Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid | Hacker News Reader

Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid

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193 pointsspeckx106 comments

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.

>He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes

Smell and taste seem to be the last two senses/modalities we can't really work with using technology. Vision (cameras) and sound (microphones) have existed for a long time but it's only within the last decade that they've become ubiquitous in the form of a smartphone, and only within the last 5 years that ML is good enough to work across them (ocr, stt).

But for some reason (maybe lack of easy commercial opportunities) we haven't even come close to making "artificial noses" to record raw input. Maybe as part of the push for "embodied humanoid AI" (e.g. Figure) we'll find a way to do that.

Two notes on this - one is that smell and taste are the earliest senses we have. The first thing organisms began to sense about their external environments were chemical gradients, and that’s in essence what smell and taste are doing.

The second is that what they’re doing is _fantastically_ complex from a physical standpoint compared to sight and vision - sight is the detection of photons of various wavelengths and energy levels; hearing is the detection of vibrations. Smell and taste are molecular docking problems: they are the detection and identification of the actual structures (or at least substructures) of molecules. The closest we have to that is mass spectrometry, which basically involves flinging molecules hard enough to break them and weighing the parts.

Both good points, thank you! I hadn't appreciated how complex it was, reframing it as something closer to spectometry makes the difficulty clearer.

Ironic, since they are the oldest senses. The very most primitive cells can do chemotaxis, which eventually evolved into the chemical senses. But it also means sensing chemicals instead of energy, and it's harder to replicate mechanically.

Perfumes have existed for centuries. Lots of "apple flavoured candy" which doesn't actually have any apple. Bacon-flavoured vegan food.

There's plenty of examples, both from recent decades and centuries ago.

OP seems to talk about smell sensor (as camera and microphones), not sentences (as paint and guitar)

>He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day

tell him to use Dry Idea antiperspirant (I'd say unscented), the stuff blows anything else away. no need to thank me. (no I don't work there, long term user who ever now and then runs out and is reminded how good it is)

what's up with vegetables though? I love vegetables, but if I were asked what was the thing I least liked about them, I'd say "the smell"

> 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

I can smell just fine but I still have carbon monoxide and smoke detectors in my house to alert me if I am asleep and there is a gas leak or fire.

I always wondered whether my poor sense of smell dictated my diet. I share your friend's food preferences.

I wonder how the anxiety developed, I would think they would not be self-aware given they cannot understand it, so maybe they were bullied as a kid by smelling bad once and it created traumatic memories for him as it's sort of an unexplainable thing to his nose.

I can't smell much at all. one time when i was 17 my friend told me i was kinda smelly (i had just exercised). I've been stressed about it since. the human brain can latch on to the oddest things

Even those of us with a good sense of smell often can't smell ourselves, so I don't think you're at too much of a disadvantage there

From embarrassing situations in the past.

I had loss of smell for 4 years after covid and developed similar fear. It is not because of bullying, but from constantly having "what if" you can't answer yourself.

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

My mother lost her sense of smell after surgery for nasal polyps in her teens. She was mortally afraid of fire breaking out in the night and not being able to smell it.

Maybe not reassuring at all: but we can't smell a lot while we are asleep. A bad smell won't wake us up. That's why fire alarms exist, noise (or bright light) does wake us up.

> A bad smell won't wake us up.

I've woken up at night to investigate weird smells. Maybe the smell didn't wake me up, or maybe it didn't wake me up quickly, but I smelled the smell as I was waking up and then did the find the vaguely burning smell game. Last one I remember was a neighbor's bonfire left going when they went to sleep inside.

I have also been woken at night by the smell of smoke from a wildfire. Could be only possible during the lighter phases of sleep I suppose

How does he react to electro magnetic stimulation of the nerve region?

My dad lost his sense of smell after having surgery for his meningioma. According to him he doesn’t even notice a reduction in the quality of his life. I asked if food tastes worse and he said he hadn’t really thought about it and no it doesn’t. It really is the least of the senses.

Having lost my sense of taste during a bout of covid I would say he’s absolutely the anomaly - or he only partially lost it. A complete loss of smell and taste is impossible to ignore. Imagine standing in the direct path of a bonfire and not noticing at all until your lungs start to hurt. You can’t not notice it.

I think people are different (also he only lost his sense of smell, not taste). It’s all about perspective. If you didn’t know that a lack of smell affects flavor you might not notice. It probably also helps that he is Asian and Asian food is significantly more flavorful.

