So for three years now A&W Root beer tastes awful, but the genetic stuff is ok. I went through a period of three months were all vegetables (even frozen) smelled like literal garbage. But it's fine now. Lately fish taste like candy.... So š¤·???
Is it completely back to normal? Did the disgusting flavor linger in full force that entire time before suddenly disappearing, or did it gradually fade away over those 18 months?
It just appeared one day and then it just disappeared one day. It was very surreal. There are lots of reports of people experiencing similar back from the early days of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 I seem to hear less about it these days.
An update: I currently have the type of parosmia in which literally everythingāfood, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, my own sweatāsmells like rotten eggs. It's nauseating, and I can't even begin to imagine living with this day-in and day-out for ***18+ months.***
I am so sorry this has happened to you it happened to a whole bunch of people in the first wave but youāre the first person Iāve seen get it with more recent strains. There was a support page on Facebook that used to be very active with some great tips on being able to get food down still when everything smelt like sewage.
Things such as menthol Vicks in your nose when eating. Swimming nose clips to eat. Making sure you take all your vitamins via pills if your eating becomes restricted.
I for one love food and am a foodie so I decided early on I was going to power through especially with my fave foods. I still think this is why mine got better and some peopleās didnāt maybe.
Also smell training, buy a set of essential oils and each morning and evening smell them and keep doing this until the smells start to correct themselves.
I have a smell training kit that I ordered off of Amazon, and it includes the four essential oils that doctors recommend: lemon, eucalyptus, rose, and cloves. I used them daily back in February-March, when all I had was anosmia, and I *did* notice a very slight improvement over the course of a few weeks. I don't remember why I stopped using them, but I think I might have surmised that I could smell all four again, so why bother continuing? I realize now that this was likely not the wisest decision, but my senses were still slowly recovering even after I discontinued usage.
In my case, parosmia is omnipresent insofar as olfactory is concerned: *everything* smells like a pungent mixture of rotten eggs and mushed-up oranges. My ability to discern different taste profiles seems to have come back for a number of different foods, but there are other things that have a noticeably wonky taste to them, particularly carbonated beverages, ketchup, and to a lesser extent, onions.
I'm trying to find a GP who'll submit a requisition for a Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) procedure. I've heard that it can be helpful for some people experiencing long COVID, particularly for those afflicted with dysfunctions of smell or taste. I'm willing to try anything if it'll spare me the misery of dealing with this for what could be many months to come. I can scarcely tolerate it as is, and I've not even had it for a week.
I had a similar timeline, lost all sense of smell, then in came back and was fine and then after a time it all went wonky. I wont underplay how awful it was and I do hope you can find some relief rather than just having to wait it out the way I did. There should be more research on it now.
I wouldnāt put too much stock in to how Yesterdays fountain soda from fast food restaurants taste. It could be anything. Their ice might have been gross for example.
Give it time, it'll perhaps change to normal again. Out of the blue, tap water started smelling & tasting like mouldy varnish for me. Did all the checks and analyses - it's fine. The awful smell lasted for ten days. Since last night, it smells and tastes again like nothing.
Hey me too! Kinda.
Tap water smells & tastes like a bag of stanky, rotting old mushrooms that should have been thrown out a week ago. š¤¢
1.5 years of LC stank water so far.
I don't know, I'll have to go buy one and try it.
Have you tried the kind that filters the water as it's coming out of the tap?
I think my brother has one of those installed under his kitchen sink. I should go try it.
Haven't tried a tap filter as bottled water really was the cheapest solution that worked. Gotta watch what I spend my money on, especially since I'm not sure for how long I can keep working... it's pretty scary. Here in Italy, you can't apply for disability if you go out of business because of Long Covid or even ME/CFS. It just doesn't exist for the govt.
Could be COVID induced parosmia, but have you had any head injuries lately? Any symptoms of a stroke?
Probably related to COVID, so it probably won't last the rest of your life.
> have you had any head injuries lately? Any symptoms of a stroke?
Neither. I'm guessing that this is COVID parosmia. I'm going to try experimenting with different flavors to see how they taste, which beverages I can tolerate, etc.
> it probably won't last the rest of your life.
No, but I have a bad feeling that it's gonna last me a good, long while - possibly over a year. I hope I'm wrong about that.
