And more of the trail mix. Then I have the bag in my face like a farm animal. I recently read a brilliant description of bingeing. The passage isn’t even about eating, but it was the best portrayal of a shame spiral I’ve ever come across. It is from Plato, and describes a man who walks by a heap of corpses. The man tries to look away, but then gives in and says to his eyes: “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight!”

That’s the way I feel about my stomach. It’s a separate beast. “Here, you evil bastard, have your Fig Newtons and shut up.”

I need to snap out of it. A few weeks ago, I’d set up an appointment at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. This is America’s biggest research facility devoted to studying human smell and taste. People are always telling me to “smell the flowers.” Maybe that’s what I need to do.

I take the train down to Monell on a cold Tuesday morning. It’s hard not to spot the center, thanks to the entryway’s giant bronze sculpture of a nose. It’s probably a good thing the same designer didn’t work on the Harvard Urology Center.

The eighty scientists at Monell believe that smell and taste are an underappreciated part of healthy living. It’s why I came.

Smell and taste have been tied to health for millennia. The earliest doctors diagnosed with their nose, as Esther Sternberg points out in Healing Spaces. The scent of sweet urine meant diabetes, for instance. And now that’s coming back into vogue thanks to a field called “olfactory diagnostics,” which analyzes some of the thousands of compounds we exhale in every breath.

It’s long been suspected that smell and taste influence mood and behavior. Florence Nightingale believed the scent of lavender relaxed her patients. In Civil War hospitals, she would anoint the foreheads of wounded soldiers with the floral fragrance. Unfortunately, until recently, there’s been little rigorous research on the topic. Instead, we’ve gotten the fuzzy-headed but well-meaning field of aromatherapy. Aromatherapy—the use of scented essential oils—isn’t bad, necessarily, especially if accompanied by a foot rub. But it’s about as scientific as numerology.

The Monell Center is out to fix that.

One of Monell’s scientists, an energetic woman with blue glasses named Leslie Stein, gives me a tour of the six-story building: microscopes, truck-size freezers, mazes for mice, a dozen white lab coats hanging in a row, scientists crunching data in their offices, skullcaps with electrodes, an Oscar the Grouch doll in the children’s testing room. Oddly, it’s not a smelly building. I could only detect one researcher’s microwaved moo shu chicken.

There’s a sense of adventure here. Smell isn’t nearly as well researched as any of the other senses. “I love it because it’s uncharted territory,” says Sweden-born researcher Johan Lundström. “Whenever I have an idea, I can design an experiment to see if it’s true, because chances are, no one’s done it before.”

Among the experiments Monell is conducting:

• Treating post-traumatic stress disorder, which can be triggered by odors such as the burning of explosives.

• Regrowing nerve cells. The nose’s nerve cells have the unusual ability to regenerate after thirty days. Can doctors cause this regrowth to occur outside the nose?

• My personal favorite: an experiment that showed men’s body odor has a calming effect on women. Which is a brilliant excuse not to shower. “Just trying to put you at ease, dear.”

During my day at Monell, I’m given a variety of tests. For one, a researcher named Chris puts on a blue surgical glove and waves a series of eighteen Magic Marker–size pens under my nose. I have to identify each pen’s odor from a list of four options.

Is pen number five leather, turpentine, or rubber? I shut my eyes and inhale. It smells like my dad’s loafers. Leather.

Another smells like honey. Then peppermint and anise.

The pens are convincing—enough so that I’m salivating, especially at the lemon ones. Pen number sixteen, on the other hand, is a repulsive fish smell that makes me jerk my head back.

I move on to taste, with a psychologist named Danielle Reed. I swig three dozen tiny vials of clear fluid, each one a different cocktail of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. The last is the oft-overlooked fifth basic flavor, sometimes called savory. It’s a meaty taste found in shiitake mushrooms and fermented fish.

Dr. Reed flips through the six-page answer sheet, studying my scrawled responses and the words I’ve circled from such lists as “soap, musk, urine, milk, and vanilla.”

“Well,” says Dr. Reed, looking up from my test. “You’re our worst subject ever.”

I chuckle. A wry sense of humor, these scientists. She is straight-faced.

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Apparently, I made some embarrassing mistakes. I confused sour for umami and semisweet for very sweet. I mixed up lemon and orange. I was their worst subject out of dozens who have taken the test over the years.

This is disconcerting. I never thought of myself as a gourmand, but to have the least discerning tongue in America—or at least of those tongues tested? Especially after I thought my discernment had improved, thanks to my cutting back on salt and sugar.

