Mere smell of food may make you fat

While searching for food, the body stores calories in case it's unsuccessful, but once food is secured, the body feels free to burn it, Riera noted. Your sense of smell that helps in enjoying the food may be inadvertently making you fat while the lack of it may trick the body into thinking it has already eaten, researchers say. The findings revealed that obese mice that lost sense of smell lost weight on a high fat diet while their counterparts with a strong sense of aroma ballooned to twice their normal weight. The result suggests that the odour of what we eat may play an important role in how the body deals with calories. "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.

Smelling food may make you fat: study

The team noted that the mice turned their beige fat cells – the subcutaneous fat storage cells that accumulate around our thighs and midriffs – into brown fat cells, which burn fatty acids to produce heat. In these mice, white fat cells – the storage cells that cluster around our internal organs and are associated with poor health outcomes – also shrank in size. Some turned almost all of their beige fat into brown fat, becoming lean, mean burning machines. Los Angeles, Jul 6 (PTI) The ability to smell food may be making you fat, while its absence may trick the body into thinking that it has already eaten, scientists say. Researchers, including those from University of California, Berkeley in the US found that obese mice who lost their sense of smell also lost weight on a high fat diet.

Just smelling food can make you fat, UC Berkeley study says

A study by UC Berkeley researchers found that a sense of smell can influence the brain's decision to burn fat or store it in the body — or a least the bodies of mice. Each mouse ate the same amount of food, but those with a super sense of smell gained the most weight. "People that don't have a sense of smell can get depressed, because the sense of smell is very important for behavior," Riera said. Eliminating a human's sense of smell would be a radical step, said Dillin, an expert in stem cell research. Just smelling food can make you fat, UC Berkeley study saysOn the bustling streets of San Francisco, people can sense what's grilling, baking and frying in restaurants from North Beach to Noe Valley without even looking at the menus, as myriad cuisines serve up a smorgasbord of aromas for the nostrils.


collected by :Lucy William