Oooh yes yes - this is such wonderful news! Literally weeks before the world changed my boyfriends dad had begun to explore the world of cooking; he was so happy when we would bring him to niche little grocers to try things he had never known about before and trying all the food - but after his infection, and for the last 2 years - nothing. No taste. No smell.
We try to make up for it by encouraging him to make stuff with varied textures and components but he's been really depressed about it since. His pinterest recipe board he would share with us hasn't been updated in years and his meals typically consist of protein/starch/veggie with no seasoning as it doesn't register.
I am so hopeful for something that can bring him his sense of smell and taste back; so far his medical teams have kinda just been bouncing him around to various specialties - he even had a small surgery in an attempt but no dice.
One of the rarer side effects of using Zicam nasal spray is loss of sense of smell. Somebody experiencing this reported that they accidentally restored their sense of smell by being exposed to pepper spray.
There are nasal decongestants out there that are essentially dilute capsaicin in suspension in saline (as a sufferer of sinus infections I have tried most things at this point). It's not pleasant, but it's less unpleasant than eating food that's way too spicy, and nowhere near as bad as getting wasabi fumes up your nose.
If memory serves there are several other ways that capsaicin can unstick the nervous system. Might be worth a try.
"Mace your boyfriend's dad" wasn't the medical advice I was expecting to see here, but I guess I can't blame anyone for being willing to try it. Not being able to taste anything for years would be terrible. I'm not confident that it works, but either way I look forward to seeing the videos if this 'one weird trick' catches on.
In 2020 I had lactoferrin on fabric tested by a university laboratory for a potential product. The product didn't go anywhere after that, but it was conclusively shown that lactoferrin did inactivate the virus by about 92% instantly and 98% in a minute.
If you want to use it as a mouthwash, the product Salivea (a quite pleasant product with a horrible name) has lactoferrin as one of the ingredients.
Around 15 years ago I broke my nose which eventually led to a loss of taste and smell. Around 8 months ago I had surgery on the internal structures of my nose which in addition to allowing me to breath again, I can also taste and smell. The experience has been completely mind blowing.
On the flip side I can no longer order the spiciest of spicy Thai and Indian food from my usual restaurants. The owners poke fun at me now.
He probably doesn’t know how. But it’s an interesting point. I never thought about it before, but the event I went through had a similar link between taste and smell, and in hindsight I now don’t get why.
In college I made a bet with a friend that I could hold dominos wings hot sauce in my mouth for 10 minutes. At the time, the wings from dominos were actually very spicy. It was painfu, I spent about 30 minutes washing my mouth out after that. I lost my sense of taste AND smell for an entire year.
Why did I lose my sense of smell and not just my taste? Any docs here to explain?
Interesting… I now (nearly 30 years later) have a condition that is considered a vestibular/neurological condition called mal de Debarquement. I also believe I suffer from vestibular migraines, but that is not diagnosed yet (seeing a specialist next week). I doubt that dominos hot sauce was the cause, but maybe I am susceptible to such things? I never thought to link these two things before.
I had a similar injury with on-and-off sense of smell since.
What type of surgery did you have done? I'd like to bring it up with my ENT doctor (who treats my nose as his personal polyp farm), and has prescribed only steroids (which DO work but have bad side-effects).
I had a septoplasty and turbinate reduction. The recovery was pretty brutal - there’s many nerves and pain receptors in the middle of your skull apparently. In all it’s amazing to not have a “stuffed” nose all the time.
That's fascinating because it implies that our ability to feel/respond to spicy food is all psychological. I would have figured that you would have felt at least some pain build while eating really spicy food but I guess not.
The response to spicy food is not all psychological. It's due to activation of heat receptors by capsaicin. Note: many factors affect the subjective experience of taste sensation.
I have been put into atrial fibrillation by the aggravation caused by spicy food from a popular indian restaurant in north Seattle. I had to get cardioverted. Was it due to stress? Was it due to the sustained rise in blood pressure? Was it caused by GI? It doesn't matter. I have to avoid it now, for safety.
It might interest you that zinc, just like Ensitrelvir, is a 3c like Protease inhibitor. You might have a try at getting his serum and RBC zinc tested.
I was cooking tacos for my family knowing I had COVID (we all had it at the time). I remember not smelling the seasoning, and threw a small handful of chopped raw onions in my mouth to confirm the bad news...