Once again, this whole health project is proving to be an exercise in radical humility. Contrary to what my mother told me, I’m not always above average. I’m not always Einstein doing physics or Michael Jordan playing basketball. And in some cases, I’m not even Michael Jordan playing minor league baseball during his ill-advised career switch.

The problem is, my chemical senses aren’t just dull. I’m blind to certain smells and tastes. I have trouble tasting umami, for instance. And I can’t smell something called “androstenone.”

I’m not alone. Fully 45 percent of Americans are genetically incapable of sensing androstenone. It’s a steroid that occurs in sweat, urine, and, oddly enough, pig saliva. Apparently it smells quite rank. I will never know. So enjoy that sweaty odor, you lucky bastards in the 55 percent of the population.

There’s a lot of variation in our abilities to taste and smell, much of it genetic. I had no idea until today that I am essentially smelling and tasting a different world from my friends.

Despite my low scores, I didn’t leave the Monell Center in a funk. The situation isn’t totally hopeless. I can take action. The scientists made two additions to my to-do list: sharpen my sense of smell, and use odors to help me relax. I’ll explain them in order:

Experiment 1: Sharpen my sense of smell

“There is an association between our ability to smell and our mental health,” says Dr. Pamela Dalton, a researcher at Monell. “It’s not a perfect correlation. But people who lose their sense of smell show signs of depression.”

She tells me that keeping your sense of smell sharp could help keep your brain healthy. “Exercise it like you would any other muscle.”

And what makes for a good odor workout?

“Go to your spice rack, and try to identify the bottles without looking.”

That’s my new favorite game. Julie hands me a bottle, I keep my eyes shut and take a deep sniff.

The first few times, everything smelled like nutmeg.

“Nutmeg,” I say.

“No, turmeric,” says Julie.

“Nutmeg,” I say.

“No, lemongrass.”

And so on. But I’ve done it twenty times now, and I’m scoring about 50 percent correct.

My nose is improving. I’ll likely never learn to smell androstenone. But I can become better at identifying the scents my nose already picks up. As one Monell researcher explained it to me, “You can’t make your car go faster, but you can become really good at obstacle courses.”

The average person smells about ten thousand odors, at least according to Nobel winners Richard Axel and Linda Buck. Nobody’s quite sure. Unlike taste, it’s not a relatively simple matter of five basic flavors. It’s a complex, not-fully-understood system that, we think, involves nasal receptors recognizing the different chemicals’ spatial features.

However it works, I find I’m noticing a lot more smells out in the world—both for good (the sweet potatoes at the corner restaurant) and ill (the smell of chlorine that permeates the local Jewish Community Center).

I’ve also noticed that enthusiastic smelling has perils. When I met a friend for lunch and took in too deep a draft of air, he looked at me suspiciously and said: “Are you sniffing me?” Kind of.

Experiment 2: Relax

The olfactory part of the brain is tucked into the ancient section, the so-called lizard brain, which means it is tangled up with the emotions. Smell can bring on powerful feelings, as anyone who has read Proust’s books or at least his Wikipedia page knows.

Which smells and which emotions? Depends on the individual. Aromatherapy goes wrong here, say Monell researchers. Aromatherapists make sweeping statements like “vanilla will relax you.” But it depends on experience.

“You can’t say ‘lemons are invigorating,’” says Stein. “If you grew up walking through a lovely garden filled with roses, you’ll have positive feelings when you smell roses. But if you are first exposed to the smell of a rose at your grandmother’s funeral, it’s the opposite.”

Dalton, for instance, says the smell of diesel puts her in a happy mood. As does a lemon-rose scent.

“I travel a lot,” says Dalton. “And when I’m in an anonymous hotel room, falling asleep can be an issue, so I bring a safe odor with me.” (Wisely, she goes with lemon-rose instead of diesel.)

My scented sedative of choice: almond. Maybe it was the marzipan that my dad always brought home. Who knows? But the scent of almond makes stress melt away and lifts the mild depression.

Inspired by Dalton, I’ve started carrying a small bottle of almond oil next to the Purell and miniature fork in my pocket. I unscrew it on the subway and inhale a few nostrilsful. Passersby probably think I’m huffing glue, but I’m too relaxed to care.

Checkup: Month 22

Weight: 159

Average minutes of self-massage per day: 4

Average hours of sleep per night: 7

Meals incorporating cinnamon (which can increase insulin receptivity): 1 in 3

My nose adventure was helpful. I’m back to my spinach salads, my meditation, my modified Bass Method. If I squint, I can see the project’s finish line off in the distance; I’m trying to finish in two years, for the sake of my sanity and my publisher’s.

