The sense of smell is particularly important to many animals, such as mice, in their search for food. But food odor does more than give these animals information about their environment: It also affects their body’s use of fats, a study published Monday (November 14) in Nature Metabolism suggests.
This work, led by Toshiyasu Sasaoka at the University of Toyama in Japan, offers new insights into the neural pathways that link smell perception to adjustments in how efficiently the body turns food into energy, known as metabolic adaptation, according to Minhong Ma, a neuroscientist at University of Pennsylvania who wasn’t involved in the study. The authors of the study did not respond to requests for an interview.
Prior research has shown a close relationship between olfactory neurons, which detect smells and convey this sensory information to our brains, and metabolism. For example, a 2017 study revealed that mice that had ...