Luckily it came back in about a week. Beer and wine tasted awful for a few weeks, and I am a fan of both. Luckily a year on, and all seems well for now.
Years later, I'm still registering new scents that I haven't smelled since before my first COVID infection. For a hearing analogy, it's not like the volume is turned down, it's like some frequencies are missing entirely. And then one day, suddenly, it's back. Freshly ground coffee is an especially rich source of new odors. It turns out coffee isn't just one smell, it must be dozens.
Yeah I had a dram or so of cask strength (60% iirc?) whisky per day when I had no taste just because I wanted to have some kind of taste-adjacent feeling even if that was just a bit of burning. I was so happy when I realised it was coming back slowly every day. Nose is still not 100% but I am fine with that, I can enjoy food and drink so I'm lucky and thankful
Weird, I remember when there was an epidemic of anosmia caused by zinc containing nasal sprays/gels: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16467707/ Guess oral supplementation is ok?
I feel for him. About 20 years ago, I had a bad bout of flu which nixed my sense of smell fro about 6 months. Eating was quite simply a chore. I didn't know whether I was drinking tea or coffee.
Then one day someone made me a cup of tea and I rhapsodised about it being the best, most flavoursome cup of tea ever and I realised I had my sense of smell back.
this is one of the plot lines in the 1994 Taiwanese film "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_Drink_Man_Woman , though the father/chef character lost his sense of smell due to another reason.
The first time I realized I had Covid, I was doing laundry and noticed that the bleach I was using had no smell. However, over time my sense of smell did return.
The current Covid strain spreading in the US no longer has the loss of the sense of smell as such a common symptom.
> only around 10-20% of her Covid patients lose their sense of taste or smell now, compared to around 60-70% early in the pandemic.
That does seem plausible. The fact that most people had prior immunity by the time Omicron arrived (whether from infection, vaccination, or both) could also play a role.
It is more likely prior immunity. Everyone now has enough antibodies and T-cells so that even if we get infected it isn't anywhere near as likely to escape outside of the respiratory tract, and the anosmia-affected neurons are mostly protected, even though you can still get sick.
> even if we get infected it isn't anywhere near as likely to escape outside of the respiratory tract
That hasn't stopped the virus from spreading with increasing effectiveness and each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against, or something that brings new harms. The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
> That hasn't stopped the virus from spreading with increasing effectiveness
It really doesn't. They've finally stopped talking about the idiocy of every single new variant being 2x to 4x times as transmissible as the last variant because the math would be fucking stupid with an R(t) of something like >1024 by now.
They've been conflating immune evasion with intrinsic transmissibility for the past several years. That has finally started to disappear.
> each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against,
Except that we're not observing any pattern of mutations around T-cell epitopes in the virus suggestive of any risk of immune escape from T-cell recognition -- which it the important defense against severe disease and death and those defenses that we have are what has turned the virus milder.
The whole reason why we likely have a two tiered immune system[*] with fast neutralizing antibodies and slow T-cells is likely because the end product of 500 million years or so of evolution favored immune systems that were clever enough to force these kinds of viruses to evolve to escape only the first line of defense.
> The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
No, that's a sign our immune systems work and its not their first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
Really, how counterintuitively up your own ass do you have to be to take the very clear signs that the symptoms are abating and turn that into something to fear.
[*] well multi-tiered, but those are the two biggies of the adaptive immune system.
I wouldn't say pressure, rather filtration: easy to spot variants can be isolated so spread is less likely, so filtered out from existence. Hard to spot variants may be easier to spread since well, ppl may think it's just a minor cold, no need to dtay at home/mask
I had the same thing - I was making something spicy and couldn't understand why it had absolutely no taste. This was just as Covid was taking off in Europe and I was quarantined at home after a trip in Austria. I had about 3 days without any taste whatsoever before news began to circulate that loss of taste/smell was a common symptom and that's when I became one of the first couple of hundred in the country I live in to test positive for Covid.
I've now had Covid 3 x times. The first time I had incredible taste and smell loss, taking in excess of 4-5 months to recover, perhaps not even fully.
The other times, I had no loss of taste or smell. I do wonder why it only impacted me the first time. Different Covid variant, or something biologically changed in me, causing it to impact me differently?
