pyrrhiccomedy: brainstatic: lodubimvloyaar: wrinklefucker: godtie: fun fact: if a persons body...

pyrrhiccomedy:

brainstatic:

lodubimvloyaar:

wrinklefucker:

godtie:

fun fact: if a persons body oder smells good to you that means they have an immune system basically opposite of yours! this happens so the chances of finding a mate with the opposite immune system is greater and the chances that any offspring you produce together will have a stronger immune system is greater.

this is fascinating

What makes an immune system ‘opposite’? I’m sensing BS here.

Mmmm, you smell immune to chickenpox.

This is actually true.

Our immune system works in two phases: it detects foreign invaders, then kills them. The “then kills them” part is pretty straightforward: T-cells, the teeth of the immune system, attack any cells flagged by your body as hostile. But the “detects foreign invaders” part has a lot more subtlety. See, cells that are ‘us’ are covered with a protein that identifies them as the locals. But not all “not us” cells need to be (or even should be) hunted down and killed. Furthermore, different diseases call for different antibodies and different levels of response. Invader cells need to not only be tagged as invaders, but also recognized, tagged appropriately, and ‘remembered.’ And your immune system has disease-detecting structures that can do that! And those structures are created by your major histocompatibility complex, or your ‘MHC genes’ for short. 

But people don’t all have the same MHC genes. There are actually dozens of variations of MHC genes, all of which have different strengths and weaknesses. That’s why some people are better at fighting off different diseases than others. But the great thing is that MHC genes are co-dominant. That means that the MHC genes you inherit from your mother and the MHC genes you inherit from your father will express at the SAME TIME. So if your mom was great at fighting off the flu, and your dad was amazing at beating back smallpox, you’re going to be good at recovering from both.

And studies have shown that women actually are attracted to the scent of men whose MHC genes are as different as possible from their own. In fact, not only do they rank those scents as more pleasant, but they very often describe them as ‘reminding them of an ex;’ suggesting that, whether they knew it or not, their mate selection process was probably influenced by their instinct to pass on the strongest immune system they could.

Here’s a source.