Posted on 10/22/2017 6:44:57 PM PDT by JoeProBono
If you’ve ever said, all I have to do is smell food and I gain weight — a new study says you may be right. The delicious aroma of baked goods or the alluring smells of pizza can not only make you feel hungry, but enjoying the scent of high-calorie, high-carb foods may also expand your waistline.
A new study out of the University of California, Berkeley, and published in Cell Metabolism found that one's sense of smell is linked to weight gain. But how can that be? The study says it is possibly related to the way your body stores or burns fat.
Senior study author Andrew Dillin, professor of molecular and cell biology at UC, Berkeley, says, “Sensory systems play a role in metabolism.”
Indeed, the study links metabolism with sense of smell and appetite. The food you can’t smell gets burned off instead of stored, while food that stimulates your senses will likely get stored as fat and become added weight. “Weight gain isn’t purely a measure of the calories taken in; it’s also related to how those calories are perceived,” adds Dillin.
Researchers used mice separated into three groups — a group that had a boosted sense of smell, a group that had their sense of smell temporarily disabled, and a control group. Each of them ate the same high calorie food — a Burger King diet.
The results showed the mice with a super sense of smell gained the most weight — nearly doubling in size. The mice with a disabled sense of smell gained 10 percent of their body weight and the control group gained less than the super-smellers and more than those that couldn’t smell.
Even though it is surprising that sense of smell appears to be so closely related to how the body metabolizes food, the results of this study could be very beneficial for future weight control research.
“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. That would be amazing,” says Dillin. “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.”
AARP? Why give them any space on FR?
Do you realize how anti-liberty they are?
I hope no Freepers are AARP members.
I used to freak out cow-irkers by eating the packing peanuts
I have seen a lot of junk science passed off as science.
Experimental design is a very difficult to get right.
It would be a pretty unbelievable mistake not to control the calories across the three groups.
Nowadays there are a lot of lies passed off as science and many findings are never replicated. I would have no issue with wanting to see the findings confirmed before putting much stock in them.
What all these weight loss studies add up to is essentially the same thing:
Anything that tastes good is likely to kill you.
A more demoralizing message I cannot conceive.
Following all these dietary restrictions would take almost superhuman discipline.
And I might ask — why did God give us so much delicious food? To torment us?
I think not.
no, but fat can make you smell...bad.
They are not lies, since for them to be lies, they would have to be the product of deliberate deception. And that rarely happens (and is an actionable offense when it does occur).
What happens can be attributed to a few factors. Many irreproducible findings are the result of poor experiment design, without use of proper controls. Others happen when "researchers" make conclusions that go far beyond what the evidence shows. This latter happens because in many cases, studies are carried out by physicians who have no training in research methodology.
The most common error I see is when non-research trained physicians conduct a "study" that is really just number mashing to see if some parameter is statistically correlated to some outcome. That is fine, as far as it goes, and could be the precursor to some solid research. However, these non-researchers find a correlation and run to the presses with it, making all kinds of conclusions that are really nothing more than speculations. OMG, drinking soda makes you fat! Eating salt increases blood pressure! What they fail to take into account is 1) that a p value of less than 0.05, although considered a significant correlation for research purposes, still means that there is a 1/20 chance that the correlation is spurious, and 2) correlation does not establish causation.
In the study described at the beginning of the thread, I would hold off judgment until there is more data. Maybe the mice simply eat less if they can't smell the food. Or, conversely, the mice subjected to tantalizing smells developed huge appetites. Or both. Without any supporting data, no one can make a valid conclusion that the sense of smell alters the metabolism. (If anything, I would expect the metabolism alteration to go the other way: smelling delicious food should make the metabolism rev up in anticipation of a meal.)
And sorry for my wordiness here. The subject of poorly interpreted research is a pet peeve of mine. It comes from having worked in the area of clinical research for three years, and having seen a slew of bad studies in the process.
This is poorly designed.
Weight gain is one factor
Amount eaten is another factor.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.