How smelling food makes you fat.

How smelling food makes you fat. A new study by University of California, Berkeley, showed that obese mice who lost their sense of smell also lost weight. Researchers developed ways to temporarily eliminate the sense of smell in adult mice, and discovered that those mice that lost smell could eat a high-fat diet and stay a normal weight, while litter mates that retained the sense of smell ballooned to twice normal weight. Super-smellers gained more weight than did normal mice on the same high-fat diet. Smell-deficient mice burned excess fat instead of storing it, suggesting a link between smell and metabolism. The irony however, is that these slimmed-down but smell-deficient mice ate the same amount of fatty food as mice that retained their sense of smell and ballooned to twice their normal weight. In addition, mice with a boosted sense of smell -- super-smellers -- got even fatter on a high-fat diet than did mice with normal smell. The findings suggest that the odor of what we eat may play an important role in how the body deals with calories. If you can't smell your food, you may burn it rather than store it.more