Is There Anything Else You Can Do to Get Your Sense of Taste Back? Simple things like eating an orange are harmless, but if a strategy sounds like it could have any potential dangers, speak with your doctor before trying it. However, he cautioned that you should exercise judgment with any potential remedies you find on the internet. Of course, there's no harm in trying it - at least oranges, even charred ones, are nutritious, Dr. 'That's why it's difficult to believe that eating a burnt orange with brown sugar may work.' 'The mechanism of loss of smell and taste in COVID-19 is thought to be due to its effect on neurons, unlike the common cold,' explained Sunitha Posina, MD, a board-certified internist in New York City who works on the frontlines with COVID-19 patients.

Kumar added that there's no evidence that eating a charred orange is effective, and it's possible that people who have tried this remedy believe it worked because they coincidentally were recovering at the time they tried it. 'Everything that's reported on the internet is anecdotal.'ĭr. 'There are no known systematically studied methods that have restored smell and taste in recovering patients,' explained Amit Kumar, PhD, a researcher and scientist and CEO of Anixa Biosciences, a company that's working to develop therapies and vaccines focused on critical unmet needs in infectious disease. In practice, patients will expose themselves to different scents – usually rose, lemon, cloves, and eucalyptus – several times a day for weeks or months, working to associate whatever smell they perceive with that object.Will Eating a Burnt Orange Help Recover Your Sense of Taste? Smell training, however, is much more involved than the one-off burnt orange trick, explains Javer. Focusing on familiar scents is also similar to a therapy called s mell training, where practitioners will use several different strong scents to help re-develop the senses. The strong smell that comes from attempting to crisp an orange directly on the stove may also be strong enough for those with weakened or recovering senses to pick up, says Dalton. The premise isn’t completely without merit. One Facebook post, for example, tells skeptics to “keep trying until it works.”

It is likely that as they slowly recover their ability to taste, this recipe appears to work, Pamela Dalton, a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, told Today. The loss of taste and smell being a temporary side effect for the majority may give some insight into why this “hack” gained traction. More than 82 per cent of patients regain their sense of taste within a month, a study published in the American Journal of Otolaryngology found.

Approximately 38.2 of patients who have had COVID-19 experience some form of “ gustatory dysfunction,” according to a meta-review of studies from 13 countries worldwide encompassing 8438 patients.

How to help get your taste buds back