Smelling Your Food May Contribute To Ageing Faster!

The famous Joey Tribianni once said, “half the taste is in the smell”, and there is now a legit scientific study to prove that even if half the taste is not in the smell, it can definitely have a significant impact on your body. Who would have thought!

According to this study, just like eating, smelling your food could interfere with the body’s anti-ageing processes as well.

The “worm experiment” churns out some interesting observations based on the behaviour of fruit flies that lived longer on a restricted diet but not as long when they were allowed to smell the food. This, however, cannot be completely relied upon because the fruit flies fall way behind in the evolutionary chain. That said, the affects on them at a molecular level could shed light on human ageing.

Image: NBC Bay Area

The study’s corresponding author‚ Professor Kailiang Jia from the Brain Institute at Florida Atlantic University in the US‚ said:

“When people are on a diet‚ they might say something like ‘I didn’t eat a lot of food.’ Except it’s not only the calories that count‚ but also the smell of food that can influence the function of the brain and the GI tract.”

This occurrence or process is referred to as autophagy, wherein the cells consume the garbage they produce through metabolism‚ in turn impacting our maturing process. According to scientists, this phenomenon takes place inside the brain and intestines, and smells have a sizeable impact on it.

Moreover, an increase in autophagy combats diseases and a decrease aggravates them.

Feature Image: wiseGEEK