I sometimes smell of vinegar. How can I overcome this?

Looks like this is common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_odor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odor

But the backpack and shoes seem like a reasonable place to start. I get pretty bad food odor and I use baking soda and a ziploc bag and put them in the freezer overnight. They smell fine in the morning. My mom told me to do the freezer thing so it is probably not helping. But she claims it kills the bacteria that produces the odor. I would suggest removing the food from the freezer first. A night in the fridge won’t hurt anything.

Perhaps you eat too much salty foods? (I don’t know if there is any correlation to this)

Do you eat a lot of fruit? If so, that’s good, but could lead to a vinegary smell. Try treating your backpack straps with some winemaking yeast. Smelling like Dom Perignon is a world better than smelling like vinegar.

Is there a chance you are diabetic?

Been bitten by a spider lately?

This may sound a little whacked ( okay maybe Big time WHACKED ) try Milk of Magnesia, apply to arm pits daily. It is able to negate the acid in the sweat and cuts down the smell.

The vinegar smell usually is from bacteria. We all have some bacteria on our skin. Some bacterias are more likely than others to produce that smell and usually it is triggered when you get sweaty. Make sure your deodorant also is an antiperspirant. Deodorant alone will not do the trick. Wash under your arms for a good 20+ seconds, like the rule for washing hands to kill off bacteria. A simple rinse with soap will not kill off enough bacteria.

Any chance you are bipolar? People with that condition sometimes have a unique odor.

Are you overweight? If so, getting yeast infections on skin where folds are is very common and can produce an unpleasant smell. Can be on the stomach, below breast for women, etc.

My two cents: I have smelled people as you describe. I don’t know them too well but I remember on several occasions them eating a bread or heavily acidic diet. It was just a personal theory.

I did look it up at some point and found that a bacteria starting with a “p” was usually the culprit though most of the links I found were to acne around subaecous glands or essentially hair follicles. It seems to linked to the horomonal or endocrine system. I still personally lean toward the alkaline diet as a cure because having ph that is too acidic causes multiple other problems. I have not had the opportunity to test this out and haven’t done further research on it.

A simple way to see if this idea has merit is adding several glasses of lemon or lime water to your diet. Yes citrus is acidic until it’s digested. The digestive “ash” is alkaline and I believe lemon water detox is the start of the alkaline diet cleanse.

I agree that you should try an alkaline diet. I follow one rigidly and I am much healthier for it. If you enjoy vegetables, there are many tasty recipes. Here’s a link that gives you a color chart to determine which foods are alkaline. The majority of alkaline foods are vegetables, which is farther down the chart.
http://www.acidalkalinediet.com/Alkaline-Foods-Chart.htm

My guess is that if you look at that chart, the majority of foods in your diet are on the acid side. You also eat quite a bit of sugar. How close am I?

@snowberry Love the chart you posted. Quite a few surprises there. I have tried to stick to an alkaline diet but failed.

@Lorna, To change your diet is no small thing, and as I have heard, the most difficult thing to adjust to in lifestyle change. It’s best if you only change only one small thing at a time, instead of jumping off the deep end. For example, the first thing I changed in adjusting to my diet was going from white bread to whole wheat. I found out I prefer whole wheat bread if it’s toasted, so I did that too, and I ate that way for maybe a few weeks until I got used to the idea, and actually found ways to enjoy my food. (I no longer eat any gluten by the way). Then I changed from eating white rice to eating whole grain rice. Many people who are used to white rice only, really dislike whole grain rice. You can start out easy by using only a little whole grain brown rice in a recipe and the rest white, eat that for a while, and then change it up a bit more, and so on. When I went off of coffee, I discovered there were several teas that I liked about as much as coffee, so I changed that out pretty easily, but if you are a big coffee drinker, you might want to cut down really slowly so you don’t have a horrible headache.

Does this make sense to you?

@snowberry It does. I cut out all caffeine, sugar, wheat, gluten as I had thrush on my tongue from long term antibiotic use. I found stopping caffeine was easy (very oddly). I now drink decaf. I found my tongue got even worse and presumed it was candida die off? To this day I do not know as I got ill with a kidney infection. So was medicated again. I realize that I did too many things at once now, I ended up eating ice cream and all sorts when I came off my new regime. I lasted about three weeks. I did feel I was thinking more clearly not sure what other benefits I got from it since I was/am ill.

@LornaLove Don’t assume you’re getting no caffeine because you’re drinking de-caf coffee. De-caf coffee in the US anyway, is unregulated. That means you can have any percentage of caffeine removed, and it still qualified as de-caf. As I understand it, it still contains some caffeine and you don’t get to know how much. There are many ways to de-caffeinate coffee, and they all involve less than healthy toxins, some of which remain in the coffee.

Tea, on the other hand, does not have that problem. De-caf tea really is de-caf, and carries no extra toxins.