BODY OF EVIDENCE : ATTEMPT TO CORRAL OUR NATURAL ODORS GETTING BIG BOOST.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

No offense, but you smell.

Not only do your feet stink, not only does your breath reek, but your entire body emits a constant and ever-changing fragrance. But don't worry, everybody smells. It's all a part of being human, as natural as having hair and eyeballs.

Still, no one wants to admit it. Americans have an obsession with body odor. We use more soap than any other country. We spend $6 billion a year masking and washing away our fragrant genetic fingerprints with cleansers, deodorants and perfumes.

Like much of the human body, many of its smells, including bad breath, remain a mystery. So vexing is halitosis that Sushma Nachnani, co-director of the UCLA dentistry school's Fresh Breath Clinic, has set up the first university research center devoted to the subject.

``Bad breath has not been taken seriously,'' she explains. ``We have patients who have sat in the chair and cried because it truly affects their lives.''

Stink bugs

So many things can make you smell. Your clothes can carry the stench from your workplace or happy-hour spot. Your lunch of garlic cloves and coffee can emanate from your skin. Some glands even release powerful odoriferous molecules that may attract members of the opposite sex.

The causes of body fragrance - both good and bad - have been the subject of very little research, says Susan Schiffman, a Duke University professor who specializes in the sense of smell.

``What comes out of your body has a lot to do with your own genetics and what you eat,'' she explains. ``The specific way you smell, there is a genetic fingerprint for that.''

Research hasn't determined, however, whether you smell like your parents. Or even if pheromones, chemicals released by many animals to communicate sexual attraction, serve the same purpose in humans. We do, she says, become attracted - or repulsed - by each other's signature smells.

Making scents

Sometimes we just plain smell bad, and that has nothing to do with propagation of the species of genetic destiny.

It's all about bacteria.

Colonies of the microscopic buggers live, die and propagate in the darkest, moistest parts of your body. They're responsible for foot, armpit and mouth odor.

``The body has a lot of bacteria all over it, even after you shower. And as they digest body materials - skin, oils, sweat, what have you - they proliferate, and they release odoriferous substances,'' explains Dr. Herbert Lapidus, the man who invented Odor-Eaters.

So it's not the sweat that smells, it's the bacteria that interact with sweat, mucus and other bodily fluids.

And so our options - and Lapidus' challenges - are to stop sweating, kill the bacteria or stop the odor molecules from reaching your nose. Odor-Eaters do the last of these.

``Heck,'' says Lapidus, who is also responsible for Just for Men hair dye, Vagisil feminine products and Seabond denture adhesive, ``there have been all kinds of innovations in odor retention and delivery systems. I am constantly working.''

Open wide, but not too wide

The one smelly place getting less and less so is the mouth. A series of new techniques have allowed dentists to pinpoint and then remove bacteria clumps, and the new research center and clinic at the UCLA School of Dentistry could provide the first hard data on halitosis, Nachnani said.

Nachnani's research has only begun, and she already receives 10 calls a day requesting information, giving her opportunities to dispel many of the myths about bad breath.

There are two types of bad breath, she says. For the simpler form - garlic breath or onion breath or Big Mac breath - a mint might do the trick. But the mining-town stench of chronic halitosis doesn't go away with Tic Tacs and Colgate.

``Between 60 (percent) and 80 percent of this bad breath comes from the back of the tongue,'' Nachnani says. ``Bacteria thrive in the back of the mouth, and they produce these sulfur-containing gases that smell awful.''

According to Sushma and dentists at other ``fresh breath'' clinics around Los Angeles, standard alcohol-based mouthwashes don't get rid of these sulfur-spewing bacteria. And neither does brushing your tongue.

But a new line of antibacterial washes (some containing chlorine dioxide, some with zinc chloride) are now available through some dentists, and specially designed tongue scrapers should be on the mass market within the year.

``People have come to incorrectly believe that bad breath occurs in the stomach,'' says Bruce Beard, a Woodland Hills dentist who last year opened the Truly Fresh Breath Center. ``That only occurs in 5 percent of the cases.''

So Beard patrols mouths with a sulfur-detecting device, hunting the bacteria on the tongue, along the gum lines and around leaky crowns with a device that breaks up bacteria deposits with ultrasonic waves.

