Smelling Your Food Before You Eat It Could Make You Gain More Weight

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One of the greatest anticipations of mealtime is enjoying the aroma of the food you’re about to eat. It overwhelms the senses and leaves your mouth watering before even the tiniest crumb touches your tongue. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley suggests that the ways in which you smell your food before you eat it can play a major role in your propensity to gain weight.

The study involved two groups of mice, one of which had their senses of smell temporarily disabled (with gene therapy) and one that could smell normally. They were then fed the same high-fat diet. And while the normal mice gained about 100 percent of their original weight throughout the study, the non-smelling mice only gained a maximum of 10 percent of their original weight.

You might guess that the dramatically different results linked to the rats’ varying desire for the high-fat food once they did (or didn’t) smell it. But the researchers actually found that it had much more to do with the metabolic process itself.

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There seems to be a connection between what animals can smell and how their bodies burn calories. Throughout the study, the smell-deficient mice transformed their beige fat cells (which store fat) into brown fat cells (which burn fatty acids), suggesting that their lack of sense of smell somehow connected to their ability to burn fat rather than store it. The reasoning behind this reaction is likely associated with the activation of their sympathetic nervous systems as they were robbed of smelling abilities and studied in a higher-stress state.

“This paper is one of the first studies that really shows if we manipulate olfactory inputs we can actually alter how the brain perceives energy balance, and how the brain regulates energy balance,” research team member Céline Riera said in a statement.

The researchers hope that if this reaction can be replicated in humans (not just mice), pharmacists could be able to manufacture a drug that inhibits this metabolic circuit without compromising one’s sense of smell, thus helping people lose weight more effectively by burning fat stores. We have a long way to go before this happens, but for now, it’s pretty freaking crazy to realize all that is happening in our bodies when we think we are simply smelling a plate of food.