Can A Hight-Fat Diet Impair Your Sense of Smell?

A high-fat diet may greatly reduce a person’s sense of smell, according to a new study.

In the past, little was known about the impact of sensory systems from obesity. This study was the first time researchers were able to link obesity and the sensory loss of smell.
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Over a 6-month period, researchers gave a group of mice a high-fat daily diet while they fed the control group of mice standard chow. The mice were all taught to associate a specific odor with a reward: water.

The results showed that the group of mice fed a high-fat diet were slower to learn the association between an odor and water.

“Moreover, when high-fat-reared mice were placed on a diet of control chow during which they returned to normal body weight and blood chemistry, mice still had reduced olfactory capacities,” said Debra Ann Fadool, PhD, one of the study’s researchers and professor of biological science at Florida State University.

“Mice exposed to high-fat diets only had 50% of the neurons that could operate to encode odor signals,” she said.

Fadool and colleagues further noted that chronic energy balances appeared to cause long-term functional and behavioral changes in sensory systems.

Researchers suggested that the results would yield other opportunities for further research; they plan to observe the impact of exercise on smell and the affects of a high-sugar diet on the sensory function in the future.

The complete study is published in the July issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

-Michelle Canales

References:

Thiebaud N, Johnson MC, Butler JL, et al. Hyperlipidemic diet causes loss of olfactory sensory neurons, reduces olfactory discrimination, and disrupts odor-reversal learning. J Neurosci.. 2014 May [epub ahead of print] doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3366-13.2014.

Florida State University. New research links bad diet to loss of smell. July 21, 2014.  http://news.fsu.edu/Top-Stories/New-research-links-bad-diet-to-loss-of-smell. Accessed July 28, 2014.