Why Do My Feet Stink?

I love my little brother, but his feet stink.  Every time that we are in the car, he decides to take off his shoes… it is painful!  In fact, we have a new family rule that he is not allowed to take his shoes off if we are all in the car with him.  I know it isn’t his fault, but why do his feet have to smell so horrible???

For one, and this one is quite obvious, feet stink because of sweat.  This is the same reason my other brother’s armpits stink to high heavens (pre teenage boys are so smelly!).  Each foot has approximately one quarter of a million sweat glands.  That’s half a million in total!  A person can sweat up to a pint a day, but that isn’t exactly what makes the smell.  It’s the bacteria on our skin that eats the sweat… THAT is what causes the stench.  We clearly sweat all over our body, but our armpits and feet are the ones that really seem to go to town in terms of stinking a place up.  For our feet, it is our socks and shoes that cause the trouble.  (This makes sense for my brother, because he is an athlete and is always wearing sneakers… until he takes them off…)  The sweat on our hands, which is almost as much as on our feet, can easily escape into the air.  Our feet, on the other hand, are trapped in socks, which allows for the buildup of the waste.    Some people’s feet have the tendency to smell worse than others, and sometimes even your own feet smell worse than normal– it all has to do with how much you sweat, and how much you allow the bacteria on your feet to feast on the sweat in the dark and damp environment that socks provide.  Kinda makes me want to start going barefoot…