Soap, deodorant and rocks

As for the rest of your body, things haven't changed too much since puberty.

Babies don't smell bad. They don't smell much at all, says Dr. Oleg Bess, a Los Angeles obstetrician-gynecologist.

``Their diet is quite pure,'' he says, explaining the lack of baby odor. ``Also, in babies, the hormone levels are much lower. They don't have the sex hormones, so they don't create some of those personal pungent smells. I guess that's how purity smells.''

Luckily for the cosmetics industry, during puberty our apocrine glands start excreting a variety of sweat that stink-inducing bacteria love. And we acquire body odor.

So millions of dollars in corporate research brings minor victories each year in the forms of soap, deodorant and antiperspirant, says Richard Murahata, manager of clinical research for Unilever Research, which makes Dove and Caress.

We've had the basic knowledge of odor control since the 1800s and built slowly upon that:

``Washing is good,'' he says, ``of course.''

Soap, made from animal fats and wood ashes, had been a novelty and luxury for 2,000 years. Its use didn't become everyday until the 19th century. The concept of bacteria, of tiny invisible creatures living on the skin and making people sick and dirty, didn't occur to a world without microscopes.

The thought of a rubber sole in your shoe trapping invisible floating odor ``molecules'' inside pockets of charcoal and baking soda would seem downright mystical, magical and weird.

And now that supermarket shelves offer enough cleansing name brands for each member of the First Constitutional Congress to have his own, the innovations have slowed down.

``The real key in the past decade has been the drive toward milder and milder products,'' says Murahata, the soap scientist. ``There's a much less potential for irritation, itching, dryness, things like that.''

Soaps classified as ``antibacterial'' may irritate some people's skin, and Murahata and his colleagues have been trying to make it less so. The alternative is to use what he calls ``deofragrance'' soap, which, instead of neutralizing bacteria, produces molecules that ``bond'' with odor molecules, making them smell good. Or at least better.

Deodorants do much the same thing, killing bacteria and masking bad odors, while antiperspirants actually block sweat glands, clogging them.

The newest wave of these come in the ever-trendy clear sticks (despite the failure of Crystal Pepsi, the Gillette Co. estimates that clear products have become a billion-dollar industry). Basically, the advantage is that when clear stuff smears on your shirt, you can't see it.

Another alternative is a line of ``mineral salt'' deodorant sticks, which are essentially rocks you moisten and rub on. These contain chemicals similar to the ones found in Right Guard and Speed Stick but can last a full year and have names like Pit Rock.

The noisome qualities of the body seem to be a curiously American preoccupation. Not only do we use more soap than most other countries, but we stand farther apart from each other, says Schiffman, who has spent more than two decades researching the sense of smell.

What she calls ``interpersonal distance,'' the space we put between ourselves, in the United States is about 18 inches.

``That's just far away from each other so that you can't smell another person's body or breath,'' she says. We condition ourselves to stay away, to not enter into the olfactory zone and thus, she explains, the emotional space of others.

This odor gap shrinks in other cultures that aren't so, well, neurotic about cleanliness.

``We're a very fastidious nation. We bathe in the morning and maybe in the evening,'' she says. ``We watch television ads that tell us we smell bad all the time.''

While our aversion to smell may point to greater shifts in society, our preoccupation with Ban and Dial and CK One may suggest emotional and physical detachment from each other, Schiffman says. Our ability to recognize smells resides in the same part of the brain as our emotions.

So people can be pushed apart by odor. When Schiffman counsels troubled couples, she asks both parties about the other's smell, about the subtle connections they draw unconsciously.

``People do acquire an aversion to each other's odors,'' she says. For example, if a couple fights and the man hasn't showered, the woman might get upset at him every time he smells dirty, even if they're on good terms.

``You can have an emotional reaction to the odor, but you're not consciously aware of that odor.''

Our national negative reaction to the human smell may signal something deeper.

``I'm seeing the culture move away from emotion and feelings,'' she says. ``I think we're going to grow more out of touch with our senses.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Concentrated in one spot, body odor can have a corrosive effect, as Dave Moody, right, learns during the 22nd annual Odor-Eaters International Rotten Sneaker Contest. To mitigate the problem, Odor-Eaters stop the odor molecules from reaching your nose.

(2--Cover--Color) The War Against Body Odor

(3) Profile of the underarm