Scientists have discovered a new method of combating excess weight

Amer­i­can sci­en­tists have fig­ured out how to reduce weight with­out diets and oper­a­tions. It turns out that just turn­ing off the sense of smell is enough! The results of the med­ical exper­i­ment are a new word in the fight against obe­si­ty.

Shut­ter­stock

We all noticed that dur­ing a cold, when we suf­fer from a run­ny nose, our appetite is notice­ably reduced. As a result, we lose weight. “But don’t get sick with the flu in the hope of los­ing a cou­ple of extra pounds?” You will be indig­nant, and you will be right. As it turned out, the con­nec­tion between smell and weight is not so direct, but it still exists!

Accord­ing to sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley (USA), switch­ing off the olfac­to­ry recep­tors in mice led to their weight loss. And this despite the fact that the exper­i­men­tal mice ate as much food as their fat rel­a­tives.

Dur­ing the exper­i­ment, exper­i­men­tal ani­mals with a “turned off” sense of smell lost 15% in a few weeks — and this was with the same diet as a group of their rel­a­tives with a nor­mal sense of smell. Mice with “switched off” sense of smell did not eat less. It’s just that their bod­ies have become more active in burn­ing fat. The exper­i­men­tal mice became more active and moved more, while their fat-eat­ing rel­a­tives with a work­ing sense of smell spent more time in a sleepy state.

Shut­ter­stock

Dur­ing the analy­sis of the results of the exper­i­ment, it turned out that the organs of smell are direct­ly con­nect­ed with that part of the ner­vous sys­tem that con­trols the work of brown fat cells, in which the body burns excess ener­gy. The con­clu­sion is sim­ple: if the olfac­to­ry recep­tors do not work, then they do not inhib­it the activ­i­ty of these cells. And it turns out that you can burn the max­i­mum avail­able amount of ener­gy!

The research results were pub­lished in the med­ical jour­nal Cell Metab­o­lism.

“If our dis­cov­ery is con­firmed in human exper­i­ments, then we will be able to cre­ate a drug that does not block the sense of smell itself, but inter­feres with the work of those meta­bol­ic chains that are asso­ci­at­ed with it,” said Andrew Dillin from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley (USA).

Shut­ter­stock

This method also has a seri­ous draw­back: as it turned out, turn­ing off the olfac­to­ry recep­tors increas­es the lev­el of stress and work­load on the heart. So while Amer­i­can doc­tors are plan­ning to devel­op this method for peo­ple suf­fer­ing from extreme forms of obe­si­ty. And these, accord­ing to WHO, are cur­rent­ly about 1/3 of the world’s pop­u­la­tion.

Read more:

Hap­py but fat: why women get fat in mar­riage?

Dor­mi­tion fast: how not to get bet­ter dur­ing fast­ing

5 main ene­mies of har­mo­ny

Relat­ed Arti­cles

The opin­ion of the edi­tors may not coin­cide with the opin­ion of the author of the arti­cle.