Aroma plays a big part in appeitite

When you're sitting in the living room watching TV while the turkey and all the other food is cooking in the oven, the aromas are wafting your way and increasing your appetite.

One way to prevent an attack of the munchies is to have fans blowing the aromas in the opposite direction from where you're sitting.

There's a website called AromaPatch that talks about aromas and how it can help decrease overeating. I present it for your information:

http://www.aromapatch.org/aroma.htm
Specific aromas can deprogram overweight people whose normal response to the smell of rich, unhealthy foods like chocolate, doughnuts and pizza was to become hungry and overeat. Scientists tested the benefits of food odors to suppress appetite rather than stimulate appetite, and found that there seemed to be certain smells that caused overweight individuals to reduce their cravings, and therefore eat less.

In scientific research, people preferred sweet smells, and strongly sweet scents such as chocolate often triggered feelings of hunger and led to overeating or binge eating, while “neutral” sweet smells actually curbed appetite. To test this theory, researchers asked 3,193 overweight people (mostly women) aged 18-64 to inhale a variety of “neutral” sweet smells, including banana, green apple, vanilla, and peppermint, three times in each nostril whenever they were hungry. After six months, the participants in his study lost an average of five pounds a month, or 30 pounds in total. Source: J. Neurol. Orthop. Med. Surg., 1995; 16:28-31.

Similar research has been done at the Human Neuro-Sensory Laboratory in Washington, D.C. and this research fully supports earlier findings. Researchers there studied eighty people who were given one of two inhalation devices. One contained a combination of specially selected scents; the other was a placebo (neutral un-detectable scent). All of these subjects were asked to inhale the scents three times five to six minutes before and after eating a meal. At the end of the six-month trial, those participants who used the selected scents lost an average of 19 pounds, while the placebo group only lost an average of 4 pounds.