Criminals can be detected by what they eat
Criminals who eat cheeseburgers, chips and ready meals should watch out - processed foods increase their chance of being caught.
Forensic experts say sweat left in fingerprints is more likely to leave a trace at the scene of a crime if it has a high salt content, a common effect of eating unhealthy food.
Dr John Bond, Northamptonshire Police's pioneering forensic scientist, said that there was therefore an indirect link between obese criminals and their chances of being caught.
Speaking at a conference at the University of Leicester, he said: "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.
"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.
"Other research has drawn links between processed foods and obesity and we know that consumers of processed foods will leave better fingerprints."
The corrosion of metal surfaces is being used in a groundbreaking technique to recover fingerprints from evidence, even after the metals have been washed clean, fired from a gun or put through extreme heat.
Working with the University of Leicester, Dr Bond now hopes to create "sweat profiles" of criminals to learn more about the person who committed the crime, rather than just a simple identification.
He said: "Important for us is how the salt varies but there is potential to investigate other elements to describe the kind of person who left the 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."
The new fingerprint corrosion technique invented by Dr Bond is already being used by several police forces in America and the FBI, as well as the US Marines hoping to track down terrorists.
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