The first time I contracted COVID, the other symptoms were wild, and I gave myself even odds on dying. However I did not lose my sense of smell or taste.
The second time I contracted COVID, it was mostly just a miserable fever but I lost my smell and taste, and they still have not come back completely almost a year later.
My theory is that COVID does a random walk when eating away the brain from wherever it enters.
I've been buying "test bags" of mandarins every 4 months or so since I contracted it for a second time around Christmas 2021. Yesterday was the first time that I was able to taste any of the background notes you would normally associate with orange flavors. Before it was like just taking a concentrated spray of orange oil to the mouth.
I was so excited I ended up eating half the bag, lol.
I mean, that's also to do with seasonality. Citrus is horrible outside of winter. I recently started noticing the oranges starting to taste much better, but that's the same as every year around now.
That makes me happy to hear! I have a couple of friends who have been affected by this, and their loss of food enjoyment has genuinely hurt them. Here's hoping they get theirs back soon, too.
Can we get that data from China's experience after dropping the zero-COVID policy in Dec 2022?
If I understand correctly, at that time, only a tiny slice of the population had been exposed to previous COVID variants, and something like 80% has since gotten it. It looks like the vaccination rate was something like 90% at the time, but that should still be a pretty large naive population to look at, of people who were exposed to Omicron & later with no original/Delta exposure.
I am reasonably certain I had covid in January 2020; felt like I had been hit by a truck, and recovery took weeks.
As far as I know, I haven't had it since, but did get the vaccinations. Do you (does anyone here) know if there is a test to see if you did have it, or does the vaccine response swamp that signal?
> I am reasonably certain I had covid in January 2020
Probably not, there were nasty flu strains circulating then that are much more likely an explanation. It had already spread somewhat, but not enough to be a likely cause until March even in the areas with early outbreaks like Italy and NYC etc. Exponential growth means that not long before everyone has it, the vast majority don’t have it.
I had a similar experience in January 2020, as did my wife. She got an antibody test that indicated she was never infected, so it was probably something else. Who knows?
Edited: to be clear we both thought prior to the antibody test that it was covid!
Some blood antibody tests can distinguish between viral induced antibodies versus infection induced antibodies.
However, antibodies decrease with time. (We have memory T-cells etc for long term immunity). Whilst I am not an expert, I would be very surprised if virtual induced antibodies were still detectable.
What you describe: it is very possible you had COVID, but it is also very possible you had a bad flu. There are other viruses too, like RSV, which used to be rarely mentioned, but at times can be nasty.
Here is an example test which checks specifically for virus induced antibodies: <https://monitormyhealth.org.uk/covid19-antibody-test/>. Non-profit Testing for All also used to sell similar tests, but they have stopped operating.
I don't have a better approach than checking the descriptions of individual antibody tests. But I know the distinction is real, because IIRC the ONS (statistics body) used tests which distinguished, when they ran their ongoing study.
Back then the Red Cross would do free antibody tests for anyone who donated blood. There were two. One could not distinguish between antibodies from an infection vs. vaccine, and came back in a day or two. The other did, and took longer.
I got pretty sick at the end of February 2020 and sent my sample in to the Seattle Flu Study along with the COVID opt-in. As far as I know the test was negative. There are lots of other viruses with similar symptoms that circulate around that time so not unlikely you (and I) had one of those.
It's weird how different it goes for each person. My little family got it the summer of 22 (tested positive too) and while I felt like flu for about a week, my wife was completely out for two days with very high fever then nothing, and the daughter only lost smell and taste for two weeks.
He could also say the peanut butter sandwiches he eats in the morning cured his sense of smell. I mean they probably didn't, but there's as much evidence either way.
There have also been multiple reports linking the loss of taste or smell to zinc deficiency, either due to chemotherapy and metal chelating agents [38–40], or due to nutritional deficiencies, especially in older populations [41,42], also caused by medical procedures such as dialysis [43]. As a result, zinc has been proposed in the treatment of taste disorders [44,45]; however, zinc supplementation for chemotherapy-induced loss of smell or taste, which is often transient, has not led to improvements in this condition
Girlfriend has lost her entire sense of smell after covid, I'm really hoping the future has an answer to that.
