Sex, smell and appetite
From San Francisco, at a meeting of the Endocrine Society
Does the smell of movie-theater popcorn send you dashing for a supersize bucket? Oddly enough, a study of sexual dysfunction in mutated mice may help explain such connections between smell and appetite.
The mice are genetically engineered to lack melanin-concentrating hormone, or MCH, which is made in the brain and is known to stimulate feeding. Mice with this mutation have little appetite and tend to be lean. During mice-breeding experiments, researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston noted that it took about twice as long as normal for MCH-deficient mice to have litters, though they bred normally when crossed with unmutated mice.