What if the smell of fried food in your kitchen today could shape your child's appetite and wait years from now?

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Hello, and welcome to Dr. Mercola's cellular wisdom.

I'm Ethan Foster, and we're examining research showing that odors from fatty foods during

pregnancy and breastfeeding may rewire how your child's brain and metabolism respond

to food for life.

I'm Alara Sky, and we'll lay out what the study found, why scent matters for metabolism,

and what you can do to manage your environment so you lower long-term obesity risk for your child

and support your own health.

The core finding comes from an animal study led by the Max Planck Institute and published in nature metabolism.

Pregnant and nursing mice were given either a standard low-fat diet or an identically nutritious chow that simply smelled like bacon.

The goal was to isolate smell alone, not calories or fat content, and then track the offspring's later response to food.

That bacon-flavored diet had the same macronutrients as the control diet.

The difference was volatile compounds that produced a fatty food scent.

The pups never ate high-fat food early on, but they were exposed to those odors in the

womb and through milk.

As adults, the exposed offspring gained more weight, carried more body fat, and showed insulin resistance once they encountered a high fat diet, even though they'd eaten the same healthy chow

as controls for months beforehand. The mothers themselves did not show these metabolic changes,

underscoring that fetal and early life exposure

...