What foods attract mosquitoes to your body, and what can you eat that will repel them?
I know that eating bananas is one way to turn yourself in to a mosquito magnet. The potassium in the bananas apparently attracts them to whomever eats them. Whenever I meet someone who says they always get eaten alive by mosquitoes I ask them if they eat a lot of bananas. The answer is usually yes.
What other foods attract mosquitoes to you? And what foods can you eat that will repel them instead?
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Sure, potassium (and salt) secreted by the skin will attract mosquitoes. However, it's a step removed (ingesting food -> nutrient absorption -> physiology -> mosquitoes) and there are so many variables, so I can't give a direct answer to the correlation of food.
Some research suggests that mosquitoes sense mammals based on the carbon dioxide (CO2) they exhale. So if you're in a state where you emit less CO2 you would be less prone to bites. When burning mostly fat (as opposed to carbohydrates), people tend to produce less CO2 for the same amount of oxygen consumed.
Tangentially, this is supported by this article which mentions research on ketones applied to the skin repelling mosquitoes.
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BBC program The Twinstitute did a test on food to repel mosquitoes, alongside a test to repel mosquitoes by using a mobile phone app.
The result of the test was that neither method did much if anything to repel mosquitoes. If you are in the UK you should be able to see the program in the first half of February 2019 on the iPlayer.
(Possibly it will be available in Youtube as well/later, I did not find it yet.)
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