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.



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.



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.