Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 21, 2008|Volume 36, Number 22

Smelling food ‘fires’ different area
of brain than eating it, says study

Smelling food activates different brain areas than consuming it, according to a Yale study published in the journal Neuron that shows definitively what researchers have long suspected.

“We believe that these findings add to our understanding of chemosensation and food reward and will have important implications in addressing the obesity epidemic,” says lead author Dana Small, assistant professor of psychiatry and associate fellow of the John B. Pierce Laboratory.

Small and her colleagues are interested in understanding how sensory processing interacts with behavioral choices such as decisions to eat or stop eating in both healthy individuals and people with eating disorders. Some theorists have postulated that overeating results from a heightened sensitivity to food reward. Others, Small says, have argued that people overeat because they experience less pleasure from eating and eat to boost a sluggish reward system. These two seemingly contradictory theories may be reconciled, she notes, if food reward is considered as a multifaceted phenomenon.

“For example, it could be that some people are more sensitive, and less able to resist, food cues, such as an aroma of freshly baked bread, and that these same people also experience less pleasure when actually eating the food,” Small says.

In this study Small and her co-authors describe the circuits that code the properties of these two facets of food reward. The study was based on two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in which subjects sniffed food aromas and drank the drinks associated with the aromas while undergoing scanning. The food odors were pineapple and peach in the first experiment and pineapple and chocolate in the second experiment. The drinks were pineapple and peach juice and a chocolate milkshake.

What the team observed is that different areas of the brain respond to the aroma of chocolate, peach or pineapple compared to the ingestion of those foods.

Small says the group currently is studying responses to food aromas and food ingestion as a function of weight and eating style.

The research was funded by grants from Unilever Research and the National Institutes of Health.

Co-authors include Maria Veldhuizen, Jennifer Felsted, Y. Erica Mak and Francis McGlone.

— By Jacqueline Weaver

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