It's taken the joy out of a lot of things she enjoys, especially cooking. She's seen a few ENT doctors and they all claim it's not coming back without any clear solutions.
Has she been doing essential oil training? As far as I know it's the only scientifically validated method and it did a lot for me (although at soon 2 years my taste/smell is not fully recovered). I know it worked as I only regained the smells from the oils initially. Flowery oils were specifically good, as they likely contain thousands of different compounds that you find in many other smells.
One usually recommend four oils (of high quality preferebly): one citrus, one mint/eucalyptus, one spicy (e.g. cinnamon) and one flowery (lavendel did wonders for me, then geranium) to start out with. Smell each oil for 20 seconds every morning and evening, while thinking of/imagening the thing you're smelling. Since it's a neurological issue, the last thing supposedly helps. It usually took me 2-3 weeks from starting training until noticing any (very minor) effect at all, and much longer to regain a lot of it.
Sorry if she's already tried, hopefully it's useful for others. It can take a long time for the training to work.
Some times I wish food was less enjoyable so I’d eat less of it. Not discounting your girlfriends experience - that’s horrible - but being able to switch off my sense of smell would help with sticking to my caloric intake!
It didn’t work that way for me. I was doing pretty well with my diet but when I lost taste/smell I ended up seeking out fried crunchy things for the interesting texture, as well as rich heavy foods that give that post-thanksgiving feeling just in order to feel something/anything from eating.
You can eat a lot of tasty food without eating a ton of calories. Most calories are from excess of fats( like a ton of oil when a teaspon is sufficient, eating too many too sugary cakes that usually also have high fat content). I've succeed to stay at the same 'normal' weight when covid hit and less mobility just by paying attention to these
The pill is an antiviral called ensitrelvir. It sounds similar to Paxlovid. Both are protease inhibitors which slow/disrupt viral replication. It may help with other symptoms.
In an earlier nature.com post..
"participants who took 125-milligram ensitrelvir pills recovered from five specific symptoms — stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish and low energy or tiredness — about 24 hours earlier than did those in the control group"
I got covid back in May 21, lost sense of taste for around 6 months, than had horrible congestion and insomnia and fatigue since. The insomnia hasn't gone away yet. I got covid again a few weeks ago, and was given some antivirals (Molnupiravir), I recovered super quick on those, and for the days I was taking it I had the best sleep I've had in years. But after the course ended the insomnia returned.
This happened to my wife. It was torture for her for the first year. It's been almost 3 years now and she's just barely starting to enjoy food again. Most things taste fairly normal for her, but a few things, like mint, onions, and garlic, (which are in everything, unfortunately for her) are still wretched.
My sense of smell hasn't recovered ever since my infection in November 2022. I had a really fine sense of smell before, and I really miss cooking fine meals :(
After completely losing my sense of smell and taste during COVID it took around two months for it to return to a level that was bearable, but more than a year (maybe even two in total) until I really felt like my sense of smell had mostly recovered. So don't give up hope yet, even without new medication.
I've had Covid at least three times myself. The first time was in Feb 2020 and was my roughest bout. I didn't fully lose my sense of smell or taste but it was very confused. Oranges tastes like parsley and other foods got swapped. I've always prided myself on my sense of smell and have been able to differentiate ingredients in a dish.
After about a month my sense of taste and smell seemed to go back to normal but for about 2 years I felt that they had not recovered fully. I love to cook and my taste clearly changed. I started drinking more full bodied wines and eating blue cheese, things that had not been my favorite.
I've had at least one but I suspect 2 brushes with Covid in the intervening years. They were pretty mild with no fever and only cold like symptoms.
Around March of this year (2023) I experienced a bout of Covid that reminded me of the original time I had contracted it. Fever, body aches, lightheadedness etc. The symptoms were the same just lighter in intensity and over quicker. The interesting thing is that I never lost my sense of smell and I feel like I've regained what I'd lost from my first bout of Covid.
I'm someone with an extremely sensitive sense of smell.
When I had COVID (the first time) at one point my sense of smell became corrupted. I didn't realize it at first. For days I smelled a tangerine smell in my apartment (where I was mostly holed up in those days). I kept thinking that they were cleaning the building carpets with some sort of new cleaner, and it was coming in the vents.
After days of this I opened the window and smelled this smell much more intensely in the wind. Then with some experimentation I realized, it's me not the world.