When I had covid I noticed a difference in how food tasted but it was kinda irrelevant. Food still tasted very good. It might be genetic or something as well. For instance, I can have a double shot of expresso and go to sleep 30 minutes later.

Smell is a huge part of perceived taste.

In lost some smell with Covid and it sucked. Food was bland.

Brain surgery can leave you without the ability to detect something is missing.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia

  Anosognosia is relatively common following different causes of brain injury

 The condition does not seem to be directly related to sensory loss but is thought to be caused by damage to higher level neurocognitive processes

Also Meningioma explained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningioma

This was 15 years ago, but he seemed to have all his faculties in order. The major change we saw was for about 3 to 6 months after the surgery he would lose his temper at the slightest thing. He was basically impossible to live with and then all of that just went away and he went back to being very normal.

> 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.

My anecdotal evidence, I couldn't smell or taste a thing for about 2 weeks, but I ate thai food constantly because I could at least feel the spice somewhat, it was dulled though, not 100%.

I eat thai food hot and love it. (scale=mild,medium,hot,thai hot)

but I wonder: it is me becoming strong and tolerant of hot... or my old body breaking down and having dull senses.

you do develop a tolerance to spiciness

Anecdotally, when my best friend first caught covid, his sense of smell was heightened, but his ability to perceive spiciness from both capsaicin (peppers) and allyl isothiocyanate (e.g. mustard, wasabi, radishes) completely disappeared. I just went back to check the messages he sent me to make sure I'm not spewing nonsense, and sure enough: "I didn't even have that nose feeling from wasabi." He couldn't perceive any spice at all. Not from peppers, not from hot sauce, not from wasabi. Nada. He tried everything he had in his kitchen.

Covid is a weird virus. I'd be really curious about the mechanism behind this. I'm sure it's nothing great, like some sort of nerve damage, but at least in my friend's case he and his senses made a full recovery as far as he can tell.

Covid caused nerve damage in the nose in the sensory glands where smell is perceived. Good news is that lots of viruses do this so the body has evolved to regrow these nerves.

Why would a virus evolve to do that? So weird. When I had covid it gave me a metallic taste in my mouth. Also was weird.

Probably it's just attacking accessible cells, and nerve cells in the nose are relatively exposed.

I don’t mean to say you’re wrong, but the “spice” due to wasabi is a different thing, not due to capsaicin at all. Same with mustard, it’s a similar thing. And then there’s yet another “spice” from the Sichuan peppercorn, again not due to capsaicin. It’s possible that COVID masks some of these but not others.

I am well aware! That's why my comment says "spiciness from both capsaicin and radishes". :)

I didn't feel like looking up how to spell allyl isothiocyanate when writing my initial comment. Maybe I should have! I've edited it for clarity, since it's an important distinction which adds to why I'm so danged curious about the mechanism behind my friend's temporary inability to perceive pungency. I also see how my original wording may have implied I was conflating the two, so I've expanded on my friend's experience a bit. He experimented with pepper and radish based spice sources in his pantry.

oh sorry, not sure how i missed that! totally makes sense though, very remarkable that he lost both!

> the “spice” due to wasabi is a different thing

But also, outside of Japan, 95% of the time the stuff with your sushi isn't wasabi, it's green-colored horseradish-and-mustard paste.

But the source of the spiciness is the same, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyl_isothiocyanate

That's also true inside Japan. True wasabi is really hard to grow commercially and thus very expensive.

> 95% of the time the stuff with your sushi isn't wasabi

so unexpected that i had to look it up; turns out you're right: https://chefcoca.com/blogs/food-service-equipment-resources/...

Isn’t wasabi just horseradish. Are you saying the mustard is what makes it not true.

> Isn’t wasabi just horseradish

Wasabi and horseradish are different! Horseradish is used as a substitute for wasabi so widely that you definitely can get the impression they are the same. But they are different plants.

?I never had a fabulous sense of smell, but COVID really nerfed it. It came back partially but never what it was before, and lots of things still don't smell right. Coffee and chocolate are definitely duller with coffee being flat out different now. Some things I can't smell at all, however there are some things I can smell WAY better now, and none of them are good. Urine is an extremely strong smell now, anything with sulfur is also really strong, and I literally can't eat anything with cumin or even have it in the house now. So weird.

Anecdote from my second COVID infection: Lost my sense of smell (anosmia) for about 2 weeks. That also killed my sense of taste.

