In news that can only be described as genuinely alarming, I regret to inform you that that a team of Berkeley researchers have discovered that the mere act of smelling that delicious, delicious food you love to eat could be causing you to gain weight. In an unrelated story, my beloved grill is currently on the sidewalk in front of my house with a gigantic FREE sign taped hastily onto its cover.

In a study published in the latest issue of Cell Metabolism, which remains far and away my favorite peer-reviewed biology journal, scientists divided laboratory mice up into three groups—regular mice, mice whose sense of smell got an artificial boost, and mice whose sense of smell was temporarily deadened—and fed them a "Burger King diet" for 14 weeks. (Somewhere, the President of the United States is nodding proudly.) The groups were all fed the same amount of food. By the end of it, the mice in the first two groups had gained a ton of weight, but those in that last lucky cohort—eating the same fast food as their plus-size counterparts—gained only about 10 percent of their body weight. Even more impressively, already-obese mice whose olfactory senses were temporarily disabled quietly returned to normal size without changing their diet.

Remember, we're talking about one experiment on a bunch of mice here, so please do not interpret this as an endorsement of kicking off your next diet by supergluing your nose shut. That said, the scientists do think that their findings, with some refinement, could one day be used on humans. Manipulating one's sense of smell—even on a temporary basis—could be used to do things like control hunger pangs, promote calorie-burning, and tricking a body plaintively calling out for another double cheeseburger into believing that it has already been fed.

The bad news, they say, is that people who lose their sense of smell often have serious trouble maintaining a healthy weight and can even become depressed, since perceiving aromas is important for things other than waistline management. What most people think of as "taste" actually comes from the sense of smell, and it's hard to imagine enjoying, say, a gigantic slab of perfectly-prepared Memphis-style dry ribs quite as much if you couldn't relish its inhaled barbecued essences before, during, and after the mastication process. The key, one researcher suggests, will be finding that sweet spot.

To use the method in a human population, scientists would need to knowhow many of the olfactory neurons to destroy and how often, Dillinsaid.

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“Maybe once a year you block your sense of smell for a while and then you lose the weight from the year and do it all over again,” Dillin said. “We don’t know yet. There’s a lot we still need to do.”

In the meantime, if your morning commute happens to bring you within 20 feet of an Auntie Anne's or, God help you, a Cinnabon, you might want to reconsider investing in a respirator mask at your earliest convenience.

Watch Now:Mark Bittman Teaches You How to Grill FruitJay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read moreRelated Stories for GQFood