ON APRIL 1, King's College London research found loss of sense of smell or taste to be a stronger predictor of coronavirus infection than fever. Out of 400,000 people in the UK reporting one or more symptoms between March 24 and 29, 18 per cent had lost their sense of smell or taste.
But what gives us the ability to taste? The average person has about 10,000 taste buds on their tongue, soft palate, cheeks, epiglottis (a flap of cartilage that prevents food going down your windpipe) and oesophagus (food pipe). Your sense of touch also plays a key role in experiencing taste, as evidenced by the strong opinions on crunchy versus smooth peanut butter.
Taste buds are actually nerve cells which can differentiate between sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (meaty savoury). They don’t stay around for long as they are replaced every two weeks.
Another bummer about getting older is that our taste buds decline by about 50 per cent and that's why some foods taste stronger to children than they do to adults. On the flip side, about a quarter of the population are considered 'supertasters', people with a heightened sense of taste, particularly for bitter foods.
Our sense of taste and smell are like a lock and key working in tandem to produce taste, so if you don’t have a sense of smell, eating suddenly becomes very boring and potentially dangerous. Your ability to taste bitter substances protects you from swallowing harmful substances – many poisonous plants taste bitter.
When you chew, food releases chemicals that immediately travel up into your nose. Smell centres, called olfactory receptors, are dotted inside your nose. It’s these nerve cells that pick up the smells which are then relayed to structures within your brain. In this taste system there are also nerve endings in your eyes, nose, mouth, and throat which give rise to sensations such as the sting of ammonia, the coolness of menthol, and the irritation of chilli peppers.
The scientists are postulating that since Covid-19 has a high concentration in the nose it’s probably more likely that the virus is causing some sort of inflammation in the olfactory nerves, rather than it causing any damage to the structure of the receptors, allowing the sense of taste to return.
