When you lose your sense of smell, it will impact your sense of taste as well because the two are closely interconnected, Before and after you put food in your mouth to taste it, we smell a food to see if it is pleasing and safe to consume. When we put food in our mouth and it touches our tongue we have taste buds to recognize a food but also the food's chemical component can be volatile (that is droplets of vapor reach the back of the mouth connected to your nasal passages (so these components of the flavor are inhaled). Together - taste and aroma send signals to your brain. That is how we know and recognize flavors in our memory.
Most of us will recognize the scent of a rose and the taste of our favorite food and our brain is happy to receive these common aromas and tastes. Scents and tastes we recognize from childhood associated with love or play often comfort and calm us.
Other aromas and taste trigger warnings - there is too much salt or that grapefruit too bitter. As your body works constantly to maintain internal balance for your survival if it gets too little or too much of what it needs it lets you know. Normally you just have to listen unless something either disrupts the systems or the body believes that it must acclimate as best as possible to survive with what it has to work within a given environment. Sometimes we recognize that acclimation is something we should consider for our long-term health.
Back to COVID-19 which disrupts this system when it enters nasal passages.
That is because our senses are designed to maintain our health sending signals to our brain about what will nourish us in the right amounts. If we are listening to our senses carefully, we will know what we need to survive and thrive at the most basic level of our existence.
Viruses spread by interfering with our basic systems hopefully only in the short term disrupting our body intelligence long enough to spread to others. In the process, our interaction with a virus may result in some damage as our body tries to fight off the intruder - in a sense an internal war.
We are all equal in nature over the long term. All life survives to procreate and be useful to its species. With time we may be able to defend our bodies from the intruder or in the case of some viruses, learn to adapt and co-exist with them. That is until we are run down, stressed or, other infected. The virus needs us to live for it to survive and spread so its objective is not to kill us. Some viruses, such as Epstein Barr, live in our body for the long term and are quiet until they feel threatened and then viral symptoms appear.
In most cases, our senses are not lost forever because once we recover from the virus, in the most recent case of COVID, our detection is no longer under attack and our sensory cues can be repaired naturally. We can assist or speed up this repair with sensory stimulation.
If you need to get your senses back again, send an email with I WANT MY SENSES BACK in the subject to mindy@foodfitter.com to learn about my short program.
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