Our sense of smell is key to our enjoyment of food, therefore, it may be no surprise that in experiments at the University of California, Berkeley, obese mice who lost their sense of smell were found to also lose weight.
Researchers developed ways to temporarily eliminate the sense of smell in adult mice and discovered that those mice that lost their sense of smell could eat a high-fat diet and stay with a normal weight, while littermates that retained the sense of smell ballooned to twice the normal weight.
Supersmellers gained more weight than did normal mice on the same high-fat diet. Smell-deficient mice burned excess fat instead of storing it, thereby suggesting a link between smell and metabolism.
