'Fat-fingered criminals' easier to catch
Criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be identified by police
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Tuesday, 16, Sep 2008 08:54
Criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be identified by police using fingerprint tests, scientist claim.
Dr John Bond, a researcher at the University of Leicester and scientific support officer at Northamptonshire police, claims that those who eat processed food leave fingerprints which are more likely to corrode metal.
Speaking at a conference on forensic science at the University of Leicester, Dr Bond suggests that sweaty fingerprint marks make more of a corrosive impression on metal if they have a high salt content.
"On the basis that processed foods tend to be high in salt as a preservative, the body needs to excrete excess salt which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers," Dr Bond said.
"So the sweaty fingerprint impression you leave when you touch a surface will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods - the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal."
He added that there was therefore an indirect link between obesity and the chances of being caught of a crime.
"Other research has drawn links between processed foods and obesity and we know that consumers of processed foods will leave better fingerprints," he said.
Dr Bond said there was potential to take his research even further and look at the what makes up sweat and whether it can identify the type of person who left that sweat mark.
"This would be particularly helpful for terrorist type crimes where the nature of the incident would tend to obliterate forensic evidence. So a sweat mark on a piece of metal or bomb fragment that might be recovered from an incident might be able to provide a clue to the type of person who perpetrated the incident," he added.
"We would describe the study of sweat as a process of intelligent fingerprinting - using the fingerprint to tell us more about the individual rather than a simple identification."