The heat sensation from capsaicin was unaffected. I was eating a lot of vegetable bowls at the time. Adding spiciness was the only that kept them palatable.

There were a few tastes that I could dully perceive but, stupidly, I didn't make notes about what they were.

I can recall one thing that I didn't like: I tried peanut butter, which I typically find delicious, and found it a horrifyingly disgusting soulless paste. It made me wretch. It was awhile, even after I got my sense of smell back, before I could eat it.

I don't believe my sense of smell has recovered to my pre-COVID capability. This story is very interesting to me.

Interesting. I lost 100% of taste and smell months. I never found anything I could taste. Spicy has zero effect. I could cut onions with no tears. Literally nothing with any food

The only “sensation” I had eas texture which I found very gross without flavor.

It was like that for about 2 months and it slowly came back over another 5 maybe 6. Salty was the first thing I noticed.

5 years later and I still don’t smell coffee, gas or a few other things. It’s weird walking down the coffee isle at the store and not smelling it at sll

> The only “sensation” I had eas texture which I found very gross without flavor.

It's powerfully off-putting, isn't it? I had no idea tasteless texture would be so upsetting.

I hope this treatment becomes something I can partake of personally. I find that I'm using a lot more salt than I used to trying to make up for lack of taste. I switched to a potassium salt substitute to try to reduce my sodium intake.

For me everything moist smelled like seaweed.

I could smell fats (e.g. a grilled steak) but anything vaporous just smelled like the sea. Even diesel cars smelled like low tide. Ugh!

I lost my sense of taste and smell for a few days when I had covid, I was eating a bowl of spicy ramen at the time and I completely lost the ability to taste anything over the course of about 2 minutes. No spice, no salt, nothing. I usually have a pretty high spice tolerance, but to be certain I ate an entire birds eye chili. This would normally leave me in pretty excruciating pain for a few minutes, it did nothing. Strange that others report retaining their spice taste to some degree, that wasn't my experience at all. I wonder what was different?

Huh! Thats really interesting, though I’m sorry you had to go through that. Losing a whole sense for a few days is scary. I’d say that me poking at you over the internet saying it’s cool isn’t exactly nice of me, so apologies for that.

I guess this must be nerve related somehow. Specifically localized to the mouth and throat, but affecting any kind of nerve tissue? And also presumably in a way that’s recoverable for some.

Did it ramp back up to full sensation all at once, or was it more gradual?

No worries! The recovery was much slower and more gradual than the onset, it probably took about a week. This was compounded by the congestion and general cold symptoms. I suspect my sense of smell is still impacted ~3yr later, but I have no way to be sure.

the damage seems to be neurological / local nerves, I haven’t tried chewing gum but the best/fastest results I’ve had for this so far has been lions mane + micro dose of other mushrooms, smell therapy has been reported to show benefit also which probably matches the chewing gum thing, rebuilding/recalibrating the nerves slowly over time

I developed tinnitus on one side after covid, anecdotal but it slowly went away after I started taking a b complex daily, apparently it can promote nerve repair.

Not totally sure I fully believe it; but it seemingly worked for me.. shrug

how long before you noticed a change?

A long time. Like 5-6 months. So I'm not convinced it's totally related. Kinda risk-free to try it though.

Covid affecting my sense of smell had an impact on this.

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 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 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 don’t buy this bit. Is heat/spice related to taste/smell? It’s a different pathway that causes the pain as far as I know.

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!

The thing that helped me is "smell training". At random moments throughout the day try and sniff things that are just beyond your ability to smell. When I was fully in covid I could just barely perceive some sensation when sticking certain bottles of spice up to my nose.

I last had Covid 2 years ago. My sense of smell came back to about 25% of what it used to be. I describe it to people like distance. Like when a neighbor a couple floors below in an apartment building is cooking tomato sauce and you can smell it a bit by your apartment door. That's what it smells like when my face is over it cooking.

I'd definitely try this gum.

> Fully vaccinated

How long ago? Covid vaccine efficacy drops significantly over time so if you haven't had a booster recently, you are not vaccinated: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/why-pro...

Which that reminds me, I should schedule a booster since I'll be attending a party and a wedding soon.

If it's been a while you lose the active antibodies, but your immune system still knows whats up and can generate them when exposed. If you're lucky they do it fast enough that the virus doesn't get time to gain a foothold and you never experience a symptom. More likely though you get sick, but your body has a head start fighting off the infection so you don't get as sick. That's why the vaccines help people from severe illness even after a few months.

