When COVID takes away your sense of taste, eating becomes a chore. Food feels pointless, appetite drops, and it’s easy to skip meals or survive on whatever requires the least effort. But your body needs fuel to fight the infection, and there are real strategies to make meals more tolerable, even enjoyable, while your taste recovers.
Why COVID Steals Your Taste
The virus doesn’t actually destroy your taste buds or the nerve cells that detect smell. Instead, it attacks the support cells surrounding those sensory neurons, called sustentacular cells. These cells maintain the tiny hair-like structures that pick up odor molecules, and they help process and clear those molecules so new ones can be detected. When the virus kills off these support cells, your smell system essentially goes offline, and since flavor is roughly 80% smell, food suddenly tastes like cardboard.
The good news: sustentacular cells regenerate faster than the sensory neurons themselves, which is why most people regain their taste within a few weeks. For the majority of COVID patients, significant improvement happens within one to three months. In the meantime, you still have other sensory channels to work with: your tongue can still detect sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Your trigeminal nerve still registers spice, temperature, and texture. The goal is to lean into those channels hard.
Focus on Texture Contrasts
When flavor disappears, mouthfeel becomes your best friend. Research on people with smell loss shows that 45% develop a heightened awareness of texture in their mouth. Your brain is already trying to compensate, so give it something to work with.
Combine crunchy and creamy in the same meal. Think tortilla chips with guacamole, toasted nuts on yogurt, crispy roasted chickpeas over hummus, or croutons in soup. A potato chip without its crunch ruins the eating experience even for people with full taste, so texture matters more than you might expect. Contrast temperatures too: a warm grain bowl with cold pickled vegetables, hot soup with a cool dollop of sour cream, or warm toast with cold avocado.
Lean Into Umami, Sour, and Spice
Your tongue still works. The five basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami) are detected by taste receptors on your tongue and don’t depend on smell. Umami, the savory, satisfying depth you get from certain foods, is especially useful because it makes food feel more complete and flavorful even without aroma.
Load up on umami-rich ingredients: parmesan cheese, soy sauce, tomatoes, mushrooms (especially shiitake), seaweed, eggs, aged cheeses, oyster sauce, balsamic vinegar, and teriyaki sauce. A bowl of plain rice tastes like nothing. That same rice with soy sauce, a fried egg, and some sesame oil becomes something your tongue can actually register and enjoy.
Sour and spicy ingredients activate the trigeminal nerve, a completely separate sensory pathway from smell. Hot sauce, chili flakes, fresh ginger, horseradish, wasabi, mustard, black pepper, and citrus juice all create sensations you can feel even with zero smell. Squeeze lemon or lime on everything. Add hot sauce liberally. Pickled foods, vinegar-based dressings, and fermented ingredients like kimchi or sauerkraut deliver both sourness and texture. Citric acid also increases saliva production, which helps transport whatever flavor molecules are available to your remaining taste receptors.
Prioritize Protein and Calories
This is the part people overlook. COVID is an infection that demands energy, and taste loss makes it dangerously easy to undereat. Your body needs more protein than usual during and after infection to prevent muscle wasting. Aim for 15 to 30 grams of protein per meal, from both animal and plant sources.
When food has no appeal, eating six smaller meals instead of three large ones is more manageable. Snack every three hours rather than waiting until you’re hungry enough for a full plate. Smoothies are particularly useful here because you can pack in protein powder, nut butter, yogurt, and fruit without needing to chew through a meal you can’t taste. Drink fluids between meals rather than during them to avoid filling up too fast.
Some practical high-protein options that also deliver texture or umami: scrambled eggs with parmesan and hot sauce, Greek yogurt with crunchy granola and honey, chicken stir-fry with soy sauce and chili flakes, lentil soup with a squeeze of lemon, or a peanut butter and banana smoothie. Avoid foods labeled “light” or “low fat” while you’re recovering. Your body needs the calories.
Practical Meal Ideas That Work
Here are combinations that hit multiple sensory channels at once:
- Ramen or pho: Hot broth delivers warmth and umami. Add sriracha for spice, lime juice for sour, and crispy fried shallots or raw bean sprouts for texture contrast.
- Tacos: Seasoned meat or beans provide umami and protein. Salsa adds acid and spice. Crunchy shell or cabbage slaw gives texture. Lime on top.
- Stir-fry over rice: Heavy on the soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and chili. Include a mix of vegetables for different textures: crunchy snap peas, soft mushrooms, crisp bell peppers.
- Toast with toppings: Crunchy toast with avocado, everything bagel seasoning, hot sauce, and a runny egg. The combination of crunch, creaminess, salt, and spice registers even without smell.
- Smoothie bowls: Blend frozen fruit with yogurt and protein powder, then top with granola, coconut flakes, and nut butter for crunch and chew.
Zinc and Taste Recovery
Zinc supplementation has real evidence behind it for taste disorders. A meta-analysis of controlled trials found that zinc improved taste acuity significantly compared to placebo, with higher doses showing stronger effects. The most effective dose range was 68 to 87 milligrams of elemental zinc daily for up to six months, though improvements were also seen at lower doses of 20 to 30 milligrams daily over three to four months.
You can also get zinc from food: oysters, beef, pumpkin seeds, lentils, and chickpeas are all rich sources. If you supplement, note that high-dose zinc can cause nausea on an empty stomach and may interfere with copper absorption over time, so pairing it with food and keeping supplementation to a defined period is sensible.
Smell Training Speeds Recovery
Since most of what you perceive as “taste” is actually smell, retraining your nose can help bring flavor back faster. The standard approach involves sniffing four distinct scents twice daily for about 15 minutes per session. Common training scents include peppermint, lavender, lemon, and something resinous like eucalyptus or pine. Essential oils work well for this.
Hold each scent close to your nose, inhale deeply, and try to remember what it used to smell like. The goal is to stimulate the regenerating support cells and strengthen the neural pathways connecting your nose to your brain. Even if you smell nothing at first, continue daily. Most protocols recommend at least 30 days, and many people begin noticing faint detection within the first few weeks.
Food Safety Without Smell
One underappreciated risk of taste and smell loss: you can’t sniff-check food anymore. You won’t catch sour milk, off meat, or spoiled leftovers the way you normally would. Rely on visual and tactile cues instead. Check for sliminess on meat or produce, unusual discoloration, mold growth (white, blue, black, or green fuzz), bubbling or foam in containers, bulging lids on jars, or any leaking from sealed packaging.
Be stricter with expiration dates than you normally would. When in doubt, throw it out. Freezer burn shows up as dry, grayish-brown spots on frozen food and is safe to eat but affects quality. Label your leftovers with dates and follow the standard rule of discarding refrigerated leftovers after three to four days, regardless of how they look.