Want to stay thin? Hold your nose!

Turns out, a good sense of smell might be causing you to gain weight


Newsdesk July 08, 2017
PHOTO:FILE

It’s often said that we eat with our eyes first, but it’s actually our sense of smell that’s running the show, a new study says. In fact, a good sense of smell might be the reason that certain people have trouble losing weight, reported Food52.

In a series of experiments, Berkeley researchers found that smell-impaired mice — whose senses were temporarily inhibited — ate the same high-fat diet as mice with unimpaired senses of smell, but only gained 10% more weight. Meanwhile, the mice that retained their senses of smell gained “about 100% of their normal weight. Also, as the second group of mice became obese, they also develop sensitivity to insulin and glucose intolerance, while the former group did not. Later, when the team tested the same diet on mice with an even more acute sense of smell, these subjects gained even more weight.

As it turns out, the very act of smelling food before you eat it informs your body of what to do with those calories, according to the study. After eating a fatty diet, the smell-impaired mice easily burned the calories. Some of these smell-impaired mice were able to do this with nearly all their fat cells, such that the high-fat diet had almost no impact on their weight.

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“I was shocked — the effect was so robust,” senior author, biologist Andrew Dillin said. “I was convinced they were just eating less.”

In the latter half of the study, researchers inhibited the olfactory senses of the mice that had grown obese, and found that they, too, finally lost weight on the same fatty diet and even regained a healthy glucose response. The next step is to consider how humans might respond to olfactory intervention for controlling weight.

“Weight gain isn’t purely a measure of the calories taken in; it’s also related to how those calories are perceived,” Dillin said. “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.”

One important negative side effect associated with loss of smell, however, was an increase in noradrenaline, a stress hormone which, in humans, can lead to a heart attack.

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