The bad news is that there are strains out there now that are different enough that even our trained immune systems won't recognize them. That's why it's good to get a booster when updated vaccines become available.

People are still doing this. Unreal.

When did you get your last tetanus shot?

I'm not sure what you mean, tetanus shots actually last 30+ years.

You need a booster every 10 years to maintain immunity.

No, there's quite a bit of evidence that they last much longer than that.

You may not have complete immunity beyond 10 years though, so the recommendation is that you get a booster every 10 years.

But I don't see your point? Are you arguing that the COVID vaccine grants immunity for much longer than advertised? That seems unlikely given the mutation rate of coronaviruses.

Doing what, getting vaccinated against infectious diseases?

People have been getting flu shots yearly for decades at this point. There's this weird delusion or socially-induced amnesia that comes with COVID.

I got COVID maybe a year ago, and I stayed home from work for a week. One of my friends couldn't believe it. He said "wow you're really gonna stay home for an entire week just because you have COVID?"

Uh... yes? Isn't that how we have always done things? If you're sick, you don't go to work because you'll get others sick. I recall being a kid and getting strep and flu many times and yup - the school nurse would send me home.

But something about the political environment around COVID has caused people to refuse to believe things that they know to be true. It's fascinating.

Yeah if I’m sick, I’m gonna stay home if I can help it. Doesn’t matter what is is or how innocuous I think it may be, what gives me the right to spread it around and multiply the misery?

Smart people are, yes.

>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.

My younger sibling, elderly mother, and I never vaccinated or caught covid, but my two older siblings both vaccinated and both caught covid several times each. My cousin is a nurse, vaccinated, caught covid, and lost hearing in one ear. Apparently hearing loss is a rare side effect of covid... I guess count yourself lucky that you didn't lose your hearing.

Multimodal Chewing Gum Flavour Training to Aid Flavour Perception Recovery - a Pilot Study

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07498062

looks like it uses flavorings from these folks https://www.tastetech.com/

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.

Looks like the basis for this is the press release from the gum production company: https://www.tastetech.com/updates/using-encapsulated-flavour...

I can't find the relevant publication from Dr Ni Yang: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/biosciences/people/ni.yang

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 lost my sense of smell from a minor virus I caught a couple years ago. It probably wasn't COVID (I tested negative at least).

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?

Hard to say without more info but most at-home COVID tests have a very high false negative rate due to the virus mutating and generally how the test is designed.

It's also the case that respiratory viruses predating covid often cause temporary loss of smell, it just wasn't much in the public consciousness before covid

Definitely possible, I lost my sense of smell completely for a couple of months over a decade ago after a minor cold. Completely gone, could not even smell gasoline. It was pretty upsetting. One day it was a faint scent of peanut butter that came back, and a few days later it recovered completely.

Where can somebody with regular taste senses buy these specially formulated chewing gum to try and develop super senses?

I wonder if it dulls other senses the opposite of blind people who develop more sensitive hearing.

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 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)

It's weird hearing about this now, because I've always had a mild version each time I had a cold - mint would taste strangely kind of... floral? hard to describe, and orange juice would just taste sour, for a couple weeks after.

It's strange how much these things are hard to discuss without the immediate context - I remember what it was like, but the translation without ready access is surprisingly challenging.

As far as I know, anosmia would be the inability to smell. Parosmia would be scents smelling like other things, or the inability to identify certain smells.

And since taste and smell are so closely related, I haven’t been able to drink colas for about 3 years. Dr Pepper is fine though, so I’m okay.

For the first year I had no idea this was a real condition and my family thought I was crazy when I said things smelled wrong. It was a relief when I stumbled upon reddit group and found others.

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).

> “The chewing gums were specially formulated to keep their flavour for longer, and actually change flavour as you chew.

Sounds like an amazing product that I would want to buy. I probably chew 20 sticks of gum a day.

Yeah this is willy wonka

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.

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.

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 liked the article, I think the general understanding is correct, but question the numbers/statistics, you can't have 67% (or 83%) of 16 people...

Does it work for people who aren't dad's?

It's too early to tell if it worked because he was a dad or because he was once a mama's boy.

"dad's" is possessive not plural

I figured it was a typo.

But it does raise the intriguing question that would work for more than one dad? What was special about that dad??

The trial and chewing gum were designed specifically for dad's with no taste

my smell never recovered fully from first waves of covid. I am at 70%. ill try this.

How it feels to chew 5 gum

Please send me some gum

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