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Mice That Can’t Smell Lose Weight Faster

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12 July 2017

By Bronwen

Your nose could be the thing preventing you from losing weight.

A study has found that mice can lose or gain weight depending on how strong of a sense of smell they have. Groups of mice were all given the exact same high-fat diet but scientists found that the mice with an enhanced sense of smell gained weight while the mice that were genetically engineered to have no sense of smell lost weight. Since your sense of taste could not exist without your olfactory system, scientists assumed that the reason the modified mice lost weight would be because they cannot taste their food and therefore cannot enjoy it. Without the ability to taste, all food would be bland and we would get little to no satisfaction from it. However, the actual reason for the differences was something unexpected.

The mice that were unable to smell burned the fat to maintain body heat while the normal mice stored the fat. It’s still unclear why, but the lack of ability to smell seems to trigger the transformation of one type of fat into another type which explains why both groups of mice use the fat for different purposes.

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