GREENSBORO, N.C. — Smelling food, especially when we're hungry, makes us want to eat. That's natural. But if you're full and you smell food, do you eat even though you're full just because it smells good?
A study by Northwestern University was published in the Journal of Neuroscience this week. The study looked at how two parts of your brain interact.
There's a part of your brain called the midbrain. It is involved in motivating behavior to negative feelings like pain and possibly telling you to stop eating. Then there's the olfactory tubercle, which is part of your brain's reward system.
The study found weaker the connection between these two brain regions, the higher a person's body mass index is. The study suggests that weak connection causes those people to eat more, especially when they smell food, even when they're not hungry.
So if your connection is strong, you likely don't eat when you smell food when you're full because your brain is programmed that way.
The publication includes this:
Significance Statement Increasing evidence suggests that olfaction plays an important role in human feeding behavior. However, the neural underpinnings of this role remain relatively unexplored. Here, we examined the structural connectivity of the olfactory tubercle, which has been implicated in both olfaction and reward, using magnetic resonance imaging. We found that a unique connectivity of the olfactory tubercle with the periaqueductal gray was correlated with body mass index. Our findings highlight a potential role for this pathway in the regulation of human feeding behavior.
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