We’re not even kidding. It’s a psychobiology thing.
If fasted resistance exercise is your thing, you may want to add a chocolate-scented something to your gym bag.
Even if you consider yourself a highly inquisitive type, always asking questions to better understand the world around you (and we do think you are of course, being one of our dear readers), here’s a relationship you may not have yet considered: that between smell, appetite, and training capacity.
When we first heard of this research, our mind went straight to stinky gym smells, but we were wrong! It’s so much nicer than that. Frontiers in Physiology has just published a paper called “Chocolate odor enhances resistance exercise performance through appetite suppression in the fasted state: an exploratory study”.
The gist of it is this: Chocolate smells can make you think you’re full, feel nicer, and help you do more resistance exercises.
Fasting, caloric restriction and hunger can affect resistance training performance, the researchers said, and studies have shown that this is also about perception of fullness, not just actual energy availability.
But the power of smell has been overlooked in the world of athletics, where strategies around caloric intake, like intermittent fasting and pre-exercise feeding, are a big part of the whole optimisation of everything.
“Exposing moderately trained men to chocolate odors right before and between sets of resistance exercise significantly increased their overall training volume without increasing their perceived exertion,” said senior author Dr Mohamed Nashrudin bin Naharudin, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Malaya.
“Seeing a substantial increase in repetitions without the athletes feeling like they were exerting themselves any harder is a fascinating psychobiological outcome.”
The researchers conducted a randomised, double-blind, crossover trial with 23 “moderately trained men” in their early to mid 20s who did resistance training two or more times a week, didn’t hate cocoa, and regularly ate breakfast.
They went into the lab after a night’s sleep (around 10 hours of fasting) and were exposed to liquids smelling either of dark chocolate (90% cocoa), milk chocolate (60% cocoa), or water. Hunger, fullness, desire to eat, and plans to eat in the near future were measured before the leg workout, and hunger and desire to eat were measured during the exercise sets, 30 seconds after inhaling their allotted scent.
The dark chocolate sniffers reported feeling less hunger, less desire to eat, and greater satiety than their fellow lab rats before exercising commenced. The dark chocolate group did 18 more leg extension repetitions than the control group (water).
The milk chocolate group noted no effect on feelings of hunger or desire for food, but they reported higher levels of odour-pleasantness and did nine more leg extension repetitions.
The effects could have something to do with the associations we form with food smells in our childhood, the researchers said.
“The dark chocolate scent serves as a learned cue for a rich, bitter, and highly satiating food, which essentially tricks the system into an anticipatory state of fullness,” said Professor Naharudin.
“Conversely, the sweeter milk chocolate scent acts more like a hedonic reward cue, enhancing training volume by creating a highly pleasant sensory environment rather than by shifting basic metabolic hunger signals.”
Chocolate was probably not the only food capable of triggering these responses, the authors said. Although they hadn’t tested them, other foods associated with pleasant satiety could probably also do the trick.
“Overall, these findings suggest that food-related odors may influence the subjective appetite and perceptual context of fasted resistance exercise. However, the proposed appetite-related, affective, and cephalic-phase mechanisms remain preliminary and require direct testing using objective physiological, neuroendocrine, autonomic, and neurophysiological measures,” the authors wrote.
There were a number of study limitations noted, but the one that really caught our eye (nose?) was that “odor delivery was performed using a standardized jar-based method rather than an olfactometer”. It made us realise that this job will never cease to surprise and delight us and remind us that, at heart, we are far more childish than sophisticated, because we are never far from a fart joke.
Capture and release your Back Page ideas in the vicinity of Back Page editor Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
