Saltpeter for Your Nose

According to this, the power of the human sense of smell is highly underrated:

New olfactory research suggests that when it comes to tracking scent at ground-level on open terrain, the average human’s sense of smell is stronger than most people believe.

“There’s this general assumption that people have a bad sense of smell,” said study lead author Jess Porter, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. “But we found that people can certainly sniff their way accurately around a spatial context — although less successfully and slower if they have only one nostril to work with.”

The new American-Israeli study, published online Dec. 17 in Nature Neuroscience, reports that people can, in fact, be trained to rely exclusively on ground-level smelling to successfully navigate unknown territory. In fact, they instinctively mimic certain animal behaviors, including enlisting each nostril to independently identify distinct smells and “triangulate” a path.

The research was conducted in open fields. The subjects were blindfolded and given thick gloves and ear plugs, leaving them to navigate a scented trail on their hands and knees, using only their sense of smell.

About two-thirds of the men and women were able to find their way, and the subjects who were brought back to repeat the task got better at it with practice.

To my surprise, the article doesn’t report any gender differences. I expected women to have keener senses of smell than men. But maybe that only applies with poopy diapers that both parents are too tired to change. In my experience, the female usually “notices” it first, which is to say the male is better at ignoring it until the female finally acts.

Coincidentally, this story came out the next day:

Compellis Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts said it will begin human trials next year of a nasal spray designed to fight obesity by blocking the senses of smell and taste. It won a patent for the product this month.

“The pleasurable effect of eating is all stimulated by smell and taste,” Christopher Adams, the company’s founder and chief executive, told Reuters on Tuesday.

“The premise is that olfactory activity that controls both smell and taste is a trigger and a feedback mechanism to eat. If you have some kind of reduced sense of smell or taste, you tend to eat less,” he said.

It makes sense in theory, but I wonder about the practice? I mean, do people with chronic sinus problems eat less? It’s pretty well-established that asthma and obesity are linked, and this study shows that people with asthma are more likely to complain of chronic problems with their nasal passages.

I’m just thinking about all this for the first time as I type it out, so I can’t even guess if chemically castrating your nose is a good idea or not for the treatment of obesity.

But I will offer this prediction: For new fathers, this spray will be a godsend. You’ll never have to change a dirty diaper again.

“Honey, I swear, I can’t smell a thing!”

Tags: Tags: obesity