No, Scientists Haven’t Just Proven That the Smell of Food Makes You Fat.
This world has to be a special hell if just the smell of food is enough to make you gain weight. Recent headlines on obesity research suggest just that, but smell probably only makes “you” fat if “you” is a special type of mouse.
Headline : “The Smell of Food Can Make You Fat,” says a study by the University of California, Berkeley (SFGate).
History : This research is actually about the minutest details of metabolism and subtle signals circulating through your body (well, the body of a mouse) that tell cells to store fat.
We do not know exactly what these signals are. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley wondered if the smell and taste of food might be involved. We already know that we are more sensitive to smells when we are hungry and less sensitive to smells when we are full. Perhaps, they thought, this was a two-way street.
So they ran a series of experiments with mice that smell really well, mice that barely smell at all, and mice whose sense of smell was temporarily blocked. They found that the better the mice smell, the more they gain and retain weight, even if they don’t overeat. Namely:
- Blocking the obese mouse’s sense of smell made it lose weight.
- Mice with a normal sense of smell gained weight faster than mice that did not smell, even if they ate the same amount of fatty foods.
- Smelling mice gained weight even faster than regular mice.
So, there are clearly some caveats here. Mice are not humans, and this is very important. Many things that cause or treat obesity in mice have not worked in humans.
Secondly, mice with very good and poor sense of smell were mutants in which more than just a loss of smell was happening. Perhaps they were prone to obesity (or not) for reasons unrelated to odor. And the researchers note that there is at least one strain of mice that they did not use in this experiment, which has a poor sense of smell and is generally thin.
Takeaway : This study is pretty neat if you like digging into the details of metabolism, but that’s about it. The researchers hope that someday they will be able to find a way to block any signals sent by smells without having to destroy a person’s sense of smell. We will let you know if this ever succeeds.