> The dad-of-two, from Litchfield, Staffordshire, could eat the spiciest curries with no effect
I know this is probably just a bit of "editorial spice" because it's an obvious example for "what would you do if you could eat anything" I guess, but I thought capsaicin/spicyness was NOT a taste-perception thing. Isn't more of a pain feeling? I would've assumed you would retain that, while losing the olfactory perception you need for flavours.
I am no expert in this sort of thing, so if anyone knows I'd be genuinely curious about why COVID would affect both of those senses.
I also feel like even if you cannot taste the spice with your mouth, you’ll feel it at the other end. I generally enjoy spicy food. But I’ve found, especially lately, that my mouth can handle more than I’m willing to deal with the next day.
I think that back-of-the-throat feeling is what I’m talking about actually. Pain vs flavour. I feel like this guy supposedly saying he could eat VERY spicy curries and not notice means that either 1) burning from spicy food uses the same mechanism as taste, so the gum restoring it makes sense or 2) they’re separate but the gum works on both pathways.
I’m thinking that burning feeling has a different route to get to your brain vs taste/scent, so I guess this gum does more than I thought originally. Though based on other accounts here, it sounds like how connected pain and flavour are varies quite a bit!
I had my fourth Covid infection just a month ago. Fully vaccinated, and having had it three times before, it still hit me like a brick.
It took 10 days to get rid of the flu like symptoms, two weeks to get to semi normal, but my taste hasn't been the same since. Not entirely gone, but very muted.
If these gums were available off the shelf I would buy them in a heartbeat!
I remember losing sense of smell, and one thing that was interesting was being able to perhaps train it back by sniffing different essential oils, and writing a note about what I was able to smell.
I believe this condition is called parosmia. I had a mild version for four years. It’s finally resolving (except shampoos and some sodas smell really strange)
I lost my sense of smell from Covid for a few weeks once, too. I used to eat mulberrys right off the tree in my backyard, but I realized that I could no longer tell if they had gone bad without my sense of smell.
The smell/taste of my favorite foods no longer there is one thing, but the lack of ability to tell whether there is something wrong with whmy food was far more concerning.
I only partially lost my sense of smell and taste from covid. Certain foods started to taste different, but I could still taste them. Then I noticed that a particular cologne I had was now completely odorless to me, so it kind of seemed like there was some particular type of smell/odor/taste that I couldn’t sense.
I eventually adjusted and got used to it and then everything tasted weird again for a while when my senses finally restored after a few months.
I have a friend who doesn't have a sense of smell since birth. It's more of a problem than one would think.
His diet is rather plain, and he doesn't enjoy a lot of food. It's mostly meat, fried things and sweets he enjoys. Most vegetables and low-fat dishes he just can't enjoy at all. Luckily he doesn't get a lot of pleasure from eating and that's what keeps him from getting obese.
It also gives him a lot of anxiety that he or his clothes smell bad. He often just can't assess it from other clues. He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes, but it's not by choice. It's driven by the fear of smelling bad and not realizing it.
It can also get dangerous in some situations, not being able to smell a gas leak, only noticing smoke once it got so thick it will hurt when breathing, and not being able to smell when food goes bad.
What about drizzling the veg with some olive oil (or even lard), salt and a small pinch of sugar? This is what restaurants do to make veg more appealing (plus some acidity)
Better than subsisting on fried food and sweets - take the fatty and sweet element from that and apply to veg
I remember this happened to me after catching covid very early. Wasn't sick beyond a flu, but it knocked my sense of smell and taste out completely for about a month. Once it started to recover it came back quick but it was a very worrying month because before it started to recover there was no sign that I was going to improve. I definitely feel sympathy for anyone who had to do with this for a long time.
Interesting. So the idea is that the senses are just damages, not dead. So use a really strong scent/smell to invigorate them, get something going through them, and have that redevelop the neural pathways (not a biologist).
I'd be interested to hear if this also has positive results on non-C19 related people, too. I've had Hyposmia (partial inability to smell) for essentially [1] my entire life.
I don't really enjoy the taste or smell of things, and I usually only notice stuff if it's especially strong, or right next to my face. I see that whole sensory thing to being a kind of distraction from living life. Like, why should you care if something smells good or not? I just don't see the point. Regardless, I'd still be interested in it because I can smell stuff like rotting fruit or feces or whatever, so I do understand that there are clear and obvious benefits to knowing "Hey, don't eat that!" because it can make you sick or kill you or whatever.
I think that, being able to smell and taste everything would probably be kind of gross and overwhelming, but it may be worth exploring since so many people make such a big deal out of it. From my perspective though, it all feels like a kind of mass hallucination on a global scale.
If nothing else, it would probably make my cooking a little bit better. I obviously tend to go very crazy with spices and stuff, and my wife kind of suffers through some of it. I've wondered what it'd be like to be able to detect anything other than a kind "terrible taste" for something like wine, or what the hell Swiss cheese is actually (supposedly) "taste" like. And for the record, I still refuse to believe that: Munster, Swiss, Provolone, American, Feta, Parmesan, Beaufort, Camembert, and Romano cheese have an actual "taste" to them! Blue cheese and Roquefort have some flavor, but everything else is just tastes like slightly different cuts of a cold, textured "food substance". It's like insisting that lettuce or spinach have a "flavor"! They're just some crunchy nonsense that you put in between the bread to make the mouth-feel vaguely more interesting; little green piles of nonsense.