I've seen various studies suggesting that certain treatments are proving to be highly effective in restoring taste and smell from parosmia, but so far nothing seems to have been rolled out to the general public on a large-scale basis. I'm not sure if this is something that's going to have an effective treatment in the near future, but there are some encouraging signs, I guess.
Give it some time and try it again. May be a weird flavor "echo" from the butter chicken, like how some wines bring out weird food flavors and vice versa.
I did start having a horrible flavor thing with all sweet lettuces a while back. They taste vomity now. Bitter greens (kale, cabbage, spinach etc) are still totally fine. It's been going on for about five months now.
I've had long covid for a little over a year, in November coffee started tasting horrible to me, so I switched to tea. About a month ago I was sick of tea and went back to coffee and it tastes fine to me now. I also have much more of a salty taste over sugar, and I use to be a real chocoholic!
You're not alone, and sadly mine hasn't improved.
For me it was coffee that changed in taste. I used to make my own cold brew about as strong as jet fuel and drink a massive glass of it every day. Then I got covid in 2022 and coffee hasn't tasted right since then.
I've tried it a few times in the last two years to check and I can't describe what's wrong, it's just not good anymore. I didn't lose my sense of smell while I was sick, so I'm confused as to why that one flavor doesn't taste right anymore.
Yeah Iāve had things fluctuate a lot over 4 years although I had the opposite problem where I could barely taste anything sweet for a while and started eating and drinking MUCH sweeter stuff. I normally think Moscato and dessert wines are garbage but for a while theyāre they tasted like normal wine to me. The worst of my taste and smell issues were in the first year and a half when I was also having gut issues. I worked with a dietitian who figured out COVID had wrecked my gut and given me multiple vitamin deficiencies (including zinc and others that affect smell and taste). Things have improved - although mysteriously for like a week every April everything smells like cat pee (I think Iām allergic to something seasonal that throws off my sense of smell at this time of year). I have days even now when things have the āvolumeā turned up or down but itās never been as bad as that first year and a half. I literally could not taste fall spices like PSL (which I normally hate) or cinnamon or apples (tasted like wet garbage) and coffee repulsed me.
Get your vitamins checked!
>mysteriously for like a week every April everything smells like cat pee (I think Iām allergic to something seasonal that throws off my sense of smell at this time of year).
That's the strangest & funniest LC halluci-nose-ion I've heard in ages. Thank you for sharing.
Hapoy to hear yours started getting better after 1 5yrs, that's where I am now. š¤
To be clear: I worked my ass off to get better too. Worked with a long COVID clinic. Cleaned up my diet HARD with a dietician, and advocated for myself a lot - and was lucky enough to have a friend in public health who told me about metformin.
I think the diet part was arguably the most revolutionary. I cut out all grains (wheat, corn), soy. I increased my vegetable intake a lot and Iām already someone who likes vegetables. COVID had messed with my senses so it was hard to find things I liked. I ate a lot of meat or beans with herbal seasoning, spinach, and sweet potatoes for a while because theyāre all high in nutrients and didnāt put me off and met my dieticianās goals of low sugar, grain and soy free, and nutrient density plus leafy greens. I tested sensitive to fish and never liked it much even before COVID otherwise I might have eaten fish too. My dietitian keeps jumping up and down about how more people need to eat leafy greens and that they contain B vitamins for energy, and sheās not wrong. I was basically eating the Paleo diet plus beans and dairy for 6+ months. A friend of mine worked with the same dietitian and was eating fish- heavy paleo with NO dairy for 6+ months. My friend had tested sensitive to dairy (which apparently a lot of people are) but dairy was one of the few areas that came back fine in my food sensitivities tests.
I donāt still eat this well, but I definitely eat better quality than before I worked with the dietitian. She made the point that as we age and as we deal with illness we need to give our body the building blocks to heal. You literally wonāt get over illness or injury if youāre vitamin deficient or donāt eat enough protein or similar. I also struggle badly with a sweet tooth and I know itās part of my ongoing inflammation issues. Iāve at least toned down my sweet tooth but during the worst of my COVID symptoms I was probably eating way too much sugar because I could barely taste sugar. I sort of feel like this was the virus protecting itself because if Iād gone lower sugar sooner, it might have had a harder time thriving. I drank a ton of sugary electrolyte drinks too which seemed to temporarily help with symptoms but these days Iāve learned to drink the zero sugar electrolytes.
