EP 228: Reader Question – Does regular drinking dull your sense of smell and taste?

This Naked Mind Podcast

Annie Grace

Mental Health, Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2019

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a few drinks, I feel like I can’t taste or smell as well. Is this all in my head? Or does drinking alcohol affect our taste and smell? Annie dives into the science behind what happens physiologically to these particular senses when we drink alcohol.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without
0:15.2	judgment, pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.
0:20.2	Today I have a question for Marney and Marney asks a question. She says, does regular drinking
0:33.2	duller sense of smell entaste? And this is actually a good question. Let me talk about smell
0:38.0	a little bit first because the research that I found in regular drinking and drinking
0:43.6	in general dulls your brain's ability to receive input from all of your senses so that includes
0:49.5	smell and taste. But we can talk very specifically about smell and taste. So normally I just want to
0:55.3	share my own personal experience before I get into the data and the research. When I didn't even
1:01.1	realize that I had to put my nose right up to a glass of wine and kind of move it around to get
1:07.4	the aroma to come out in order to really smell the wine. After I stopped drinking, I could smell wine
1:13.0	from across the room still can't. It's like, wow, that's so powerful and so potent. So I'm absolutely
1:19.1	convinced for my own experience that yes, it definitely dulled my sense of smell. But the research
1:24.3	backs us up as well. And we can talk about smell and taste. There was a study of 3519 men and women
1:31.3	they were age 40 plus and four plus drinks a day certainly impaired taste across the board.
1:38.4	And there was a few different reasons for it. There's nerve endings on your tongue that alcohol
1:42.3	over time eroded and damaged and so it actually dams their nerve endings in your mouth. And
1:50.9	so that damaged the nerve fibers impaired taste. But there's two other things that happen. So it's
1:56.6	interesting because that impairment of taste is going to impaired taste of everything all the time
2:01.6	for you know until they're healed if they even can't heal this wasn't clear from the study. But
2:07.4	then also drinking and excess increases it has a really high prevalence of vitamin B1 deficiency
2:15.5	and vitamin B1 deficiency damages central regions of the brain that are very important for
2:21.2	smell and taste. So again, that is exactly what happens is your deficiency goes down and that
	...

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