A question for commenters that has nothing to do with this post.
I have considered offering a paid option for my posts. It would provide nothing not available with the free option, just a way for people to pay me if they feel like it. I don't need the money, would probably pass it on to the Institute for Justice, the one charity I routinely support.
My reason to do it is largely my memory of my relation with SSC, which for some time was a majority of my time online. I arranged to pay money to Scott's Patreon because I was getting a large benefit from his work and felt I owed him payment. I'm not sure if enough people would feel that way about my posts to make it worth offering the option, or whether there might be negative effects.
Opinions? I'll probably put this in the comment thread of my next post as well.
> in the next few days the three other members of my family tested positive as well
If you all don’t get too sick that’s the best thing to happen. For me I had to isolate in a room for 8 days, including Christmas, because of a faint red line on a plastic device, long after I had no symptoms. 5 days before I could leave the room I had no cough, or sore throat or anything.
It is a known fact that taste buds are like muscles. You can deaden them by bombarding them with too much salt, spice, or sweet. They get weak if they don't have to work to taste something delicate because you've overloaded them with strong flavors. People like me who avoid sugar find that things that used to taste a bit sour, like an imperfect strawberry, now taste delightfully sweet. And many experiments have shown that people who go on a low-sodium diet lose their taste for high-sodium meals. Too much salt now tastes dreadful to them and to me. People who brag about being able to stand really hot chili peppers are just bragging that they've successfully deadened their ability to taste. I was doing that for a while, with excess amounts of spices, but now I'm retraining myself, so that I can fully taste the amazing flavors of plain food.
But you write an interesting column on igniting your taste buds!
I avoid ice cream for two reasons beyond the taste bud argument: The calories involved could go toward life-giving and health-giving foods, instead of foods that harm the body and lead to heart disease, cancer and dementia in old age, to name just three. Also, the cow that gave up the milk that would have gone to its calf has been known to search for that calf for miles, or mourn it with loud bellows. As Milton Friedman told the Whole Foods founder John Mackey, he could find no justification for consuming animal products after listening to Mackey's argument. See Mackey's book: "The Whole Foods Diet." Your mom said that in his 90s, he was too old to become a vegan. I hope he did it anyway.
Technically, at least part of what you're experiencing doesn't sound like a failure of taste (or smell, another component of flavor). The effect of chili peppers is due to capsaicin, which involves chemical stimulation of the pain receptors in the mouth. I hadn't heard that Covid had an effect on those, though I suppose it might have. There are other substances that affect other "tactile" receptors; for example, mints stimulate the cold receptors. That might be an interesting comparison test, if you ever eat mints.
I am pretty sure I got COVID in Mar 2020 (no test at the time) as I caught something that gave me a fever and put me down on the couch for 3 days of sleeping. No normal long term effects, but it did seem to reset my internal thermostat. Typically I was fine around 65 degrees, usually wearing short sleeve polos to work in the winter (maybe a long sleeve button down in MN winters). After getting sick though I have had to buy sweat shirts and sweaters to wear inside. Nearly four years later and it still hasn't gotten back to the previous 40 years' norm.
I have no idea why that would be the case, however. Even stranger though is that I was living in MN at the time, and you don't spend a lot of time walking around outside there in the winter without getting used to the cold. I went from "Wow, it's almost 30 outside, I don't need to button my coat" to "How is it this cold in my office? Where's my scarf?" in a week.
I'm not vaccinated and I'm well into my middle ages but caught COVID a year ago and TBH, was in my experience less bad than the flu which I was vaccinated against. Really the only noticable, and lingering, affect on me involved taste as you said. Everything that contained wheat as well as carbonated water became both sour and sweet and persisted for about eight months; not even full recovered now on it though maybe 95% there.
Sorry about the illness. The taste effect is interesting; I’d never heard of it before. (Though I’m reminded of Fred Cassidy’s experience in “Doorways in the Sand”.) I haven’t had COVID myself, although my young-adult son has—fortunately with very mild symptoms.