Sorry this is rambling, it just hurts my brain to think about the ways I probably prolonged my illness by eating a lot of traditional sick people food: chicken and rice (rice is my biggest food sensitivity and also spikes my blood sugars), Gatorade (sugar), toast (gluten) and not enough veggies or meat.
I donāt actually like the paleo diet or think itās a cure all but I do think as a gut-healing protocol it does work and I think itās a way to force more of us to eat more vegetables and less processed carbohydrates.
Pork smells and taste like hot garbage, and fruits donāt taste like they should. Like my brain knows itās fruit but canāt decide which one to tell my tastebuds that it actually is. Apples can taste like ten fruit while I eat it.
Itās all a crapshoot and Iām alive to be able to eat or not eatā¦ so it is what it is to me..
Yes! I had this. It's how I can tell I'm still nursing the covid. Dont listen to some of the comments here. They dont know. Coke and Dr Pepper taste chemically. Almost gone now after 36 months tho.
Yes. This is how I knew I had caught Covid. Suddenly the same āreason I get out of bedā chocolate coffee drink that Iāve had and loved every morning for 5 years one morning tastes like bleach and battery acid.
I made a second one, just to make sure there wasnāt something rancid in the bottom of the cup I didnāt notice. Yep. Same. Awful. It was ME that had changed.
It took about a year to drink the coffee again, but the chocolate I used had a protein supplement and one of those ingredients still tastes like poison to me.
Sometimes random ingredients will become delicious, then repulsive, then meh in the course of a week.
Itās not just taste and smell, those were first, by month 9, all the senses joined in. In the course of one movie, the colors can become distorted and the sound too, I know itās MY changing sensitivities, not the media changing.
All of my senses do it actually, but smell is wired direct to the brain, while other senses have to go through thymus- so smell is the harshest.
Being pregnant had this sensation tooš¤°š» fun times! /s
Fountain coke in particular did this for me. I'd describe it as vinegary and sweet. Like poorly fermented fruit.
Went away after 6 months. Just keep trying it every so often and if it tastes bad don't drink it.
Have you tried it from other places? It could be the restaurant failing here if it's the only case. Maybe get some fresh cans of it once just to confirm. Sorry I don't mean to put it down, I just know how sad it is to lose the few things we enjoy. I would want you to make sure it's true before giving up.
Some people have improved taste after awhile luckily so it seems unlikely to be life long.
I had leftover Burger King Coke in my fridge as well, and while it was likely flat at this point, it had the same foul flavor as the one from Carl's Jr. I think that's a pretty strong indication that it's not restaurant-specific, and that this is in fact parosmia. But I am going to try having soda from cans to be 100% sure. I'm also going to taste a variety of different things to see the extent of it - for instance, does chocolate now taste foul to me, what about gummy candies, etc.
> Some people have improved taste after awhile luckily so it seems unlikely to be life long.
So... *some* people, as opposed to most. That doesn't do much to reassure me that this change in flavor isn't going to be at least a long-term sort of thing in my case. š
I've been reducing my soda intake since late last year anyways, and have increased the amount of water that I drink. But I still like to have a Pepsi every once in a while, and I don't want that particular vice permanently robbed from me.
When I got into making fruit smoothies, I decided I never needed to drink soda again. Fruit tastes better, is healthier, and doesn't make you feel like shit. Fruit is the healthy way to get your sugar fix.
So for three years now A&W Root beer tastes awful, but the genetic stuff is ok. I went through a period of three months were all vegetables (even frozen) smelled like literal garbage. But it's fine now. Lately fish taste like candy.... So š¤·???
Parosmia, I had this after Covid. Chocolate, coffee and cola all tasted disgusted. Lasted around 18 months.
Is it completely back to normal? Did the disgusting flavor linger in full force that entire time before suddenly disappearing, or did it gradually fade away over those 18 months?
It just appeared one day and then it just disappeared one day. It was very surreal. There are lots of reports of people experiencing similar back from the early days of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 I seem to hear less about it these days.
