Blocking sense of smell causes weight loss
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-loss-8zh9xw69f Quote:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...esity-chmkd26bg |
:rolleyes: I smell a rat...or mouse..with this study without even reading. In 1990, during an operation on my hearing, my olfactory nerve was severed. There was a high likelihood of this happening but I accepted the risk. In that time since with almost no sense of smell, have gone up and down from normal weight to obese, and have been only able to lose and maintain with low carb diet.
And Dusty Homes make you fat? Is today April Fools Day? :rolleyes: |
Seth Roberts' Shangri-la Diet fans have been clothes-pinning their noses for years. Seth's theory is that the bodyfat setpoint is set by food flavour, and that it involves a conditioned response. He was talking about flavour, not taste--he didn't count sweet taste, only smells etc., not that sweetness didn't count, it's just that the association of the sweetness with other aspects of the food was needed for the food to be fattening. So flavourless foods by this definition and foods that were new to the consumer so that a conditioned response to the food could not have yet been formed were supposedly non-fattening. Flavourless calories and fasting were supposed to decrease body fat setpoint.
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I was posting about this study in my journal the other day, in the conversation I brought up something I saw in a Robert Sapolsky lecture, a smell center in the brain was originally thought to be the emotional center--it turned out that this was due to smell being particularly salient to rats, these animals detect threats and mating possibilities etc. by smell to a much greater extent than humans, the same is true for mice. But "high stress levels," I wonder what they mean by that here? Fasting animals would have increases in certain stress hormones. This approach does have reduced exposure to a particular aspect of food in common with fasting. Quote:
Ugh. Read your own study. Supersmelling mice grew fat on food that didn't fatten normal mice. Supersmelling makes it easier to pick up a weak signal. A snickers bar is not a weak signal. There are a number of studies showing that bland, low flavour food, the sort that might only be detected as palatable by people with a strong sense of smell, rather than a weak one, are undereaten by overweight humans and rodents alike. It would be interesting to see how the supersmeller mice would do on a ketogenic diet. Standard diet fed vs. fasted is not the same as ketogenically fed vs. fasted, you could see the decreased alteration in metabolism when somebody eats a ketogenic diet vs. when they eat a higher carbohydrate diet having an effect on this sort of conditioning. This would get us around the hard sell of claiming that a low carb diet works due to decreased palatability while still allowing for a weakened conditioned response. |
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One question I'd have here is how specific is this thing to smell, and how long the effect lasts. Pavlov's dogs salivating to the sound of a bell, all sorts of things might become associated with food, not just smells. Also as humans we have the option of increasing the signal from the other direction, compensating for a weaker sense of smell by eating smellier foods etc. I'm not saying you eat smelly food, just that there are ways to compensate. A lot of stuff we don't know. |
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Somehow low carb diets get left out of the equation. Also this is not just about losing weight it is about maintaining weight loss. Looking for that holy grail of weight loss, that pill that is going to cure us all, leads to a kind of blindness of vision to what is already out there. What is the long term success rate of gastric bypass surgery? What is the complication rate? Jean |
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Visual cues way out-rank odor...why is everyone taking photos of their plates at restaurants? Hiring food stylists to out-do each other's Cookbook photos? Since I do the cooking, I can see and hear a crisp coating on a steak sizzling in a pan..I don't need to smell it. My taste buds also are muted, but I don't oversalt or eat weird stuff...as you said...the other senses step in. Jean ,totally agree...and I hadn't even read that part...just thought this article was another piece of "fake science news" :lol: |
Another thing. Make kittens where glasses with vertical stripes to a certain age, and keep them on a flat surface. Take the glasses off--they've learned what they've experienced, put them on a little platform, they'll walk right off and be surprised when they fall. Rodents are sometimes put in "enriched environments," and metabolically, they're very different then. But you could argue--compared to a cage, is the wild an enriched environment? Clearly it is--the intervention isn't the enrichment, it's the impoverished condition in the cage, that's looked at as the baseline, as if that's any kind of normal. We could think of the enriched environment as enriched, or we could think of it as just closer to normal--it's a non-impoverished environment.
Rat pups exposed to white noise develop seizures, this can be corrected by exposing them over time to a series of simple tones, giving the auditory cortex something to properly adapt to. Lack of specialization is the problem, any noise causes general activity, instead of activating a smaller number of neurons. I look at chow as a "white noise" food. Out in the wild, eating various foods, various cues might be relied on for food learning. With something like chow, there's less information. A given volume of food has varied carbohydrate, calorie, protein, micronutrient etc. content in the wild. None of these things vary in the diet of a lab mouse. If associative learning affects how fattening a food is, these mice are definitely in an impoverished learning environment. |
I have a friend who has no sense of smell. He has been this way since childhood I believe or at least through most of his adult years. He is in his 60's. He quite enjoys food. He is thin, always has been. He has an identical twin brother, also thin, but with a normal sense of smell who also enjoys his food. They are both about the same weight. What are we supposed to glean from this? For one thing it shows that food can be enjoyed both with and without a sense of smell and also that sense of smell doesn't necessarily have a major effect on weight.
I think Teaser's point about how we adapt to the environment we find ourselves in is an important one. Our reductionist science tends to erase the complexity of biological processes. First we cut out functioning stomachs of obese people and now we think about eliminating their sense of smell. I think this says more about how we think about obese people than it does about understanding what drives weight gain and loss. Jean |
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I completely agree. If you delve down into gastric bypass, as I have done, the picture is hardly reassuring. While you have "only" a 1 in 200 chance of dying from the procedure, the aftermath is different. The surgeon is going to dust you off his hands within six months, while the "honeymoon period" lasts a year. The honeymoon is the time period for your digestive system to fully heal... and properly feel hunger again. Typically, this first year is a time when the procedure works as advertised. People aren't hungry and the weight is dropping off. Many of them find the exacting regimen of tiny meals and required vitamins an easier price to pay than their many failed diets, and the nearly inevitable bathroom difficulties and bouts of stomach spasm and lightheadedness are compensated by their rapid weight loss and the admiration from family and friends. Some don't even get that though; if there was any kind of emotional content to their eating, that coping mechanism is now gone, never to return. A 2012 survey indicated people after bypass had doubled their risk of alcoholism. Other "emotional eaters" discover that stuff like ice cream and cake digests more easily than fat and protein. It is less likely to trigger "dumping," which some people describe as "feeling like you are going to die." The internet is full of bariatric foods, basically Atkins bars and shakes for bypass patients, because real food is just so troublesome. And then the honeymoon ends. Hunger comes back. And there's not a dang thing you can do about it. This is the "failed bypass" where people gain back all the weight by stretching their stomach back into a larger size. And if they are lucky, that is the end of it. But a substantial number (at least a third, but of course they don't like to release real data) go on to have far more serious issues, including death. Because this is also when the consequences of nutritional absorption come in; the compromised digestive system can't absorb nutrients so matter how many vitamins and shakes a person tries to get down. Eat more, dodge the complications, and gain weight. Don't eat more, and make malabsorption more of a problem. So then there's epilepsy, nerve damage, strokes, brittle bones, joint pain, dimming vision, mental disorders; the list goes on and on. Successful? I don't think so. |
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