You’re more careful about your weight than most people are. I weigh about 170 lb (though I have to translate from kg) and I think I’m officially on the borderline between normal and overweight; I’d be happy to lose a little weight, but I don’t bother to do anything about it.
I'm a bit puzzled by the description of the taste problems. I had the classic anosmia and discovered it first through the fact that food and drink tasted terrible, i.e. oversalted or bitter, for instance. So I tested my sense of smell and it was gone. Once the anosmia receded, food and drink tasted normal again. I wonder if you had something else going on and how to explain it. - I was in Albania in September when I had COVID, one of the countries that lacked access to vaccination earlier in the pandemic. A friend of the family, my age and without any known health problems, died from COVID. An N of 1 but always on my mind when I read anti-vaxxer commentary somewhere.
I had COVID for the first time a few months ago. It was like the flu; but the cough lingered a week or two after I was feeling fine otherwise, and my sense of taste was dulled for a month or so.
You mentioned how the prescribed steroids modified your taste in such a way that ordinary flavors became delightful; cottage cheese turned into ice-cream, for example.
Although you may not have had the entrepreneurial ambition to reproduce this effect, others have!
A product known as "Miracle Berries", per my own experimentation, function in just the way your medication did: they turn bitter to sweet! Chew on one of the berries, and lemons turn to candy-- or better still, vodka to juice...
You noticed a marketable value in the field of taste enhancement. And, just as we predict markets would behave, entrepreneurs found ways to capture that value.
Last time I had covid (summer 2023), it was a "mild" case, with an intermittent fever over 36 hours that left me weak for a few days, but no other symptoms. But I was taking paxlovid at the time, and the paxlovid definitely affected my sense of taste. Not only was there a strange aftertaste in my mouth for 8(?) hours after taking some, but the taste of food was affected, too. But that went away within a day of stopping the paxlovid.
I'm glad you're keeping your weight down. I suspect I had Covid in December (I wasn't tested). I was sick in bed for 2 weeks. I had a sore throat and lost my voice. I didn't notice any difference in the taste of food. But I completely lost my appetite. At first I didn't eat any food in over 24 hours. Then for 4 days I consumed about as many total calories as I usually consume in 1 day. My calorie consumption is still lower than it was before. I lost about 10 pounds, going from about 5 pounds more than my doctor said I should weigh to about 5 pounds less. It's an effective but unpleasant diet.
I didn't have any effects on my taste either time I had COVID. My main symptoms both times were tiredness and some of the most runny noses of my life. Glad you at least escaped the runny nose!
Also, having been at one of your meetups, I need to clarify your "being a male Friedman, he likes to talk" - at least one of the female Friedmans does too!
I am in my upper 60s, and instead of vaccinating, we contacted the America's Frontline Doctors and used prophylactic ivermectin as well as various supplements to improve our immune system. When in the summer of 2022 we (three of us) did finally catch CoVid, we increased the ivermectin to a therapeutic dosing schedule. Only I experienced the lowering of the o2 stat, and so I also went on prednisone, which took care of that very well.
Our main symptoms were fever and fatigue. I coughed a lot, but I always do with every viral infection. The fatigue was extreme in my case. I was the only one who experienced any taste symptom, but I didn't have a lack of taste. To me, everything tasted horribly metallic. That lasted for weeks.
Recently our daughter was sick and tested positive for CoVid. She had fever for one day and general malaise for about five days. We tested negative, but also had some slight symptoms, but really very minor. We all stayed in the house, since everybody we knew was also sick, some with CoVid. It was easy. I believe our previous cases a year and a half ago helped prepare us to fight it off this time.
This was interesting. Thank you. How do you plan your covid vaccinations going forward? Eric Topol said they protect you for only a month. Then you have protection from severe symptoms for about six months. What then? Isolate?! Should the vaccine be taken annually?
A question for commenters that has nothing to do with this post.
I have considered offering a paid option for my posts. It would provide nothing not available with the free option, just a way for people to pay me if they feel like it. I don't need the money, would probably pass it on to the Institute for Justice, the one charity I routinely support.