I worried that everything would smell like that forever, but luckily it came back. Something similar happened with smoke, where I felt like certain smells (coffee, for example) smelled like someone was smoking. Another confusing experience.
I had the same, corrupted is the right word. During the period my smell and taste was corrupted there was a big set of foods and smells that smelled and tasted exactly the same, kind of like burning plastic but without being so disgusting.
At the same time I was oblivious to certain smells, I remember one time I was walking a dog with a friend and friend complained about heavy smoke smell in the air - I took a deep breath and all I could smell was fresh cold air.
My sense of taste and smell is ~30% since Covid in June of 2022. Luckily there’s still mild taste so eating isn’t completely joyless. another symptom that started at this time was extreme nasal snoring so bad that I wake myself up and that has never happened before and it just started happening in June 2022.
I finally got to an ENT, literally yesterday, where they did a nasal endoscopy. There was mild inflammation, but no major deviation or polyps or anything worrying the diagnosis from them was Covid related since nothing structural was observed.
I just got a taste and smell training kit that arrived from Amazon today and I think that’s basically my only course of action at this point. Here’s hoping
I lost taste/smell for about two weeks in the late summer 2022 from covid infection. Very wild to lose taste/smell. Not just diminished ... gone. You could have put a turd under my lose and I wouldn't have known the difference. Not only that, I stopped drinking coffee during that time because again ... what was the point if I couldn't taste it?
Took a few weeks to completely recover from all of the side effects of a covid infection.
Same way tech products get named -- the Marketing department does it and it is kind of a cultural thing in industries to have a naming technique that follows other brands in style. In tech this would be similar prefixes and removing vowels and using completely unrelated but common words for branding. In pharma they tend to use words that have pseudo-latin fixes ('Nexium'), alchemical sounding names ('Elixophyllin'), or fake-science/medical sounding terms ('Crestor'), and my favorite, words that sounds like they are life-giving or philosophically pleasant states of mind or physicality ('Abilify')
Is there a way to temporarily invoke these effects? When I had covid the first time I lost my sense of smell & taste completely for 1 day. Eating food felt so weird. I really didn't want to eat. The next day my taste returned although I couldn't taste bitterness for a few months (espresso felt like warm water).
Has any company thought of taking away people's sense of taste as a weight loss method?
I think that this study was conducted a couple of years ago when this was a more common symptom.
My guess is that any antiviral is going to have similar effects since they all do the same basic thing which is to inhibit viral replication.
I'm surprised more people aren't getting Paxlovid. In my experience it worked great, and there is a study out that shows that it reduces the chances of long covid.
Have there been studies on the potential advantages of loss of smell and/or taste from COVID-19?
Westerners are too obese, and presumably part of that's to do with the enjoyment people get from unhealthy foods.
Whereas if you can't taste anything food's basically differently textured fuel of varying temperatures. You'd have to desire to eat e.g. yogurt with added sugar over one without.
> You'd have to desire to eat e.g. yogurt with added sugar over one without.
So in your mind, there are alternative, inexpensive 6- and 12-packs of plain, unsugared yogurt sitting in national grocery chains, just waiting to be consumed by people with no sense of taste at scale?
Edit: also keep in mind that people who have lost 40% of their sensory input are apt to go through a depression, and that being sedentary has a lot of risk factors that overlap with the risks from obesity.
My local Kroger imprint sells their generic-brand plain Greek yogurt (with zero sweetener of any sort) in both whole milk and nonfat versions, in 32-ounce tubs for cheap. Every other grocery store I've been to also has something similar, even if you have to get the non-generic brands.
As someone who bikes regularly, let me just say that you clearly don't understand the distances involved in America, particularly rural and suburban areas. Which makes sense if you're bringing a European bias.
Probably controversial but I did lose a ton of weight before my sense of smell and taste came back from COVID. Part of me wondered whether it would've been better for my long term physical health to have that sense of taste stay gone...on the flip side, my mental health would've suffered greatly. Food is such an amazing way to experience the world and other cultures.
You can temporarily induce a partial loss of taste sensation, specifically sourness, with a glycoprotein found in one particular fruit. An astonishingly specific behaviour. It leads one to wonder what undiscovered or uninvented glycoproteins could do.
