I eat what I want and don't get fat
Loss of sense of smell helps to maintain a slim figure
A study conducted on laboratory mice showed that mice who have lost the ability to perceive odors lose weight, although they eat no less than before.
In the work of molecular biologist Andrew Dillin from the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues, experimental mice were given regular doses of diphtheria toxin – a product of Corynebacterium diphtheriae. It suppresses the neurons associated with the perception of odors, which is why mice lost their sense of smell during the period of taking the drugs. During the experiment, some mice were fed regular food, and some were kept on a high-fat diet.
After more than three months, it turned out that the olfactory mice who ate ordinary food weighed only slightly less than the mice from the control group who ate the same way, but did not lose their sense of smell.
But among the mice whose diet was characterized by increased fat content, the mice deprived of smell weighed 16% less than the overweight mice from the control group.
Most likely, the author of the UC Berkeley press release Smelling your food makes you fat is on the set
I invited the most prominent representatives of these two groups – VM.
At the second stage of the experiment, mice that had already eaten fat on a fat diet were taken and deprived of their sense of smell. Pretty soon they lost weight.
The obvious explanation for this effect is that mice with a weakened sense of smell eat less, it turned out to be wrong. There was no difference in food intake between the two groups of mice. Moreover, the thin mice also moved no more than their fat counterparts.
The researchers determined that the mice remained lean because they burned more calories through brown fat. In the body of mice, as well as humans, there are two types of adipose tissue: white and brown. White serves to store energy in the form of chemicals. Brown adipose tissue is intended for heating, heat is released in its cells due to reactions in the mitochondria.
Andrew Dillin and his colleagues found that in the body of mice with a disabled sense of smell, not only the activity of brown adipose tissue increases, but also part of the white fat turns into brown. "They rewrite their metabolic programs to burn more calories," says the scientist. "When a mouse cannot smell its food, it may 'think' that it has eaten more than it actually has, and this encourages it to expend more energy."
Continuing their research, the scientists decided to find out what would happen to mice whose sense of smell would not be reduced, but on the contrary, sharpened. To do this, they took genetically modified mice, hypersensitive to odors. Such mice were indeed often obese, although they ate no more than others. So the hypothesis about the connection of the sense of smell with energy consumption and, ultimately, with obesity or weight loss, was confirmed.
The results of the study are published in the journal Cell Metabolism (Riera et al., The Sense of Smell Impacts Metabolic Health and Obesity).
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06.07.2017