My reason to do it is largely my memory of my relation with SSC, which for some time was a majority of my time online. I arranged to pay money to Scott's Patreon because I was getting a large benefit from his work and felt I owed him payment. I'm not sure if enough people would feel that way about my posts to make it worth offering the option, or whether there might be negative effects.
Opinions? I'll probably put this in the comment thread of my next post as well.
> in the next few days the three other members of my family tested positive as well
If you all don’t get too sick that’s the best thing to happen. For me I had to isolate in a room for 8 days, including Christmas, because of a faint red line on a plastic device, long after I had no symptoms. 5 days before I could leave the room I had no cough, or sore throat or anything.
Covid is less lethal than the flu now.
It is a known fact that taste buds are like muscles. You can deaden them by bombarding them with too much salt, spice, or sweet. They get weak if they don't have to work to taste something delicate because you've overloaded them with strong flavors. People like me who avoid sugar find that things that used to taste a bit sour, like an imperfect strawberry, now taste delightfully sweet. And many experiments have shown that people who go on a low-sodium diet lose their taste for high-sodium meals. Too much salt now tastes dreadful to them and to me. People who brag about being able to stand really hot chili peppers are just bragging that they've successfully deadened their ability to taste. I was doing that for a while, with excess amounts of spices, but now I'm retraining myself, so that I can fully taste the amazing flavors of plain food.
But you write an interesting column on igniting your taste buds!
I avoid ice cream for two reasons beyond the taste bud argument: The calories involved could go toward life-giving and health-giving foods, instead of foods that harm the body and lead to heart disease, cancer and dementia in old age, to name just three. Also, the cow that gave up the milk that would have gone to its calf has been known to search for that calf for miles, or mourn it with loud bellows. As Milton Friedman told the Whole Foods founder John Mackey, he could find no justification for consuming animal products after listening to Mackey's argument. See Mackey's book: "The Whole Foods Diet." Your mom said that in his 90s, he was too old to become a vegan. I hope he did it anyway.
> frequent violent sneezing
On reading that I immediately went to https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html to check my memory that sneezing was *not* on the list of symptoms. It's still not. The list is not exhaustive and there are other caveats.
Technically, at least part of what you're experiencing doesn't sound like a failure of taste (or smell, another component of flavor). The effect of chili peppers is due to capsaicin, which involves chemical stimulation of the pain receptors in the mouth. I hadn't heard that Covid had an effect on those, though I suppose it might have. There are other substances that affect other "tactile" receptors; for example, mints stimulate the cold receptors. That might be an interesting comparison test, if you ever eat mints.
I am pretty sure I got COVID in Mar 2020 (no test at the time) as I caught something that gave me a fever and put me down on the couch for 3 days of sleeping. No normal long term effects, but it did seem to reset my internal thermostat. Typically I was fine around 65 degrees, usually wearing short sleeve polos to work in the winter (maybe a long sleeve button down in MN winters). After getting sick though I have had to buy sweat shirts and sweaters to wear inside. Nearly four years later and it still hasn't gotten back to the previous 40 years' norm.
I have no idea why that would be the case, however. Even stranger though is that I was living in MN at the time, and you don't spend a lot of time walking around outside there in the winter without getting used to the cold. I went from "Wow, it's almost 30 outside, I don't need to button my coat" to "How is it this cold in my office? Where's my scarf?" in a week.
I'm not vaccinated and I'm well into my middle ages but caught COVID a year ago and TBH, was in my experience less bad than the flu which I was vaccinated against. Really the only noticable, and lingering, affect on me involved taste as you said. Everything that contained wheat as well as carbonated water became both sour and sweet and persisted for about eight months; not even full recovered now on it though maybe 95% there.
Sorry about the illness. The taste effect is interesting; I’d never heard of it before. (Though I’m reminded of Fred Cassidy’s experience in “Doorways in the Sand”.) I haven’t had COVID myself, although my young-adult son has—fortunately with very mild symptoms.
