A really bright light can make me blind. A really loud noise can make me deaf. Can a really strong flavour break my taste buds? Or a strong odour break my sense of smell?
A really bright light permanently damages your eyes. So a really strong acid could permanently damage your tongue.
If you eat something too hot without properly letting it cool, you’ll burn your tongue and won’t taste anything for days
I’ve experienced this with pineapple, specially a lot of freshly peeled pineapple. Some mix of Bromelain and intense sugar muted general flavors and my ability to taste anything sweet for a few hours.
Ageusia is the term for loss of taste.
Traumatic damage to the olfactory nerve can cause of lack of smell but you would also need to damage the tongue for the taste.
You won’t do it from eating regular foods, but trying to eat a large enough firecracker might do the trick. It could take out both the tongue and the nerve.
Don’t do that though. It would probably blow the jaw off and make you blind as well.
oh yeah, you can totally change your sense of taste of sweet and salty
remove either of these for several weeks and then slowly bring them back and you will find you are far more sensitive to them than previously.
the addiction to high level sweet taste is why dieting is so hard for so many and why sugar substitutes are targetted as an option.
If I have ice cream and then a piece of 100% dark chocolate, its tasteless. When I do keto and have a piece of 100% as my only dessert, it’s the sweetest thing in my life.
Ghost peppers. Jus munch one piece (don’t do it). It will mess up your flavour on the first bite and wish for the sweet release of death (won’t come I think) for a long time after.
Only to a point. Once you acclimate, they won’t affect you like this anymore. Thats why you can buy stuff like this as seasoning:
https://www.flatironpepper.com/products/green-ghost
Just pure ghost pepper flakes. Exactly as hot as you think.
People here keep listing diseases and chemicals when OP is asking about taste and smell.
Unless you’re drinking bleach, food will never destroy your sense of taste. It’s the same with smell. There are chemicals that are really smelly and can destroy your nose, but smell ≠ nose destruction.
So light and sound intensity are continuous scales. They also are physics but taste and smell are chemicals. Chemistry, molecule properties are a discrete scale. Now you make a distinction between food chemicals and non-food but that distinction is already based empiracally on “what tastes good and does no harm” so a poor choice for this answer.
Yeah, temporarily, I think. You ever indulge in a food repeatedly until it stops tasting good? I have, many times. It resets after a while, but the difference, I think, is that the light and sound are actually doing physical damage to your retina and ear follicles / ear drum. You could blow up a fire cracker in your mouth to get that outcome, but that’s not what you’re asking.
We used to occasionally have to put our kids on “sugar fast” when they ate too much sweet stuff because they then couldn’t taste sweet in lightly sweet stuff. So their palate needed to be recalibrated. I’ve had to do the same with salt before.
And I am desensitized to spicy things but like that because I can appreciate more foods that way, or more of the ones I tend to like. But surely it’s a form of damage.
What are you over here wanting to eat?
Your mom.
Sorry. You left that wide open.
…kind of like your mom.
Corsodyl mouthwash, according to my dentist, is not supposed to be used every day because it can permanently alter your sense of taste. Corsodyl specifically.
Thats only 1 dentist though you’d have to ask the other 9 to know for sure.
My hygienist told me recent studies say mouthwash isn’t all that good for you anyway because it kills the good germs too.
i stopped using mines everyday, because it was causing allergic reaction, the CPC mouthwash works on mouth sores though and gum inflammation.
There’s a specific chemical extract from some berry that makes EVERYTHING taste like Splenda. You can bite into a lemon and it will taste sweet. Lasts a few minutes, fun novelty
I didn’t find that everything was sweet. Most things tasted normal. Beer tasted oddly sweet, citrus was very sweet, but almost everything we ate at hotpot tasted the same. Maybe spicy things were less spicy.
It makes sour taste sweet. Not everything
Covid
Not technically - it deadens your sense of smell, which affects your sense of taste.
I would say chili peppers can do that, though.
Smoking will make you less sensitive to taste. Still too early to tell on vapes.
Vapes kinda work in a similar fashion to foods. I remember having to switch from vanilla, because it was making my coffee taste like nothing.
For the curious, I removed nicotine from my diet last February. About 28 years, total.
Hydrogen sulfide deadens the sense of smell. You can smell it in low concentrations, but not in high concentrations. So it is quite a dangerous gas.