Loss of smell is a well-studied disorder long before COVID-19 ever came around:
"However, some reports (Mattes et al., 1990; Mattes, 1993, 1995) are contrary to the earlier suggestions that anosmics do not experience problems related to their food intake. These authors report that ~14% of anosmic patients experienced a body weight gain exceeding 10% while ~6.5% experienced a loss of at least that amount." (https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/24/6/705/320339)
Some people might with diminished (but not completely eliminated) senses of smell might compensate by eating more of certain flavors that they CAN taste. Also worth noting that there are tons downsides, ignoring the obvious lack of sensory pleasure most people get from food. They are less likely to smell rotten and spoiled food, smell smoke from a nearby fire, etc.
What would be the process for getting this drug approved for use in the US? I wonder if it would qualify for the EUA pathway, on the grounds that it's possible there is a limited window during which it is effective. Has this drug been used for other purposes, which would help regulators know whether it is generally safe? Or would they be assessing it from square one?
According to the article (and Wikipedia), it's a novel antiviral developed to treat COVID-19, and has reached (or completed, by now?) Phase III trials in Japan, and is currently in use there under an EUA (although I assume the acronym may be different in Japan).
If this works for people who have had smell & taste lost for years after recovery, that would imply that the ongoing symptoms were the result of a lingering infection. I'm not sure the referenced study demonstrates that -- as near as I can tell, it was clinically evaluated in people who had new COVID-19 infections.
Does anyone know if it's in trials in the US, or how long the process might take? Just from this thread it seems like there's a decent number of people who have lingering loss of smell, for weeks/months/years after infection.
Obviously an N=1 result, but I had really good luck with a sodium citrate nasal spray. Restored my sense of smell almost immediately, I used for 5 days twice a day.
"[Loss of smell] is sometimes the only symptom to be reported, implying that it has a neurological basis separate from nasal congestion. As of January 2021, it is believed that these symptoms are caused by infection of sustentacular cells that support and provide nutrients to sensory neurons in the nose, rather than infection of the neurons themselves. Sustentacular cells have many Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors on their surfaces, while olfactory sensory neurons do not. Loss of smell may also be the result of inflammation in the olfactory bulb." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symptoms_of_COVID-19#Loss_of_s...)
I managed to avoid getting COVID until August 2023 and I lost my sense of smell. It took over a month for the sense to slowly come back, even after I tested negative.
The interesting thing is that I tested positive for COVID and went into quarantine, but didn't lose the sense of smell until a couple of days later. Seems like it set up shop in my lungs to start and only migrated up to the sinuses later. I also only really felt bad (low energy, aches, chills) for the first day, afterward I felt fine except for the loss of smell/taste but tested positive for another 5 days.
I've had COVID 5 times since mid 2022 and have had total loss of taste and smell 3 times. The only reason I think two of those infections were mild is because they were almost back to back (3 infections within 10 weeks at the start of this year).
Nov 2022 first time Covid-er here. I lost my sense of smell for about 2 weeks. I noticed it ~2 days before the illness really hit me (it mostly just drained me of all energy.)
That would be consistent with the claim that the new drug shortens the duration of sensory symptoms. Those not in the placebo groups recovered before the three week timeframe.
Probably, but still, smelling if someone used an elevator half an hour after they did is less of a me-problem and more of a you-problem. It should not happen and if it does, you are either disgusting or ill.
I consider myself an isotretinoin (the famous and highly effective anti acne medication with loads of dangerous, permanent side effects) "victim", in the sense that I suffer from medium to strong dry eye, nose and throat. Isotretinoin is known to improve sense of smell in those that suffer from a lack of it.
> I consider myself an isotretinoin (the famous and highly effective anti acne medication with loads of dangerous, permanent side effects) "victim", in the sense that I suffer from medium to strong dry eye, nose and throat. Isotretinoin is known to improve sense of smell in those that suffer from a lack of it.
We try to make up for it by encouraging him to make stuff with varied textures and components but he's been really depressed about it since. His pinterest recipe board he would share with us hasn't been updated in years and his meals typically consist of protein/starch/veggie with no seasoning as it doesn't register.
I am so hopeful for something that can bring him his sense of smell and taste back; so far his medical teams have kinda just been bouncing him around to various specialties - he even had a small surgery in an attempt but no dice.