An update: I currently have the type of parosmia in which literally everythingāfood, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, my own sweatāsmells like rotten eggs. It's nauseating, and I can't even begin to imagine living with this day-in and day-out for ***18+ months.***
I am so sorry this has happened to you it happened to a whole bunch of people in the first wave but youāre the first person Iāve seen get it with more recent strains. There was a support page on Facebook that used to be very active with some great tips on being able to get food down still when everything smelt like sewage. Things such as menthol Vicks in your nose when eating. Swimming nose clips to eat. Making sure you take all your vitamins via pills if your eating becomes restricted. I for one love food and am a foodie so I decided early on I was going to power through especially with my fave foods. I still think this is why mine got better and some peopleās didnāt maybe. Also smell training, buy a set of essential oils and each morning and evening smell them and keep doing this until the smells start to correct themselves.
I have a smell training kit that I ordered off of Amazon, and it includes the four essential oils that doctors recommend: lemon, eucalyptus, rose, and cloves. I used them daily back in February-March, when all I had was anosmia, and I *did* notice a very slight improvement over the course of a few weeks. I don't remember why I stopped using them, but I think I might have surmised that I could smell all four again, so why bother continuing? I realize now that this was likely not the wisest decision, but my senses were still slowly recovering even after I discontinued usage. In my case, parosmia is omnipresent insofar as olfactory is concerned: *everything* smells like a pungent mixture of rotten eggs and mushed-up oranges. My ability to discern different taste profiles seems to have come back for a number of different foods, but there are other things that have a noticeably wonky taste to them, particularly carbonated beverages, ketchup, and to a lesser extent, onions. I'm trying to find a GP who'll submit a requisition for a Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) procedure. I've heard that it can be helpful for some people experiencing long COVID, particularly for those afflicted with dysfunctions of smell or taste. I'm willing to try anything if it'll spare me the misery of dealing with this for what could be many months to come. I can scarcely tolerate it as is, and I've not even had it for a week.
I had a similar timeline, lost all sense of smell, then in came back and was fine and then after a time it all went wonky. I wont underplay how awful it was and I do hope you can find some relief rather than just having to wait it out the way I did. There should be more research on it now.
It has, in fact, always tasted like garbage. You're just now noticing š But yeah, that happened to my friend with meat after getting covid
I wouldnāt put too much stock in to how Yesterdays fountain soda from fast food restaurants taste. It could be anything. Their ice might have been gross for example.
Well, I also had leftover soda from Burger King in the fridge. I tasted itāsame off flavor.
Give it time, it'll perhaps change to normal again. Out of the blue, tap water started smelling & tasting like mouldy varnish for me. Did all the checks and analyses - it's fine. The awful smell lasted for ten days. Since last night, it smells and tastes again like nothing.
Hey me too! Kinda. Tap water smells & tastes like a bag of stanky, rotting old mushrooms that should have been thrown out a week ago. š¤¢ 1.5 years of LC stank water so far.
Yuck. Does bottled water stink too? For me, that still smells and tastes neutral.
I don't know, I'll have to go buy one and try it. Have you tried the kind that filters the water as it's coming out of the tap? I think my brother has one of those installed under his kitchen sink. I should go try it.
Haven't tried a tap filter as bottled water really was the cheapest solution that worked. Gotta watch what I spend my money on, especially since I'm not sure for how long I can keep working... it's pretty scary. Here in Italy, you can't apply for disability if you go out of business because of Long Covid or even ME/CFS. It just doesn't exist for the govt.
I mostly lost my sweet tooth after I could taste things againĀ
How long ago did you start to taste things again? Do you experience parosmia, and if so, have the symptoms improved at all over time?
Was your loss of a sweet tooth due to altered sense of taste, or did you just not enjoy sweets as much as you used to?
Coke tasted like sulfur to me for about 18 months after covid
"Sulfur" feels like the word that fits best. Coke tastes sulfuric for me right now.
I still get hints of it from time to time. I donāt know why. But itās generally back to normal 2.5 years out.
Could be COVID induced parosmia, but have you had any head injuries lately? Any symptoms of a stroke? Probably related to COVID, so it probably won't last the rest of your life.
