As many people have pointed out, it's basically the case that we don't actually like the taste of "fish." After all, one of the worst things you can say about a food — particularly fish! — is that it smells or tastes "fishy."
So you can imagine how difficult it was for this Portuguese family when their son started smelling, well, exactly like that.
Via Live Science:
Shortly after eating different types of fish, the child would develop an odor of rotting fish emanating from his body. The smell was noxious and powerful, especially around his head and hands. He was 10 months old the first time this happened. ... His mother temporarily put him on a fish-free diet, but after she reintroduced fish to his meals two months later, the odor returned.
Well, look, first of all, I'm not trying to parent-police here, but if my own kid started smelling like "rotting fish" every time he ate a piece of cod, I think I'd never "reintroduce" fish to him; I think rather I'd find all the fish in a 500-mile radius and throw them away.
This is Portugal, however, which has a very seafood-heavy cuisine, so of course you could understand why a parent there would be extremely anxious to solve this problem.
Doctors examined the young boy and guessed that he had "trimethylaminuria," also known as "fish odor syndrome," in which "breath, saliva, sweat and urine smell like decaying fish." Here's a breakdown of that ailment:
Rotten fish gets its distinctive smell from a molecule called trimethylamine, and the human body produces trimethylamine from nitrogen-rich foods, such as fish. An enzyme called flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) breaks down trimethylamine in the body, changing it to the odorless compound trimethylamine N-oxide. But if the enzyme isn't working as it should, trimethylamine accumulates in the body and can make a person produce a foul, rotting-fish aroma.
Yeah no chowder for me, thank you!
Doctors, however, weren't very alarmed; they suggested the parents "reintroduce fish to the child's diet in small increments" and that they "manage any lingering smell with a low-pH soap." The smell went away and hadn't returned after several years. (Though trimethylaminuria is normally incurable, doctors suggested that the "immaturity of [the young patient's] metabolism" might have rendered this a temporary case.)
Hope everyone in the family can still tolerate fish!
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