 A few weeks ago, I released videos on deet versus natural repellents that we can apply to our clothes or skin. But can things we eat also have a repellent quality? No word yet on vampires, but we do have it on garlic and other bloodsuckers. Check it out. Are some people just more attractive to mosquitoes than others? Apparently so, as identical twins are most likely to be similarly tasty compared to fraternal twins who will only share 50% of their DNA, demonstrating an underlying genetic component that can be sniffed out by mosquitoes. Although it's not clear it's because some people smell better or other people just smell worse. We know pregnant women are twice as attractive to malaria mosquitoes and also that mosquitoes are attracted to sweat. Human sweat contains components that are attractive to anthropophilic, meaning human-loving mosquitoes. The unique composition of human sweat appears to explain its tantalizing effect, though sweat from some body parts are evidently more tantalizing than others. Skin emanations collected from armpits were less attractive compared to hands or feet. Here's the graph. They think the difference may be caused by deodorant residues, since in a subsequent experiment volunteers were asked to avoid using skin care products for five days, and after that no differences were detected. The creepiest bit of research I found was this. The parasites that cause the mosquito-borne disease malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, makes you more attractive to, you guessed it, the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. What better way for the parasites to hitch from person to person? Instead of leaving it up to chance, some parasites manipulate their hosts in elaborate ways. I've talked about how the toxoplasma brain parasite draws mice to the smell of cat urine to get into cat's brains, or how about the rabies virus concentrating in the saliva while tapping into the Cujo rage circuit in the brain. There's even a parasite that needs to get from an ant to a bird, so it turns the ant's belly bright red to look like a ripe berry and makes the ant stick it up in the air to confuse the fruit-eating bird. There's the ants before and after infection, just like malaria parasites making us particularly tasty to mosquitoes. Anything we can do to make ourselves less tasty? I've talked about the various mosquito repellents you can spray on your skin, both synthetic and natural mosquito repellents, but is there anything you can eat or drink to make you less of a target? When you search the scientific literature for diet and mosquitoes, a lot of articles like this pop up on diets for mosquitoes, like Skeeto snack for that artificial blood meal replacement. Feeding mice, different diets make a difference, but what about people? One of the most common anecdotes is that vitamin B-complex supplements protect against biting insects. Other anecdotal remedies include the taking of garlic, Marmite, Vegemite, Brewer's yeast tablets, and alcohol. But you don't know until you put it to the test. How about a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of garlic as a mosquito repellent? A belief in the ability of garlic to repel insects seems to be widespread, so researchers in Connecticut decided to see if it were true. They looked at the numbers of mosquitoes that did not feed on the subjects, the number of mosquito bites, the weights of the mosquitoes after feeding and the amount of blood ingested all determined on people on and off garlic. The data did not provide evidence of significant mosquito repellent. No surprise, given that even if you slather garlic oil on your skin within 30 minutes, mosquitoes don't seem to care. Eating garlic may, however, help against ticks. Because military personnel can sometimes be a particularly high risk for tick bites and tick-borne diseases, the Swedish military conducted randomized, controlled, double-blind trials of garlic to prevent tick bites among marines. Fifty swallowed the equivalent of about a clove a day of garlic, and fifty took placebo pills. Then they all switched, and there was a significant reduction in tick bites when consuming garlic compared to placebo, cutting the risk of tick bites by about 20%. 20% is better than nothing, but treating your clothing with something like permethrin has been shown to be 100% effective against deer ticks, the vector of Lyme disease, and so that may be better than counting on garlic bread to save you.