I’m not free of morbid thoughts, though. One of my big preoccupations is this: What if it’s all for naught? What if my DNA has doomed me, and I have some hidden disease that will strike me dead before year’s end?

This anxiety inspired me to spit into a skinny tube and send it off to a lab in California.

I just got back my results this month. The proper reaction would be gratitude to my parents for bestowing upon me relatively decent DNA.

There are no huge problems. I have a slightly elevated risk of having a stroke, arthritis, and restless legs syndrome. I’m hypersensitive to warfarin blood thinner. But overall, the test says I’m free of huge risk factors for horrible diseases.

So gratitude would be appropriate. Instead, I keep focusing on one result. That I have gene marker rs174575, Genotype AA. Which means, according to the testing service’s website: “Being breastfed raised a person’s IQ by an average of six to seven points.”

I was not breastfed.

Therefore my IQ is six to seven points lower than it could be. At least in theory. This news is disturbing. Six to seven? That’s not a trivial amount. Imagine what I could have been like. Maybe my Netflix queue would be filled with Truffaut films instead of Albert Brooks movies. Maybe I’d read The Mahabharata in its original Sanskrit. Maybe I’d be decoding genomes myself instead of sending my drool out in a FedEx box.

What do I do? Do I mention this news to my mother and give her a guilt trip? It’s hard to blame her. In her day, formula was seen as breast milk’s equal, if not its superior.

Perhaps I should compensate. Watch more Yale literature classes on YouTube. Buy a calculus textbook. On the bright side, my slightly lower IQ means I probably have worse recall. Maybe I’ll soon forget I have a depressed IQ.

I’m also trying to remember this is far from gospel. I went with one of the most reputable consumer services—it’s called 23andme—but genetic testing in 2011 is still in its infancy. Think of it as better than tarot cards but much less reliable than X-rays. It has a long way to go before it’s considered an accurate diagnostic tool.

The problem is, there’s rarely a one-to-one relationship between a gene and a trait. There’s no single “you will go bald” gene. It’s dozens of genes, interacting with one another and the environment. It’s going to take a while to put this jigsaw together.

Services such as 23andme do give some results that you can act upon immediately to improve your health. This is especially true with the information about your sensitivity to medications. But mostly, for now, it’s more about curiosity and potential future knowledge.

That will likely change. In a few years, genetic testing will probably be a massively important health tool, yielding tons of useful information. If we have an elevated risk for lung cancer, we can avoid secondhand smoke. We will be able to tailor prescriptions.

This tidal wave of information will come with its own complications. There will be a whole class of information that we can’t act on. Diseases for which there is no known cure. Vulnerability to environmental factors—like the breast milk—that are too late to fix.

I just read a great but scary book, Origins, by Annie Murphy Paul, about the many ways gestating infants are affected by the mother’s behavior. Poor Julie. My sons will come to know all sorts of things she did wrong while pregnant. “You breathed unfiltered New York air? What were you thinking?”

DNA testing will present us with a Tree of Knowledge problem. On the whole, I think I would bite that apple of full bodily knowledge. I’d like access to unlimited information, despite the perils.

Julie’s not so sure. She argues there’s some benefits to blissful ignorance. But to humor me, she agreed to have her spit sent to 23andMe as well. Again, we got lucky. Aside from higher odds of heroin addiction, which has yet to be a problem, she’s relatively free of risk factors.

We called the genetic counselor together to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. She assured us, yes, Julie’s genes looked okay.

“I do want to ask about one result in her DNA,” I say.

“Yes?” asks the counselor.

“I’m interested that she has rs1800497,” I say. “It says people with this genotype are much less efficient at learning to avoid errors.”

“Well, it’s only got a single star next to it, so that indicates it’s a finding we have the least amount of confidence in.”

“But it is interesting,” I say. “Do you think she’s not efficient at learning from mistakes?” For instance, Julie keeps deleting episodes of The Office before I have a chance to watch them.

“My husband’s trying to bait me,” says Julie.

The counselor stays professional. “It’s from just one study with twenty-six Germans. It’s really too small a sample to have a lot of confidence in the data.” At this point, she says, rs1800497 is more for curiosity than actual valuable data.

“Well, it’s interesting is all,” I say.

After we hang up, Julie asks me if I have a gene for being a schmuck.