I sometimes joke that just being around food makes me gain weight, whether or not I eat it. Surprisingly, there might be some truth to this. Just smelling food can make you fatter. In a study with mice, those that couldn’t smell the fatty food they were eating, didn’t get fatter. Seems crazy that this can be true in humans, but, there are connections between “…the smell system and regions of the brain that regulate metabolism…” (1). We aren’t mice, but “humans who lose their sense of smell….often become anorexic…” (1). We don’t know why this is, “….perhaps the lack of smell tricks the body into thinking it has already eaten…” (1). Before you run to your doctor to kill your sense of smell, don’t, this can increase a hormone called noradrenaline, which can increase the chances of a heart attack (1).
With this knowledge I’m not going to sniff food I’m not going to eat, and I might plug my nose if I eat something fattening.
Source: Sanders, Robert. “Smelling your food makes you fat.” Web blog post. Berkeley News. UC Berkeley. 15 Jul. 2017. Web. 2017, 13 Jul. 2017. Retrieved from: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/07/05/smelling-your-food-makes-you-fat/
add’l sources:
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/07/just-smelling-food-could-make-you-gain-weight.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/weight-gain-causes-food-smell-university-berkeley-california-mice-study-research-a7831491.html
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