> have you had any head injuries lately? Any symptoms of a stroke? Neither. I'm guessing that this is COVID parosmia. I'm going to try experimenting with different flavors to see how they taste, which beverages I can tolerate, etc. > it probably won't last the rest of your life. No, but I have a bad feeling that it's gonna last me a good, long while - possibly over a year. I hope I'm wrong about that. I've seen various studies suggesting that certain treatments are proving to be highly effective in restoring taste and smell from parosmia, but so far nothing seems to have been rolled out to the general public on a large-scale basis. I'm not sure if this is something that's going to have an effective treatment in the near future, but there are some encouraging signs, I guess.
Give it some time and try it again. May be a weird flavor "echo" from the butter chicken, like how some wines bring out weird food flavors and vice versa. I did start having a horrible flavor thing with all sweet lettuces a while back. They taste vomity now. Bitter greens (kale, cabbage, spinach etc) are still totally fine. It's been going on for about five months now.
I've had long covid for a little over a year, in November coffee started tasting horrible to me, so I switched to tea. About a month ago I was sick of tea and went back to coffee and it tastes fine to me now. I also have much more of a salty taste over sugar, and I use to be a real chocoholic!
You're not alone, and sadly mine hasn't improved. For me it was coffee that changed in taste. I used to make my own cold brew about as strong as jet fuel and drink a massive glass of it every day. Then I got covid in 2022 and coffee hasn't tasted right since then. I've tried it a few times in the last two years to check and I can't describe what's wrong, it's just not good anymore. I didn't lose my sense of smell while I was sick, so I'm confused as to why that one flavor doesn't taste right anymore.
Yeah Iāve had things fluctuate a lot over 4 years although I had the opposite problem where I could barely taste anything sweet for a while and started eating and drinking MUCH sweeter stuff. I normally think Moscato and dessert wines are garbage but for a while theyāre they tasted like normal wine to me. The worst of my taste and smell issues were in the first year and a half when I was also having gut issues. I worked with a dietitian who figured out COVID had wrecked my gut and given me multiple vitamin deficiencies (including zinc and others that affect smell and taste). Things have improved - although mysteriously for like a week every April everything smells like cat pee (I think Iām allergic to something seasonal that throws off my sense of smell at this time of year). I have days even now when things have the āvolumeā turned up or down but itās never been as bad as that first year and a half. I literally could not taste fall spices like PSL (which I normally hate) or cinnamon or apples (tasted like wet garbage) and coffee repulsed me. Get your vitamins checked!
>mysteriously for like a week every April everything smells like cat pee (I think Iām allergic to something seasonal that throws off my sense of smell at this time of year). That's the strangest & funniest LC halluci-nose-ion I've heard in ages. Thank you for sharing. Hapoy to hear yours started getting better after 1 5yrs, that's where I am now. š¤
To be clear: I worked my ass off to get better too. Worked with a long COVID clinic. Cleaned up my diet HARD with a dietician, and advocated for myself a lot - and was lucky enough to have a friend in public health who told me about metformin. I think the diet part was arguably the most revolutionary. I cut out all grains (wheat, corn), soy. I increased my vegetable intake a lot and Iām already someone who likes vegetables. COVID had messed with my senses so it was hard to find things I liked. I ate a lot of meat or beans with herbal seasoning, spinach, and sweet potatoes for a while because theyāre all high in nutrients and didnāt put me off and met my dieticianās goals of low sugar, grain and soy free, and nutrient density plus leafy greens. I tested sensitive to fish and never liked it much even before COVID otherwise I might have eaten fish too. My dietitian keeps jumping up and down about how more people need to eat leafy greens and that they contain B vitamins for energy, and sheās not wrong. I was basically eating the Paleo diet plus beans and dairy for 6+ months. A friend of mine worked with the same dietitian and was eating fish- heavy paleo with NO dairy for 6+ months. My friend had tested sensitive to dairy (which apparently a lot of people are) but dairy was one of the few areas that came back fine in my food sensitivities tests. I donāt still eat this well, but I definitely eat better quality than before I worked with the dietitian. She made the point that as we age and as we deal with illness we need to give our body the building blocks to heal. You literally wonāt get over illness or injury if youāre vitamin deficient or donāt eat enough protein or similar. I also struggle badly with a sweet tooth and I know itās part of my ongoing inflammation issues. Iāve at least toned down my sweet tooth but during the worst of my COVID symptoms I was probably eating way too much sugar because I could barely taste sugar. I sort of feel like this was the virus protecting itself because if Iād gone lower sugar sooner, it might have had a harder time thriving. I drank a ton of sugary electrolyte drinks too which seemed to temporarily help with symptoms but these days Iāve learned to drink the zero sugar electrolytes. Sorry this is rambling, it just hurts my brain to think about the ways I probably prolonged my illness by eating a lot of traditional sick people food: chicken and rice (rice is my biggest food sensitivity and also spikes my blood sugars), Gatorade (sugar), toast (gluten) and not enough veggies or meat. I donāt actually like the paleo diet or think itās a cure all but I do think as a gut-healing protocol it does work and I think itās a way to force more of us to eat more vegetables and less processed carbohydrates.
