Being allergic to mosquitoes, I have heard of countless ways to keep them at bay. I personally use the dryer sheets trick. But something I have heard about for a while is the myth that if you eat a banana before going out, it will keep the mosquitoes at bay. I personally have never tried it but was interested to find out what studies have found regarding the banana trick.

According to the myth, mosquitoes won’t bother someone who ate a banana because of the Vitamin B12, but this is in fact false. I have ever heard the rumor that eating a banana before going out causes mosquitoes to be attracted to you. But in fact, according to the American Mosquitoes Control Association, eating a banana before going out with neither attracts nor defends against mosquitoes. Susan Paskewitz from The University of Wisconsin also studied the effects of bananas on mosquitoes and found no correlation between the two.

Although both of these studies found no correlation between bananas and the effect of them on mosquitoes, both researchers said that they believe more studies need to be conducted to come to a more clear conclusion. I believe the studies are not very strong because they were both conducted on small sample sized which can cause a large problem. We also don’t know if the study was conducted on random people or not. What if everyone in the test had the same blood type, this could be a very large third variable that was not taken into account that could cause the results to be bias. Reverse causation also couldn’t be a factor here because that would be saying that because someone was not bitten by any mosquitoes, they must have eaten a banana, and this is more definitely the case.  So overall, the studies do not seem to have been conducted well and I don’t believe the studies results can be trusted.