Most people who lose their sense of smell and taste after a viral infection will recover on their own, with one study finding that 96% of patients had objectively confirmed full recovery by eight months. But recovery doesn’t always happen quickly or completely, and there are proven strategies that can speed the process along. The most effective approach combines daily smell training with nutritional support and, in some cases, medical treatment.
Why Smell and Taste Disappear Together
Taste and smell are deeply intertwined. What most people call “taste” is actually flavor, which depends heavily on your ability to smell. Your tongue detects only five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Everything else you perceive while eating, from the richness of chocolate to the complexity of a curry, comes from aroma molecules reaching smell receptors high in your nasal cavity. When a virus damages those receptors or the nerves connecting them to your brain, food suddenly tastes flat and one-dimensional.
The good news is that olfactory neurons are among the few nerve cells in the body that can regenerate throughout your life. This is why most people recover naturally. The strategies below work by supporting and accelerating that regeneration process.
Olfactory Training: The Single Best Tool
Smell training is the most well-studied and consistently recommended intervention for recovering your sense of smell. The protocol is simple and you can do it at home with essential oils.
The standard approach, developed by researchers and recommended by Mass Eye and Ear, uses four distinct scents: rose, eucalyptus, lemon, and clove. You sniff each one for about 15 to 20 seconds, twice a day, every day, for three months. You don’t need the actual flowers or spices. Essential oils work because the training targets your brain’s ability to recognize and process scent signals, not just your nose’s ability to detect them.
After the first three months, you switch to a new set of four scents: menthol, thyme, tangerine, and jasmine. Train with these for another three months. Then switch again to green tea, bergamot, rosemary, and gardenia for a final three-month round. Rotating scents forces your olfactory system to rebuild a broader range of connections rather than adapting to just a few familiar smells.
While you sniff each oil, actively think about what the scent should smell like. If you’re holding rose oil, recall the experience of smelling roses. This mental visualization component matters because it engages the brain pathways involved in scent processing and helps rebuild the neural connections between nose and brain.
Supplements That Support Recovery
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Omega-3 supplements at a dose of 2 grams daily have shown meaningful results in clinical trials. In one study of patients who lost their smell after surgery, those taking omega-3s were significantly less likely to experience lasting olfactory loss, with function returning to baseline in most patients by three months. A separate trial in patients with post-viral smell loss found that combining omega-3 supplementation with olfactory training produced a significant increase in the ability to detect odors at low concentrations, compared to training alone. The proposed mechanism is twofold: omega-3s reduce inflammation in the nasal lining and support nerve regeneration.
Vitamin A Nasal Drops
Topical vitamin A applied inside the nose has been shown to boost recovery rates when combined with smell training. In a clinical trial, 37% of patients with post-infectious smell loss who used vitamin A nasal drops improved, compared to only 23% who did smell training alone. The combination produced significantly greater improvements in both the ability to detect faint odors and the ability to distinguish between different scents. The protocol used in the study was 10,000 IU applied in the nose daily (in a head-back position) for eight weeks.
Zinc
Zinc deficiency can independently impair both smell and taste. If your levels are low (below 70 micrograms per deciliter on a blood test), correcting the deficiency has been shown to improve olfactory function. This is worth checking with your doctor, particularly if your smell loss has persisted for months without improvement, since zinc deficiency is relatively common and easily treated with oral supplements.
Alpha-Lipoic Acid
Alpha-lipoic acid was once considered promising for smell recovery, with an earlier study suggesting that 600 mg daily helped 61% of patients with post-viral smell loss. However, a more rigorous double-blind trial found that alpha-lipoic acid at the same dose added no benefit over olfactory training alone in patients who lost their smell after COVID-19. It’s probably not worth the investment.
Medical Treatments
If your smell loss is connected to chronic sinus inflammation, nasal polyps, or ongoing congestion, corticosteroids are the primary medical treatment. Clinical guidelines strongly recommend both oral and nasal steroid sprays for olfactory dysfunction caused by chronic rhinosinusitis. These work by reducing the swelling that physically blocks scent molecules from reaching your smell receptors. For smell loss caused purely by nerve damage from a virus, steroids are less likely to help.
A newer option gaining clinical evidence is platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections into the olfactory cleft, the narrow space at the top of your nasal cavity where smell receptors live. A prospective study followed patients for one year after PRP treatment and found that 87.5% of those who received injections achieved a meaningful improvement in smell scores, compared to just 31% of those who didn’t. PRP patients improved their scores by an average of nearly 9 points on a standardized smell test, versus only 1.3 points in the comparison group. The benefits appeared to continue growing over time. This treatment is still relatively new and not widely available, but the long-term data is encouraging for people with persistent post-viral smell loss who haven’t responded to other approaches.
How to Make Food Enjoyable Again
While your smell recovers, you can improve the eating experience by leaning into the sensations your body still detects well. Your trigeminal nerve, the largest nerve in your face, responds to temperature, texture, and chemical irritation independently of your sense of smell. This means you can still perceive spiciness, cooling sensations, crunch, creaminess, and temperature contrasts even when you can’t smell a thing.
Practically, this means adding chili flakes or hot sauce to dishes for a spicy kick, incorporating mint or menthol for cooling contrast, and varying textures by combining crunchy and creamy elements in the same meal. Eating foods at more extreme temperatures, very warm soups or cold, crisp salads, also provides more sensory stimulation. These adjustments won’t replace flavor, but they make meals far more interesting than eating bland food at room temperature.
Your tongue’s five basic taste receptors still work normally during most smell loss, so balancing sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami elements in each dish also helps. A squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of good salt, or a splash of soy sauce can make a bigger perceptible difference than usual when smell isn’t contributing to the experience.
What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like
Recovery from post-viral smell loss is rarely instant. Most people notice the first signs of improvement within two to four months, often starting with fleeting “phantom” smells or brief flashes of a familiar scent. These inconsistent signals are actually a positive sign. They mean your olfactory neurons are regenerating and beginning to reconnect.
A common and sometimes alarming phase is parosmia, where familiar smells become distorted. Coffee might smell like burnt rubber, or onions might smell like sewage. This typically begins a few months into recovery and, while deeply unpleasant, generally indicates that healing is underway. The new nerve connections haven’t fully calibrated yet. For most people, parosmia fades as the nerves finish maturing, though this can take several additional months.
The large JAMA Network Open study found that 96% of patients had objectively recovered their smell by eight months after their initial COVID diagnosis. For the small percentage who don’t fully recover in that window, continued olfactory training, nutritional support, and treatments like PRP offer paths forward. The olfactory system retains its capacity for regeneration even years after the initial loss, so improvement remains possible well beyond the first year.