You must be familiar with this scene: when you smell the aroma of delicious food, your mouth will involuntarily salivate.

Note that the physical reaction that the sense of smell can cause may not be just a little saliva. A latest study believes that the sense of smell also affects your metabolism. The sense of smell itself will affect the efficiency of your fat burning. If the sense of smell becomes worse, you may lose weight.

, or vice versa, haha!

Our sense of smell can not only convey the feeling of "aroma" to the brain, but also convey the signal of "deliciousness". When you smell the aroma of food, the brain's reaction is "it should be delicious, right?" In this sense,

Our senses of smell and taste are connected, and just by smelling we can pick up the "delicious message" of the taste director.

You must have experienced this scenario: after catching a cold and having a stuffy nose, food seems less delicious than usual, people lose their appetite, and they don’t feel hungry as often.

From this phenomenon, you may guess: Can taste affect people’s appetite and even metabolism?

You guessed it, at least one study now supports that assumption: Smell affects your metabolism.

The study was not a human experiment but was conducted on mice, but the researchers believe the same phenomenon occurs in humans.

The research comes from the University of California, Berkeley, and the paper is titled "The Sense of Smell Impacts Metabolic Health and Obesity" (pictured above), which means "The sense of smell affects metabolic health and obesity".

Researchers cut off the sense of smell of some mice through technical means, and then fed them high-calorie food. The results showed that although the mice with loss of smell ate a large amount of high-calorie food every day, most of the mice did not become obese. The mice that were originally overweight did not become obese.

The white mice also lost weight.

In the control group with a normal sense of smell, the phenomenon was exactly the opposite. They ate the same type and total amount of food every day as the group with anosmia, but at the end of the experiment, their average weight became twice as much as before the experiment.

The researchers also artificially enhanced the sense of smell of some mice. At the end of the experiment, their weight gain was even greater (more than 2 times) than that of the mice in the control group with normal sense of smell.

This means that although the total caloric intake of the three types of mice in the experiment was almost the same, the mice with a more sensitive sense of smell gained more weight, while those without a sense of smell hardly gained weight and even became thinner.

The researchers concluded that the sense of smell itself affects metabolism, so the sense of smell itself can make people fatter or thinner.

So how does the metabolism of mice that have lost their sense of smell change?

Researchers also found the answer. Loss of smell greatly enhanced a fat-consuming mechanism in mice.

There are three types of adipose tissue in mammals, white, brown and brown fat.

White fat is widely distributed in the subcutaneous tissue and around the internal organs in the body, which is commonly known as the beer belly, and is a fat storage; brown adipose tissue is mainly distributed between the shoulder blades, the back of the neck, the armpits, the mediastinum and around the kidneys. The cells are filled with a large number of mitochondria.

It does not store energy, but consumes energy. It functions like a "heat generator" and has a high metabolic rate. When the body eats or is stimulated by cold, it produces a large amount of heat. It is like a charcoal-burning stove.

Convert fat into heat.

Researchers found that a large amount of white adipose tissue in mice with anosmia was converted into brown fat, which not only reduced white fat storage, but also increased fat-burning mitochondria, which caused the mice without a sense of smell to lose weight.

This is the first such trial in history, and more peer verification is needed, but it points to a great possibility: the sense of smell itself affects the brain's regulation of the body, and it is likely that patients with a weakened sense of smell experience sharp weight loss

One of the reasons.

At the same time, it also pointed out another great possibility: Although you eat the same amount as others, because your sense of smell is more sensitive than others, your ability to burn fat is worse than that of people with a weak sense of smell. As a result, you eat the same amount than others with a sense of smell.

Weak people get fatter.