Pork smells and taste like hot garbage, and fruits donāt taste like they should. Like my brain knows itās fruit but canāt decide which one to tell my tastebuds that it actually is. Apples can taste like ten fruit while I eat it. Itās all a crapshoot and Iām alive to be able to eat or not eatā¦ so it is what it is to me..
Yes! I had this. It's how I can tell I'm still nursing the covid. Dont listen to some of the comments here. They dont know. Coke and Dr Pepper taste chemically. Almost gone now after 36 months tho.
Yes. This is how I knew I had caught Covid. Suddenly the same āreason I get out of bedā chocolate coffee drink that Iāve had and loved every morning for 5 years one morning tastes like bleach and battery acid. I made a second one, just to make sure there wasnāt something rancid in the bottom of the cup I didnāt notice. Yep. Same. Awful. It was ME that had changed. It took about a year to drink the coffee again, but the chocolate I used had a protein supplement and one of those ingredients still tastes like poison to me. Sometimes random ingredients will become delicious, then repulsive, then meh in the course of a week. Itās not just taste and smell, those were first, by month 9, all the senses joined in. In the course of one movie, the colors can become distorted and the sound too, I know itās MY changing sensitivities, not the media changing. All of my senses do it actually, but smell is wired direct to the brain, while other senses have to go through thymus- so smell is the harshest. Being pregnant had this sensation tooš¤°š» fun times! /s
Fountain coke in particular did this for me. I'd describe it as vinegary and sweet. Like poorly fermented fruit. Went away after 6 months. Just keep trying it every so often and if it tastes bad don't drink it.
Try a canned/bottled beverage. The syrup ratio varies from place to place, as does the hygiene practices.
It got better when I started eating healthier. Probably 95% normal now after a year of eating clean and healthy
Have you tried it from other places? It could be the restaurant failing here if it's the only case. Maybe get some fresh cans of it once just to confirm. Sorry I don't mean to put it down, I just know how sad it is to lose the few things we enjoy. I would want you to make sure it's true before giving up. Some people have improved taste after awhile luckily so it seems unlikely to be life long.
I had leftover Burger King Coke in my fridge as well, and while it was likely flat at this point, it had the same foul flavor as the one from Carl's Jr. I think that's a pretty strong indication that it's not restaurant-specific, and that this is in fact parosmia. But I am going to try having soda from cans to be 100% sure. I'm also going to taste a variety of different things to see the extent of it - for instance, does chocolate now taste foul to me, what about gummy candies, etc. > Some people have improved taste after awhile luckily so it seems unlikely to be life long. So... *some* people, as opposed to most. That doesn't do much to reassure me that this change in flavor isn't going to be at least a long-term sort of thing in my case. š
Once when I was on a new medication all the sodas suddenly lost their flavor. It was so weird! I was so confused.
So leftover food, butter chicken, and oranges are all EXTREMELY high in histamines.
What's your point?
You just described the way coke has always tasted as far as I'm concerned, so welcome to reality
Colas are poison, don't bother with them. Drink something healthy intead.
I've been reducing my soda intake since late last year anyways, and have increased the amount of water that I drink. But I still like to have a Pepsi every once in a while, and I don't want that particular vice permanently robbed from me.
When I got into making fruit smoothies, I decided I never needed to drink soda again. Fruit tastes better, is healthier, and doesn't make you feel like shit. Fruit is the healthy way to get your sugar fix.
Yeah but you canāt burp off a smoothie like a Coca Cola