A smell only a mother could love

[scaeagles]

Moms prefer smell of their own baby's poop (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060712_baby_poop.html)

Long live science!

In a new study, 13 mothers were asked to sniff soiled diapers belonging to both their own child and others from an unrelated baby. The women consistently ranked the smell of their own child's feces as less revolting than that of other babies.

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Moms prefer smell of their own baby's poop (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060712_baby_poop.html)

Long live science!

Who would volunteer for that study?

[scaeagles]

I was also wondering who would think of performing that study and why on earth anyone would fund it.

[Alex]

I can think of several intesting lines of inquiry it opens up. I'd be interested in seeing the differential using women who were the biological mother of the child but had not been involved in the care of the child.

Similarly do fathers show the same factor? Even if they are providing the "typically mother" level of care?

From an evolutionary perspective human babies are pretty interesting. They are both physically much less developed than most other mammalian species but physically more separate than in other species with such immature births (such as marsupials where the physically immature infant is physically attached to the mother). Anthropologically it is interesting from a behavioral evolution point of view but it is also interesting from a straight biological point of view as it indicates there is something that the mothers are able to identify as unique and more tolerable in own their own baby's poop.

As for funding, it very likely wasn't. A lot of small studies like these are done without any, or very little, external funding. That is the great thing about doing research at a university full of students who can get extra credit for participating in such studies.

Another follow-up question would be whether we would all rank the smell of our own excrement as superior to that of anybody else. In Lake Wobegone everybody's **** smells like roses, you could say.

[Brigitte]

Doing the job that I do, I have to agree. My son's diapers never smelled as bad as the daycare kids' do. Except maybe for that infant I have now, but he's too little to have really stinky poop yet ;)

[wendybeth]

I cannot believe they actually studied this- any mother could have told them that. My sis had a son two months before Tori was born, and we often traded babysitting. I would practically throw up trying to change his diapers, while Tori's didn't hardly ever bother me. (Except that time she had the flu....:eek: ).

[DreadPirateRoberts]

I would practically throw up trying to change his diapers, while Tori's didn't hardly ever bother me. (Except that time she had the flu....:eek: ).

Agreed, I can change my little swabs' diapers, and no one elses.

[Alex]

Yeah, but the interesting question is why. Is it psycholigcal or physiological?

[DreadPirateRoberts]

Yeah, but the interesting question is why. Is it psycholigcal or physiological?

In my case, I think it's psychological. It's more in my mind.

[wendybeth]

Probably physiological. New moms can also pick out their child by cry in the hospital nursery. The smell thing is probably just adaptation, not unlike a person who freaks when someone else farts, but has no problem with their own.

[Gemini Cricket]

Scientists study lots of stuff that seems weird but makes perfect sense to someone else. :D

I thought studying the immune systems of tunicates was weird, until I found out their immune systems have similarities to our own.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I wouldn't be so quick to pass it off as psychological. There have been some surprising studies involving human smell, pheremones, and genetics. For example, I read a study where women smelled shirts that men had worn for a couple days. The results showed that the women preferred the scent of men with complimentary immune systems (i.e., if the woman had high counts of antibodies against diseases a, b, f, h, and i, she'd most prefer a man with high antibodies counts against diseases c, d, e, and g). Seems to suggest a genetic advantage, giving offspring the highest chance at a robust immune system.

[tracilicious]

I think to be truly accurate they would need to smell blindfolded and not just mislabel the poop. All baby poop looks different and I'm sure the mothers could tell which was their baby's poop.

I've often said that if I could bottle baby smell (from their head, not their butt) and the euphoria that mother's get from it, it would outsell crack.