ASSOCIATION OF OLFACTORY SENSITIVITY WITH ENERGY INTAKE: ROLE IN DEVELOPMENT OF OBESITY

Obesity results from an imbalance between energy consumed and energy expenditure generated. Among the factors that regulate the non-homeostatic energy intake is the olfaction, which is an important external signal that induces food intake, humans used to assess the palatability of foods and to select foods in general. Materials and methods: an electronic search in the databases PubMed and Scielo, where the key words used were: "smell", "energy intake" and "obesity", additionally the following limits are added to restrict the exploration, "animals", "human", "clinical trial" and "meta-analysis". Results: the individual hunger state modulates olfactory sensitivity, which shows that the sensitivity of smell detection increases compared to fasting state. There are two hormones that allow us to relate olfactory sensitivity to energy intake: orexin, which increased olfactory sensitivity and energy intake and leptin that decreased olfactory sensitivity and energy intake. Obese people with BMI> 45 have low olfactory sensitivity; a situation does not change after bariatric surgery. Conclusions: to determine the association between olfactory, energy intake and obesity is fields scarcely studied and deliver new insights for the treatment of diseases where there are eating disorders involved such as obesity. In the future the conduct of clinical trials to determine causality between these two variables and molecular studies to better understand the olfactory signals relating to energy intake are necessary.