Food & life · 2016
Does smelling food make you want foods that match its smell?
Yes—in a laboratory experiment with 29 healthy-weight female participants, smelling food odours for three minutes favoured appetite for foods matching the taste or calories per amount of food suggested by the smell. Matching foods received higher appetite ratings than nonmatching foods. Hunger did not clearly change this pattern, but the study measured wanting food, not eating it.
Details
Researchers tested whether food smells favour appetite for particular kinds of food, rather than simply making all food more appealing. Participants smelled food odours suggesting sweet or savoury tastes and higher or lower calories per amount of food. They also smelled a non-food odour and an odourless control. Exposures lasted three minutes each and occurred in random order; participants then rated their appetite for 15 foods during the following two minutes.
After sweet or savoury smells, appetite ratings were higher for foods with the matching taste than for foods with a different or neutral taste. A similar matching pattern appeared for higher- and lower-calorie foods. Hunger did not have a detectable influence on this selective appetite pattern; that does not prove hunger never matters.
The finding concerns short-term appetite ratings in this small group of healthy-weight female participants. It does not establish that people actually choose or eat more matching foods. The authors’ suggestion that smells might steer food intake remains a hypothesis.
What do you think?
Good conversations begin with curiosity.
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