{"id":67083,"date":"2022-05-25T16:03:05","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T20:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=67083"},"modified":"2022-05-26T16:48:36","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T20:48:36","slug":"how-does-smell-affect-taste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/how-does-smell-affect-taste\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Smell Affect Taste? More Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>How does smell affect taste? How good is a human&#8217;s sense of smell?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The sense of smell plays a significant role in its taste. According to Bill Bryson, the author of <em>The Body<\/em>, the sense of smell is actually more important than taste, which can be an obstacle to weight loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s why you shouldn&#8217;t underestimate the power of smell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-recognize-the-power-of-your-sense-of-smell\"><strong>Recognize the Power of Your Sense of Smell<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>In his book <em>The Body<\/em>, Bryson discusses how we <em>perceive<\/em> what we eat. He explains that flavor is actually a mental construct that your brain assembles from a variety of sensory inputs, not just taste. So, how does smell affect taste? The smell of food actually has a greater influence on how you perceive its flavor than its taste does, perhaps because <strong>your sense of smell is more refined<\/strong> <strong>than your sense of taste<\/strong>: Your body only has about five types of taste receptors, but it has roughly 400 types of smell receptors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To illustrate the sensitivity of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/human-sense-of-smell\/\">human smell<\/a>, Bryson recounts an experiment where researchers dragged various scented objects, such as a piece of chocolate, across an athletic field. Then they asked students to follow the scent trail on their hands and knees, sniffing the grass. Most of the participants succeeded in following the scent trail accurately. Many of them even outperformed dogs at following scent trails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Shortform note: A different study measured how sensitive humans and various animals were to different scents. They found that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/314950341_Human_and_Animal_Olfactory_Capabilities_Compared\">the human sense of smell was as good or better than that of most animals<\/a>, even those noted for their keen sense of smell. In fact, humans\u2019 sense of smell was more sensitive in 76% of their tests.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Beware of Olfactory Triggers<\/strong><br><br>Bryson\u2019s discussion highlights the acuteness of our sense of smell and its significance in furnishing information to our brains about the food we\u2019re eating. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/app\/book\/the-power-of-habit\"><em>The Power of Habit<\/em><\/a>, Charles Duhigg notes that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/app\/book\/the-power-of-habit\/part-3#advertisers-align-cues-and-rewards-to-make-you-crave-what-theyre-selling\">restaurants and certain other businesses take advantage of this fact to make us overeat<\/a>.<br><br>As Duhigg explains, much of human behavior is habitual. Our habits are like programmed subroutines that we can execute on autopilot, but something still has to initiate the automatic behavior. This initial stimulus is called the \u201ccue\u201d or \u201ctrigger\u201d of the habit.&nbsp;<br><br>As Bryson points out, your body can distinguish many more smells than tastes because you have so many more types of smell receptors than taste receptors. This allows you to pick out the unique smell of the food at your favorite restaurant, even from a distance. And since smell is the largest sensory component of our flavor, it\u2019s easy for your brain to associate the smell of delicious, high-calorie foods with the pleasurable sensation of eating them. This makes it particularly easy to develop a habit of eating at the restaurant, with the smells that waft out of the kitchen triggering the act of ordering food.<br><br><strong>Thus, if you\u2019re trying to limit your caloric input, don\u2019t underestimate the power of habits, or the power of smells to trigger them<\/strong>.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How does smell affect taste? How good is a human&#8217;s sense of smell? The sense of smell plays a significant role in its taste. According to Bill Bryson, the author of The Body, the sense of smell is actually more important than taste, which can be an obstacle to weight loss. Here&#8217;s why you shouldn&#8217;t underestimate the power of smell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":67093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,160],"tags":[626],"class_list":["post-67083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food","category-science","tag-the-body","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Does Smell Affect Taste? More Than You Think - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Believe it or not, smell affects your perception of food more than taste does. 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