The link between smelling your food and weight gain

They turned their beige fat cells (stored as fat) into brown fat cells, which burn fatty acids to make heat. These results point to a connection between the system that controls smell (olfactory system) and parts of the brain that control metabolism. While the normal mice gained 100 per cent of their normal weight, the smell-deficient mice only gained, at most, 10 percent more weight. Their white fat cells (those that cling to internal organs) also shrank, yet there was no effect on their muscles, bones or other organs. He explains that weight gain isn't just a measure of calories taken in, it also relates to how those calories are perceived.



People who can't smell their food might burn them, while people who can smell their food might store them. Fresh on the heels of the devastating news that zero-calorie seltzer might cause weight gain, a sadistic new study indicated that just smelling food may make you fat. The researchers theorized that the smell of food might affect how our bodies respond to calories. And it wasn't because the excellent smellers gorged themselves: The groups consumed the same amount of food. Surprisingly, the sniff-gifted group literally doubled in size, while the obese mice without a sense of smell gained only 10 percent more weight.

Could smelling our food lead to weight gain?

A team of researchers have recently made a surprising discovery: mice that cannot smell their food do not gain weight. Namely, they looked at the link between white fat, brown fat, and disruption of the olfactory sense. They also looked at the "energy homeostasis" of the mice - that is, the balance between food consumption and energy expenditure. The results of the new study were published in the journal Cell Metabolism, and the findings point to an unexplored link between olfactory neurons and weight gain. White fat and brown fat fulfill different functions: white fat stores energy, while brown fat expends it.


collected by :Lucy William