Fatty Diet Impairs Your Ability to Recognize Smell: Study

Eating too much fatty snacks can impair olfactory senses, according to a study.

High-caloric junk food and sweet treats increase body weight leading to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol and metabolic disorders. Experts at the Florida State University discovered another reason why people must control their cravings to binge on fatty snacks. Their study used a rodent model where mice were daily given high-fat food for nearly six months and found drastic reduction in their ability to recognize smell.

The mice were trained to identify a particular smell and would receive water as a reward. After continuously feeding on high-fat diet, experts tested mice with a new odor. It was observed the smell perception gradually declined among those on fatty diet indicating a direct association between unhealthy diet and loss of smell.

Upon switching to a healthy diet the body weight and lipid and triglyceride levels in blood of mice returned to normal. But, the study noted no improvements in mice's abilities to detect smell.

"Mice exposed to high-fat diets only had 50 per cent of the neurons that could operate to encode odour signals," said Nicholas Thiebaud, study author and professor of Biological Sciences at the Florida State University in a news release.

The authors believe in conducting further research to examine if physical activity can reverse the effects on high-fat diets on smell. They also plan on investigating if eating too much sugary substances can have a similar impact.

According to the data by the National Institutes of Health, obesity in the U.S. affects more than two in every three adults and over one-third of  American children and teens aged between six and 19 are overweight.  

More information is available online in the journal Neuroscience.