Just Smelling Food Can Make You Gain Weight
If you thought the willpower you harnessed to skip out on freshly baked
cookies or the pizza your friends ordered was helping you lose weight,
you might want to rethink that. It turns out even smelling those
calorie- and carb-rich foods could be messing with your waistline.
According to a new UC Berkeley study published this week in Cell
Metabolism, your sense of smell is linked to weight gain, possibly
because the smell determines whether your body stores fat or burns it
off.
“Sensory systems play a role in metabolism,” said senior study author
Andrew Dillin, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Distinguished Chair in Stem
Cell Research and professor of molecular and cell biology. “Weight gain
isn’t purely a measure of the calories taken in; it’s also related to
how those calories are perceived.”
Researchers put mice into three groups — “super-smellers” that have a
boosted sense of smell, those with a temporarily disabled sense of smell
and a control group — and had them eat the same, high-fat “Burger King
diet.”
The mice with the superior sense of smell gained the most weight,
doubling in size, while those who couldn’t smell gained a maximum of 10
percent of their body weight. The control group gained less than the
super-smellers, but more than the non-smellers.
This study points to a key connection between olfaction — our sense of
smell — and to not only to appetite, but also to metabolism. Food you
can’t smell likely gets burned instead of being stored as fat, while
food that stimulates your nasal senses likely gets stored, hence the
added weight gain. In other words, those who can’t really smell the
beefy, cheese goodness of a Taco Bell Chalupa, are probably metabolizing
it significantly better.
But that doesn’t mean you should go plugging up your nose to lose
weight. Researchers pointed out that it’s common for people who’ve lost
their smell sense due to old age, diseases like Parkinson’s or injuries
to become depressed and stop eating.
Instead, using these new findings, science may be able to find a way to
help “super-smellers” as well as those who have lost their sense of
smell properly stabilize their metabolism. “If we can validate this in
humans, perhaps we can actually make a drug that doesn’t interfere with
smell but still blocks that metabolic circuitry. That would be amazing,”
Dillin said. “For that small group of people, you could wipe out their
smell for maybe six months and then let the olfactory neurons grow back
after they’ve got their metabolic program rewired.”
What Do YOU Think?
Does it surprise you that your sense of smell could be so closely
related to how your body metabolizes food? Will this study change the
way you smell and eat? Do you think this study will be significant in
the way obesity and eating disorders are treated?
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