it’s also worth mentioning that some tiktok users have tried the recipe with no success. user @anniedeschamps2, who says she had lost her sense of taste from covid “over a month ago,” posted a
video
of her trying the burnt orange trick but later
confirmed
she was still having trouble tasting.
why do patients lose their sense of taste?
there are not a lot of definitive studies on why some covid patients lose their sense of taste, although we can say with some certainty that the illness does not cause you to actually “lose” your taste buds — they just aren’t working normally.
one
research article
, published in acs chemical neuroscience, suggests that inflammation caused by covid-19 impacts the ability of taste buds to do their job. as the inflammation goes down, the theory suggests, the sense of taste will come back in most patients.
the loss of taste may also be connected to loss of smell. the sensation of taste is a
combination
of three different mechanisms – t
aste, smell, and chemesthesis (the sensation that chemicals elicit, like how menthol feels cool)
– so losing the ability to smell will impact the sensation of taste,
according to
nature.
when we “smell” something, we have actually inhaled small molecules that trigger the olfactory centre – a small section of nerve endings in our nose that communicates the scents to our brain. javer explains that for many viral infections, not just covid, swelling makes it difficult for those small molecules to reach the olfactory center.