Google ‘diet’ and you will find yourself inundated with advice, ideas and gimmicky food plans all promising to have you shedding the lbs in record time.
Eat less, ditch carbs, give up dairy, avoid eating after this hour, fast, don’t fast; the noise in defeaning when it comes to what we should and should not do or eat for weight loss.
However, this latest advice has less to do with what you eat and all to do with what you smell.
Yup, that’s right.
According to a new study, there is a good reason for even the strongest dieters to avoid walking past your local bakery or even pizza place. Why? Because, using mice in a test lab, researchers have now found evidence smells may be making us gain wait.
Wait, WHAT?!
UC Berkeley researchers recently published a new study that concluded mice bred to not have a sense of smell could eat a high-fat diet and maintain a healthy weight, while their normal sniffing littermates ballooned up to twice their size when exposed to the same foods.
Strange, isn’t it? They ate the same amount of fatty foods, yet only one of them got fat. Looking into the findings, the scientists blame this phenomenon on a connection between the olfactory (or smell) system and regions of the brain that regulate metabolism.
This is what Céline Riera, a former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow now at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, had to say about the findings:
“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.”
Senior author of the study, Andrew Dillin, explained it this way:
“Weight gain isn’t purely a measure of the calories taken in; it’s also related to how those calories are perceived, so 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,” Dillin explained.
“Though it would be a drastic step to eliminate smell in humans wanting to lose weight, it might be a viable alternative for the morbidly obese contemplating stomach stapling or bariatric surgery, even with the increased noradrenaline. For that small group of people, you could wipe out their smell for maybe six months and then let the olfactory neurons grow back, after they’ve got their metabolic program rewired.”
