According to Elbrich Postma, loss of smell affects quality of life: “Patients notice that they enjoy eating or cooking less. In addition, they often become insecure because they cannot smell their body odors. ” It also gives an unsafe feeling, because people do not smell gas or burning smells.
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Learned eating habits
“I expected that patients with a loss of smell would eat less healthy food,” Postma admits. “This turned out not to be the case at all. Many of them have acquired eating habits from home. ” Some people stick to the food they already know because they remember it. On the other hand, people also enjoy trying out other things.
“A patient once said that he was not a fan of fish. Now he likes herring the best there is ”, says Pos tma. People with a loss of smell prefer food products with stronger flavors. In this way they compensate for their changed taste experience.
About 5 to 20 percent of the Dutch population has a reduced sense of smell or taste. This has all kinds of causes, such as old age, an accident, the flu or a cold. Postma allowed patients with no sense of smell to smell odors in the MRI scanner. The patients indicated that they did not smell anything, but the brain did respond to the smells. “This prompted me to further investigate whether awareness could be made active”, says Postma. “You let people practice smelling again. A kind of physiotherapy in front of you. ”
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She found a relationship between the area of the brain related to smell and taste and how well patients could smell. “Smell training can have a small effect on the sense of smell and lead to changes in the brain. This allows us to link changes in eating behavior and in the brain in future research ”, says Postma.
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Quote Smell determines your taste for more than 90 percent
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Cookbook author Joke Boon knows how obstructive a non-functioning sense of smell is. Loss of smell is disruptive, she knows. At the age of four, she lost her ability to smell. She has ‘learned to live’ with that handicap, told they recently opposed AD. “Smell determines your taste for more than 90 percent,” she says. Fortunately, there is still quite a bit to experience and enjoy at the table with some tricks. For example, use color, Boon advises, and different textures (soft, creamy, crunchy) to make the food interesting.
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