The role food odours play in obesity is not to be sniffed at.
Regular readers of this digital rectangle may be aware that your correspondent is beset by anosmia, the result of a much-needed and successful nasal and sinus polypectomy.
We like to imagine we bear this affliction with Spartan stoicism, but there are some things we dearly miss now we are one sense short of the full set of five.
Such as? Well the aroma of frying bacon, for starters.
I’m sure other folks will have more exotic nose-tickling favourites, but for us the sacrifice made by the fattened pig for our degustatory delight has never been in vain.
But such sensual treats are not without their risks, it transpires, at least according to research released this week by the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Germany.
Publishing in the journal, Nature Metabolism, a team of boffins have proposed that the smell of fatty foods during pregnancy might put babies at higher risk of obesity later in life.
That’s right, yet another thing we can blame our mothers for.
Or maybe not.
Before the mums of the world whip themselves into too much of an exasperated lather, we hasten to point out that this is a mouse study only and any applicability to human scenarios is yet to be established.
What our research team did was feed two groups of pregnant mice the same healthy diet, except that one group of mousey mums had added artificial bacon flavour to the food. The nutritional value of the two diets was exactly the same, however.
The scientists reckoned that the artificial flavouring would create “bacon smell” molecules that would reach the baby mouse pups through the amniotic fluid in the womb, and later through their mothers’ milk.
While these sensory signals are known to shape the food preferences of offspring later in life, their role in metabolic programming has remained unclear.
What the researchers found in this study was that the mice exposed to fatty food smells as pups used up less energy, gained more weight and showed signs of diabetes.
What’s more, brain activity analyses revealed altered activity in reward circuits and hunger neurons, resembling responses typically seen in obese animals.
“Collectively, we report that fat-related sensory cues during development act as signals that can prime central responses to food cues and whole-body metabolism regulation,” the authors said in the study.
And while “further research is needed to establish whether this association also applies to humans”, the possibility that it could is difficult to ignore.
After all, almost our entire fast-food industry is predicated on “selling the sizzle, not the steak”.
Send your deep-fried tasty-as-hell story tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
