A Pennsylvania mother who noticed her newborn smelled like pancakes is speaking out after the sweet scent turned out to be a warning sign of a rare and potentially deadly disease.
Megan Popps, 30, of Pittsburgh, welcomed son Leo Debelak with partner Devaughn Debelak in February 2026. The family was discharged after routine testing, but the unusual odor she detected shortly after arriving home would soon send them racing back to the hospital.
Popps described the smell as “sickeningly sweet” and unmistakably like maple syrup, not the typical scent of a newborn. At first, she recalled being served pancakes during her hospital stay and assumed she had simply spilled some onto Leo’s blankets.
“We had mentioned to each other a few times that Leo smelled very sweet,” she said. “It’s a very sugary, pancake smell, it’s sickeningly sweet like maple syrup.”
Days after returning home, the family received an urgent call about Leo’s routine heel prick test. The results had flagged an anomaly.
“While we were still in the hospital, Leo had the heel prick test done and we were discharged home before the results came back,” Popps explained. “We were told we needed to have the test redone as something had come back inconclusive. We went the next day to have it redone. I called up and found out it was Leo’s amino acid profile that had come back inconclusive.”
Popps said she researched Maple Syrup Urine Disease (MSUD), a rare inherited metabolic disorder in which the body cannot properly break down certain amino acids found in protein. The condition takes its name from the distinctive sweet odor it produces in urine, sweat, and earwax. She took Leo back to the hospital, where doctors found his amino acid levels had reached critical levels. He was formally diagnosed with MSUD and hospitalized for three weeks.
“When I looked up the disorder and saw how rare it was, it was hard for us to grasp our brains around the fact that was what was possibly happening,” she said.
Popps came prepared for the emergency visit, bringing evidence of the strange symptom. “Before going to the ER, we had packed some of his clothes and a soiled onesie to show the doctor that it smelled like pancakes. There was no urine smell at all.”
In the viral moment that has since drawn widespread attention, a mother simply trusted her nose and a peculiar pancake-like scent on her infant, initially dismissing it as spilled hospital food, only to have it lead to a life-saving diagnosis of a disease so rare that most families would never encounter it.
Leo is now doing well, but Popps said he faces lifelong dietary restrictions to manage the condition. “He will be on a very strict vegan diet, he will have to avoid meat and dairy completely,” she said. “He will have to count his protein intake for the rest of his life.”
The risks of mismanagement remain severe. “He is at risk for life of having another metabolic crisis,” Popps added. “If he ingested too much protein, periods of fasting, sickness or extreme stress can also lead to a metabolic crisis.”
Popps believes the distinctive odor proved crucial to Leo’s survival, saying he could have deteriorated rapidly without intervention. “I think that pancake, maple syrup smell absolutely helped save his life,” she said. “I think if we didn’t have something concrete like the smell, we’d have been able to talk ourselves out of everything that was going on.”