So — I don’t really know yet. But let me back up.
A while ago I realized my body odor was starting to smell like corn chips, and it baffled me. What did I do? What had I changed that would suddenly make me smell like corn chips? It was super annoying. Not that I have anything against corn chips — I actually love them — but I don’t want to smell like them. Although part of me thought, well, if I have to smell like something, maybe this is a wonderful occurrence. Why didn’t I smell like corn chips earlier in life? I’ve been missing out. I don’t even know if they make a corn chip scent — maybe they will. I heard the other day that soda-flavored snacks are becoming a thing, so maybe Fritos will eventually bottle the smell. But as far as I know, it doesn’t exist yet.
So it was genuinely perplexing, and I did what everybody does: I looked it up online. Why has my smell suddenly changed? And of course the internet says, well, it could be some physical thing. So then it’s, all right, do I have some kind of disease? I looked into that too. On top of it, I hadn’t been feeling great — I had fatigue, some muscle aches — and all of these things sort of coincided, so I decided it was something internal, some physical issue I couldn’t quite pin down.
I hadn’t changed my diet in any significant way that would explain it. So I went to the doctor and got blood tests — not purely for the smell, but I added it to my growing list of odd physical maladies. And I think that’s actually one of the reasons people don’t go to the doctor sooner: you just assume it’s part of getting older. My joints hurt, my digestion’s weird, whatever — you attribute all of it to age instead of looking closer.
I did end up going, though. With the fatigue and muscle aches, I was also thinking about tick-borne diseases, because my kids have had them and my wife has had them. I did find a tick on me — one was even attached — but it didn’t seem like it had been there long, and I never got a bull’s-eye. When the tests came back, everything was normal. Which is good news and bad news: good that nothing’s obviously wrong, bad that there’s no obvious reason for any of it, including the smell.
So this bothered me for a while. But I think I may have — oddly enough — found the source. I’m not going to go out on a limb yet, since it’s only been a few days, but I think I’ve got it. And it’s a little unsettling.
It came down to two possibilities. When I dug in a second time, the search pointed to products you put on your body, and separately, to your laundry. On the product side, I’d switched the smoothing cream I put in my hair to keep it from flying all over the place — different brand — so that was one candidate.
The other was the laundry, which honestly should have been obvious. We have teenage boys, and teenage boys today are obsessed with smells. Everything has to have a scent — they douse themselves in cologne, all their products reek of something, it’s an overwhelming explosion of perfume. The reason I’d discounted laundry is that we’d already been through a whole saga with it. For some reason our wash started smelling like vomit, and the smell wouldn’t come out. We tried baking soda, we tried everything. Eventually, after we got rid of that underlying odor, we started putting scent-booster pellets in the laundry to give it this incredibly heavy smell — because before that we were using free and clear: no dyes, no fragrance, nothing. Add in the fact that, to save energy, we’d been washing everything in cold water, which everybody says is fine.
That should have been the key, and I didn’t put it together. I thought we’d solved the problem.
Here’s what I now think actually happened. My younger son has incredibly smelly feet — and smelly feet and socks tend to smell like corn chips, at least in my experience. I’ve been lucky that my own feet don’t have much odor. But I think those stinky socks permeated my T-shirts and the rest of my clothes in the wash, and then when I’d sweat, the smell came right back out.
So I changed things. I swapped out the hair product, and I ran my shirts through a hot wash with baking soda and OxiClean to strip the odor. And it seems — gross as this is — to have worked. The catch is that my experiments are never clean, because I tend to change everything at once, so I’m never totally sure what did it. Right before that load, I also cleaned the washer itself with baking soda and vinegar on a hot cycle. I do that occasionally, but I couldn’t tell you the last time, so maybe it had been too long.
This morning was the test. I took the dog for a walk, worked up a sweat — the exact conditions where I’d normally smell the corn chips — and today, nothing. So the three things I changed were the hot wash with baking soda and OxiClean, cleaning the washer, and switching the hair product. My gut says it was the stinky socks getting into my clothes.