You’re more careful about your weight than most people are. I weigh about 170 lb (though I have to translate from kg) and I think I’m officially on the borderline between normal and overweight; I’d be happy to lose a little weight, but I don’t bother to do anything about it.
I'm a bit puzzled by the description of the taste problems. I had the classic anosmia and discovered it first through the fact that food and drink tasted terrible, i.e. oversalted or bitter, for instance. So I tested my sense of smell and it was gone. Once the anosmia receded, food and drink tasted normal again. I wonder if you had something else going on and how to explain it. - I was in Albania in September when I had COVID, one of the countries that lacked access to vaccination earlier in the pandemic. A friend of the family, my age and without any known health problems, died from COVID. An N of 1 but always on my mind when I read anti-vaxxer commentary somewhere.
I had COVID for the first time a few months ago. It was like the flu; but the cough lingered a week or two after I was feeling fine otherwise, and my sense of taste was dulled for a month or so.
Hello Dr. Friedman!
You mentioned how the prescribed steroids modified your taste in such a way that ordinary flavors became delightful; cottage cheese turned into ice-cream, for example.
Although you may not have had the entrepreneurial ambition to reproduce this effect, others have!
A product known as "Miracle Berries", per my own experimentation, function in just the way your medication did: they turn bitter to sweet! Chew on one of the berries, and lemons turn to candy-- or better still, vodka to juice...
You noticed a marketable value in the field of taste enhancement. And, just as we predict markets would behave, entrepreneurs found ways to capture that value.
Suffice to say, I recommend you try them out!
Last time I had covid (summer 2023), it was a "mild" case, with an intermittent fever over 36 hours that left me weak for a few days, but no other symptoms. But I was taking paxlovid at the time, and the paxlovid definitely affected my sense of taste. Not only was there a strange aftertaste in my mouth for 8(?) hours after taking some, but the taste of food was affected, too. But that went away within a day of stopping the paxlovid.
I'm glad you're keeping your weight down. I suspect I had Covid in December (I wasn't tested). I was sick in bed for 2 weeks. I had a sore throat and lost my voice. I didn't notice any difference in the taste of food. But I completely lost my appetite. At first I didn't eat any food in over 24 hours. Then for 4 days I consumed about as many total calories as I usually consume in 1 day. My calorie consumption is still lower than it was before. I lost about 10 pounds, going from about 5 pounds more than my doctor said I should weigh to about 5 pounds less. It's an effective but unpleasant diet.
Very glad that you're feeling better!
I didn't have any effects on my taste either time I had COVID. My main symptoms both times were tiredness and some of the most runny noses of my life. Glad you at least escaped the runny nose!
Also, having been at one of your meetups, I need to clarify your "being a male Friedman, he likes to talk" - at least one of the female Friedmans does too!
I am in my upper 60s, and instead of vaccinating, we contacted the America's Frontline Doctors and used prophylactic ivermectin as well as various supplements to improve our immune system. When in the summer of 2022 we (three of us) did finally catch CoVid, we increased the ivermectin to a therapeutic dosing schedule. Only I experienced the lowering of the o2 stat, and so I also went on prednisone, which took care of that very well.
Our main symptoms were fever and fatigue. I coughed a lot, but I always do with every viral infection. The fatigue was extreme in my case. I was the only one who experienced any taste symptom, but I didn't have a lack of taste. To me, everything tasted horribly metallic. That lasted for weeks.
Recently our daughter was sick and tested positive for CoVid. She had fever for one day and general malaise for about five days. We tested negative, but also had some slight symptoms, but really very minor. We all stayed in the house, since everybody we knew was also sick, some with CoVid. It was easy. I believe our previous cases a year and a half ago helped prepare us to fight it off this time.
This was interesting. Thank you. How do you plan your covid vaccinations going forward? Eric Topol said they protect you for only a month. Then you have protection from severe symptoms for about six months. What then? Isolate?! Should the vaccine be taken annually?