By MARY BROPHY MARCUS CBS NEWS July 6, 2017, 5:53 PM
Would you be willing to give up the smell of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies or a pizza right out of the oven if it meant slimming down?
A new study showed that mice that lost their sense of smell didn’t gain weight even when they ate the same high-fat diet as mice that could smell and did gain weight.
The mice that retained their sense of smell packed on twice their normal weight while the smell-deficient mice didn’t gain at all, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, reported in the journal Cell Metabolism.
A group of mice whose olfactory neurons had been genetically altered to take away their sense of smell were also compared with another group of mice whose sense of smell had been enhanced. The “super-smellers” gained even more weight.
