Losing Taste during the Common Cold

Cold & Tasteless

Eating food may just be the worlds greatest activity. Just smelling the tantalizing wafts emanating from your local bakery is enough to satisfy. So, we go on about life tasting, smelling and enjoying. But what happens when we develop the common cold?

It's interesting to note that when you have a cold your sense of taste and smell diminish. Why should this be so? Perhaps the senses of taste and smell should be heightened? I’m not asking how it is that your taste gets diminished from a cold, but rather why is it so? If we are masterly designed by a Creator then everything, literally everything, must have a practical and functional purpose and reason.

Drink To Your Health

Pondering upon this question during a cold spell, a solution to this conundrum arose. There are plenty of symptoms of a cold. Having a runny nose, sneezing, coughing , pressure in the sinuses, fever, and a sore throat. One part of having a sore throat is the feeling of dryness which will increase levels of a never-ending thirstiness. This constant thirst encourages drinking. The thirst is a great benefit, since your body needs these extra fluids. There are a variety of reasons why a body will lose fluids when not feeling well, but here are just some examples: runny noses, and sweating during a fever.

Now, an important thing to remember when sick is to drink. Luckily our thirst acts as a reminder to do this. However, along with drinking more than usual, the need to relieve oneself increases, thus defeating the purpose. So how is it possible to intake more fluids and keep them too ??!!

Salty Chicken Soup

You've probably guessed it by now. Salt. The spice you keep using to make up for your lack of taste. It's the bond made in heaven between sodium and chloride (NaCl, salt). Salt is one of the simplest compounds yet has so many uses and profound effects on our bodies. One of them being that it enables our bodies to retain more water. Here's a short excerpt from a science article on the topic that tested this theory and hypothesized that it's indeed correct that salt consumptions causes rentention of water. (For the full article, click here, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5409798/.)

"We conclude that the primary physiological response of the body to increased salt intake in our subjects was an antidromic management of osmolyte and water balance; osmolytes were excreted and water was retained ."

Personal Take

Armed with this newly founded knowledge, I sat down to eat my chicken soup, with a new appreciation and excitement! Naturally, I poured lots of salt into the soup (for extra good luck) and extra tastiness and of course the rentention of my water intake. This new life hack made me realize that the reason we lose our tase during a cold is for a practical and functional reason so we can retain our water and get better faster!

How beautiful and intricate?! Thank you Hashem!

Spice it up!

FYI, eating sharp, spicy foods is also beneficial to eat when you have a cold. The sharp food kills the bad bacteria in the throat. So, again, when you can’t taste your food well, besides for adding salt, you should add spices too!

Go ahead, add as much salt and pepper as you’d like!