While in space, astronauts sometimes find it hard to eat enough to stay healthy, according to HealthDay.
But recent research may have pinpointed how to help astronauts — and even people on Earth who struggle with a lack of an appetite — eat more, the article said.
Why aren’t astronauts hungry in space?
Food tends to taste blander in space, according to HealthDay.
Traditionally, scientists have attributed this issue to weightlessness. A lack of gravity means fluid in the body shifts upward, causing facial congestion and distorting how astronauts taste and smell — two senses that influence how much we enjoy food.
Normally, the body adapts over the course of several weeks to weightlessness. But some astronauts never regain a zest for food during a space mission, said Julia Low, one of the researchers with the study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, per HealthDay.
Low and her colleagues believe that the isolation that comes along with space travel might also affect astronauts’ relationship with food.
Every bit of an astronaut’s journey is carefully charted by teams of researchers, including what and how much they eat. But food issues can be a major problem when it comes to long-term space stays.
“What we’re going to see in the future with the Artemis missions are much longer missions, years in length, particularly when we go to Mars, so we really need to understand the problems with diet and food and how crew interact with their food,” said Gail Iles, a professor at RMIT, according to HealthDay.
How science can increase appetite
Low and Iles worked with a team of researchers at RMIT to try to increase astronauts’ appetites. Over the course of their study, 54 subjects underwent a virtual reality experiment where they were placed in the middle of a virtual version of the International Space Station.
The VR experiment “really does go a very long way to simulating the experience of being on the space station,” said Iles, per HealthDay. “And it really does change how you smell things and how you taste things.”
Facilitators had participants smell various food aromas. Results indicated that sweet scents like vanilla, almond and lemon either remain unchanged or are even more aromatic than they are on Earth, per Popular Science.
The research team believes that understanding how aroma impacts appetite will improve astronaut diets, making long missions more possible and healthy. They also believe that their findings can be applied to people on Earth.
“The results of this study could help personalize people’s diets in socially isolated situations, including in nursing homes, and improve their nutritional intake,” said Low, per Popular Science.