Most people who lose their sense of taste will get it back, but the timeline depends on what caused the loss and what you do during recovery. After a viral infection like COVID-19, about 79% of people recover taste within 30 days, and roughly 90% recover within three months. For the remaining cases, targeted strategies like smell training, dietary changes, and addressing underlying deficiencies can speed things along.
Why You Lost Your Taste
Taste and smell are deeply linked. What most people describe as “losing taste” is actually a loss of smell, since your nose does most of the work of detecting flavor. True taste loss (the ability to detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory on your tongue) is rarer. Either way, the recovery strategies overlap significantly.
The most common causes are straightforward: colds, flu, sinus infections, allergies, and COVID-19. These infections inflame or damage the cells responsible for detecting odor molecules, which strips food of its complexity. Beyond infections, taste and smell loss can result from head injuries, nasal polyps, dental problems, hormone changes, smoking, exposure to certain chemicals, and some medications. In rarer cases, it signals a condition like diabetes, high blood pressure, or a neurological disease such as Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis.
Identifying the cause matters because treating it is the fastest path to recovery. If a sinus infection is blocking your nasal passages, clearing the infection restores your smell. If a medication is the culprit, switching to an alternative may resolve the problem within weeks.
Smell Training: The Best-Studied Recovery Method
Smell training is the closest thing to physical therapy for your nose. It works by repeatedly exposing damaged olfactory nerves to strong, distinct scents, which encourages nerve regeneration. Johns Hopkins Medicine recommends a specific protocol using four essential oils, one from each odor category: a floral scent (lavender), a fruity scent (lemon), a spicy scent (clove), and a resinous scent (eucalyptus).
The routine is simple. Twice a day, morning and evening, hold each jar of essential oil a few inches from your nose and sniff gently for 15 to 20 seconds. Focus on trying to recall what the scent should smell like as you inhale. Do this with the same four scents for the first three months, then switch to four different scents for months four through six. The minimum recommended duration is three months, though many people continue longer.
Smell training requires patience. You likely won’t notice changes day to day. Progress tends to come in sudden jumps: one morning you’ll catch a faint whiff of coffee or notice a scent you haven’t detected in weeks. These moments are signs that your olfactory nerves are regenerating.
Dietary Tricks That Help During Recovery
While your taste is diminished, adjusting how you eat can make meals more enjoyable and may actually stimulate recovery by keeping your taste receptors active. The goal is to compensate with texture, temperature, and bold flavors.
- Lean into strong flavors. Use barbecue sauce, soy sauce, mustard, vinegar, garlic, onions, sharp cheddar, and spicy seasonings. These deliver enough intensity to register even when your palate is dulled.
- Vary textures and temperatures. Combining crunchy, creamy, hot, and cold foods in the same meal gives your mouth more sensory information to work with. High-protein foods like cheese plates, chicken salad, or cold salmon often taste better at room temperature or chilled.
- Balance what tastes off. If everything tastes too sweet, add a squeeze of lemon or a pinch of salt. If food tastes overly salty, a small amount of sugar can balance it. These adjustments counteract the distortions that often accompany partial taste recovery.
- Try salty and smoked foods. Cured meats, seasoned steaks, ham, sausage, and snack chips tend to register more strongly than blander options.
These strategies come from Mayo Clinic guidance originally developed for cancer patients undergoing treatment, but they apply to anyone with diminished taste regardless of the cause.
Supplements That May Help
Zinc plays a direct role in taste bud health. In zinc-deficient animals, taste cells develop structural damage and the tiny hair-like projections on their surface break down. Cell turnover slows, meaning old taste cells aren’t replaced with fresh ones at the normal rate. If your diet is low in zinc (common in vegetarians, older adults, and people with digestive conditions), a deficiency could be contributing to your taste loss.
Good dietary sources of zinc include oysters, red meat, poultry, beans, nuts, and fortified cereals. If you suspect a deficiency, a simple blood test can confirm it. Some clinicians also recommend alpha-lipoic acid and CoQ10, two over-the-counter supplements that Cleveland Clinic notes may support taste restoration, though the evidence is less robust than for zinc.
What the Recovery Timeline Looks Like
If your taste loss followed a viral infection like COVID-19, the numbers are encouraging. A large meta-analysis published in The BMJ tracked recovery curves and found that about 79% of people recovered taste within one month, 88% within two months, and 90% within three months. By six months, 98% had recovered. At the one-year mark, roughly 7 to 9% of people still had some degree of persistent smell or taste impairment.
Recovery isn’t always a clean return to normal. Many people go through a phase called parosmia, where things smell or taste distorted rather than absent. Coffee might smell like burnt rubber, or toothpaste might taste metallic. This is actually a positive sign. It means your olfactory nerves are regenerating, even if the new connections aren’t fully calibrated yet. Parosmia typically resolves on its own over weeks to months.
For taste loss caused by medications, recovery usually begins within days to weeks of stopping or switching the drug. Taste loss from head injuries or radiation therapy tends to take longer, sometimes six months to a year, and recovery may be incomplete.
What Doesn’t Work
The “burnt orange” remedy that went viral on TikTok, where you char an orange over a flame and eat the flesh, has no scientific support. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center noted the trend but found no mechanism by which it would accelerate nerve recovery. The timing of people’s reported success likely coincides with natural recovery rather than the orange itself. There’s no harm in trying it, but don’t rely on it as a treatment plan.
Signs Your Taste Loss Needs Medical Attention
Taste loss that follows a cold or COVID and gradually improves over weeks is typical and rarely needs intervention beyond smell training and patience. But certain patterns warrant a closer look. If your taste loss appeared suddenly without any infection, persists beyond three months without improvement, affects only one side of your tongue, or is accompanied by numbness, weakness, or difficulty swallowing, these could point to a neurological issue, a nerve injury, or a growth like a nasal polyp that needs treatment.
An ENT specialist can evaluate your nasal passages for physical blockages, test your ability to detect specific tastes and smells with standardized kits, and rule out conditions like diabetes or nutritional deficiencies through bloodwork. If the loss followed a head injury, a neurological evaluation may be appropriate.