[1] I don't know if my issue was from birth, or came on later from a blow to the head, or what. I didn't realize I had Hyposmia until I mentioned how, "All bread tastes exactly the same" in my mid 20's and multiple people started looking at me funny.
Interesting life-imitates-art moment reading that he tried this flavor-changing chewing gum and then noticed that his taste was restored when he ate a blueberry.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka formulates a new kind of gum that provides the flavor of a full-course meal in a single stick. Violet Beauregarde steals and chews a piece, but the formula hasn't been worked out yet so when it gets to the blueberry pie she plumps up and turns into a giant human blueberry.
I have anosmia, triggered by AERD/polyps. I have been mostly without the sense for the past ~12 years, but int eh past year have had bouts of smell again, via a doc who finally diagnosed AERD, and suggested steroid intervention + mepolizumab.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadI wonder if it dulls other senses the opposite of blind people who develop more sensitive hearing.
I know this is probably just a bit of "editorial spice" because it's an obvious example for "what would you do if you could eat anything" I guess, but I thought capsaicin/spicyness was NOT a taste-perception thing. Isn't more of a pain feeling? I would've assumed you would retain that, while losing the olfactory perception you need for flavours.
I am no expert in this sort of thing, so if anyone knows I'd be genuinely curious about why COVID would affect both of those senses.
Apart from not being able to taste coffee, I also could not taste freshly ground black pepper, fresh spicy peppers, nor Tabasco sauce.
I could only feel the effects of the capsaicin at the back of my throat after having swallowed.
I’m thinking that burning feeling has a different route to get to your brain vs taste/scent, so I guess this gum does more than I thought originally. Though based on other accounts here, it sounds like how connected pain and flavour are varies quite a bit!
Sounds like an amazing product that I would want to buy. I probably chew 20 sticks of gum a day.
It took 10 days to get rid of the flu like symptoms, two weeks to get to semi normal, but my taste hasn't been the same since. Not entirely gone, but very muted.
If these gums were available off the shelf I would buy them in a heartbeat!
It came back very slowly, and unevenly. My coffee/chocolate taste is still quite dim.
Of all the possible smells to lose, why did it have to be those?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07498062
looks like it uses flavorings from these folks https://www.tastetech.com/
The smell/taste of my favorite foods no longer there is one thing, but the lack of ability to tell whether there is something wrong with whmy food was far more concerning.
I eventually adjusted and got used to it and then everything tasted weird again for a while when my senses finally restored after a few months.
His diet is rather plain, and he doesn't enjoy a lot of food. It's mostly meat, fried things and sweets he enjoys. Most vegetables and low-fat dishes he just can't enjoy at all. Luckily he doesn't get a lot of pleasure from eating and that's what keeps him from getting obese.
It also gives him a lot of anxiety that he or his clothes smell bad. He often just can't assess it from other clues. He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes, but it's not by choice. It's driven by the fear of smelling bad and not realizing it.
It can also get dangerous in some situations, not being able to smell a gas leak, only noticing smoke once it got so thick it will hurt when breathing, and not being able to smell when food goes bad.
Better than subsisting on fried food and sweets - take the fatty and sweet element from that and apply to veg
I don't really enjoy the taste or smell of things, and I usually only notice stuff if it's especially strong, or right next to my face. I see that whole sensory thing to being a kind of distraction from living life. Like, why should you care if something smells good or not? I just don't see the point. Regardless, I'd still be interested in it because I can smell stuff like rotting fruit or feces or whatever, so I do understand that there are clear and obvious benefits to knowing "Hey, don't eat that!" because it can make you sick or kill you or whatever.
I think that, being able to smell and taste everything would probably be kind of gross and overwhelming, but it may be worth exploring since so many people make such a big deal out of it. From my perspective though, it all feels like a kind of mass hallucination on a global scale.
If nothing else, it would probably make my cooking a little bit better. I obviously tend to go very crazy with spices and stuff, and my wife kind of suffers through some of it. I've wondered what it'd be like to be able to detect anything other than a kind "terrible taste" for something like wine, or what the hell Swiss cheese is actually (supposedly) "taste" like. And for the record, I still refuse to believe that: Munster, Swiss, Provolone, American, Feta, Parmesan, Beaufort, Camembert, and Romano cheese have an actual "taste" to them! Blue cheese and Roquefort have some flavor, but everything else is just tastes like slightly different cuts of a cold, textured "food substance". It's like insisting that lettuce or spinach have a "flavor"! They're just some crunchy nonsense that you put in between the bread to make the mouth-feel vaguely more interesting; little green piles of nonsense.
[1] I don't know if my issue was from birth, or came on later from a blow to the head, or what. I didn't realize I had Hyposmia until I mentioned how, "All bread tastes exactly the same" in my mid 20's and multiple people started looking at me funny.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka formulates a new kind of gum that provides the flavor of a full-course meal in a single stick. Violet Beauregarde steals and chews a piece, but the formula hasn't been worked out yet so when it gets to the blueberry pie she plumps up and turns into a giant human blueberry.
I can't find the relevant publication from Dr Ni Yang: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/biosciences/people/ni.yang