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?
If you eat something too hot without properly letting it cool, you’ll burn your tongue and won’t taste anything for days
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.
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.
Yes, Various injuries and diseases can do that.
And taste too.
Or a strong odour break my sense of smell?
I’ve accidentally knocked out my sense of smell with a bathroom cleaner before. Not enough ventilation while I was scrubbing things, I guess. Came back later in the day, thankfully, but was quite disturbing. I don’t recommend it.
Can a really strong flavour break my taste buds?
Not sure exactly about that, but there are compounds that will mess with your sense of taste significantly. e.g. there’s a fruit that makes sour things taste sweet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synsepalum_dulcificum
Strong mint can absolutely knock out other flavors for a time.
I also knew a guy who had cancer (thyroid? Don’t quote me on that,) that the treatment knocked out his sense of taste. Everything except flour.
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.
OP is asking if the intensity of the smell or taste can inherently destroy your sense of it.
You could activate every single taste bud on the tongue or every single olfactory neuron in your nose to max feels and suffer no lasting damage. Your taste buds and smell neurons get replaced regularly. Your eyes and ear hairs don’t. You don’t need to drink bleach to know how it tastes. You can make a safe equivalent made with non-dangerous chemicals that activate all the same spots. You can’t do the same for light or sound.
I think this is what I was going for, if a smell or taste could be so overwhelmingly powerful that it could permanently destroy the ability to smell or taste again. But it seems the mechanisms the various senses use are so different that it just doesn’t work that way. I have enjoyed reading all the replies though.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Chewing a pink peppercorn can KO your ability to taste for like 15 minutes or so, in my experience. Working with ammonia for a little while will also nuke your ability to smell for a while, which is a big part of taste.
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
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.