What still perplexes me is why it only seems to happen to me. Is everybody else’s clothing doing this and they just don’t notice, because the kids have drowned everything in cologne? I don’t know why my wife doesn’t notice it. Maybe it’s just my chemistry — something in my sweat reacting with whatever’s left in the fabric. When you actually smell the clothes, they smell fine; they’ve got that heavy perfume on top. But underneath, hidden, there’s this really gross smell that only comes out on me — and I’m especially sensitive to odors.
So hopefully I’ve solved it. If I don’t write about it again, it means it hasn’t come back. It’s unfortunate what the source might be, but at least now I know I have to wash my stuff separately, or go back to hot and warm water instead of cold, at least on those items. And who knows — hopefully he grows out of it. It’d suck to have that his whole life. But I guess that’s part of being human.
A little update: it may be the socks, or it may be something about the shirts. It’s odd — it doesn’t happen with my white T-shirts, only the colored ones. I notice it in both my 50/50 blends and my heavy 100% cotton tees (Gildan 5000), though it seems stronger in the Gildan. Which almost makes it stranger — cotton is supposed to be the fabric that doesn’t hold odor, so the fact that it turns up across different fabrics makes me think it’s probably not the cotton itself. It may or may not be solved, but I think I’ve at least narrowed it down. And I don’t think it’s because I’m dying.
Claude Fact Check
The following is an independent fact-check of the claims in this post, run by Claude. It’s here for transparency, not to change the story.
The corn-chip foot/sock smell is real and has a known cause — accurately described. The “Fritos feet” smell is generally attributed to Brevibacterium, a bacteria that thrives in the warm, moist environment inside socks and shoes. As it feeds on dead skin and sweat, it releases sulfur compounds (S-methyl thioesters) that produce that distinctive corn-chip/cheese odor. Fun corroborating detail: Brevibacterium is the same genus used to ripen stinky cheeses like Limburger and Muenster. So the author’s hunch that his son’s socks were the source is biologically plausible.
No bull’s-eye rash doesn’t rule out Lyme — a fair worry. The classic bull’s-eye rash (erythema migrans) is reported in roughly 60–80% of Lyme cases, meaning a meaningful share of people never develop or notice one, and the “classic” target pattern appears in only a minority of those rashes. So the author’s reasoning — that he found an attached tick and felt off, even without a bull’s-eye — is sound, and getting tested was reasonable.
Cold-water washing really can leave odor behind — correct. Body oils and odor-causing bacteria get embedded deep in fabric fibers, and cold water plus detergent often isn’t enough to break them down. When you warm up and sweat, the trapped bacteria reactivate and the smell returns — a phenomenon laundry folks literally call “rebloom.” Warm or hot water breaks down the oils better, which is exactly why the author’s hot wash with baking soda and OxiClean helped.
The shirt clue — with a correction. Two shirt types are in play here: 50/50 cotton-poly blends and Gildan 5000 heavy tees, which are 100% cotton. The smell shows up on both — reportedly stronger on the pure-cotton Gildan. That argues against the fiber itself being the driver: if synthetics were the culprit the blend should be worse, not the cotton (and in odor studies cotton actually holds body odor less than polyester). There aren’t notable reports of Gildan 5000s being smelly, either. Since the common thread is colored shirts across different fabrics, the likelier suspects are the dyes and finishing chemicals on colored fabric, leftover contamination from the wash, or simply that a heavier, more absorbent shirt holds more of whatever’s causing it — not the cotton per se, which lines up with the author’s own hunch.
On the “soda-flavored snacks” aside: This is a real trend — brands do periodically release novelty soda- and snack-crossover flavors — but it’s a passing pop-culture reference, not load-bearing to the story, so treat it as color rather than a verified claim.
Bottom line: the science underpinning this post checks out. Brevibacteria explain the corn-chip smell, cold-water washing genuinely can trap and re-release body odor, and a missing bull’s-eye rash doesn’t rule out Lyme. One correction: because the smell turns up on both a 50/50 blend and a 100% cotton Gildan — stronger on the cotton — the fabric fiber itself isn’t the culprit (cotton actually resists odor better than synthetics). That points to the dye/finishing on colored shirts, leftover contamination in the wash, or fabric weight rather than the material. The overall self-diagnosis — socks and/or certain shirts contaminating the shared laundry — remains a reasonable, still-untested hypothesis, which the author frames as such.
Even that's Odd 
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