A really bright light can make me blind. A really loud noise can make me deaf. Can a really strong flavour break my taste buds? Or a strong odour break my sense of smell?
I’ve experienced this with pineapple, specially a lot of freshly peeled pineapple. Some mix of Bromelain and intense sugar muted general flavors and my ability to taste anything sweet for a few hours.
A really bright light permanently damages your eyes. So a really strong acid could permanently damage your tongue.
If you eat something too hot without properly letting it cool, you’ll burn your tongue and won’t taste anything for days
oh yeah, you can totally change your sense of taste of sweet and salty
remove either of these for several weeks and then slowly bring them back and you will find you are far more sensitive to them than previously.
the addiction to high level sweet taste is why dieting is so hard for so many and why sugar substitutes are targetted as an option.
Corsodyl mouthwash, according to my dentist, is not supposed to be used every day because it can permanently alter your sense of taste. Corsodyl specifically.
Thats only 1 dentist though you’d have to ask the other 9 to know for sure.
People here keep listing diseases and chemicals when OP is asking about taste and smell.
Unless you’re drinking bleach, food will never destroy your sense of taste. It’s the same with smell. There are chemicals that are really smelly and can destroy your nose, but smell ≠ nose destruction.
So light and sound intensity are continuous scales. They also are physics but taste and smell are chemicals. Chemistry, molecule properties are a discrete scale. Now you make a distinction between food chemicals and non-food but that distinction is already based empiracally on “what tastes good and does no harm” so a poor choice for this answer.
OP is asking if the intensity of the smell or taste can inherently destroy your sense of it.
You could activate every single taste bud on the tongue or every single olfactory neuron in your nose to max feels and suffer no lasting damage. Your taste buds and smell neurons get replaced regularly. Your eyes and ear hairs don’t. You don’t need to drink bleach to know how it tastes. You can make a safe equivalent made with non-dangerous chemicals that activate all the same spots. You can’t do the same for light or sound.
I think this is what I was going for, if a smell or taste could be so overwhelmingly powerful that it could permanently destroy the ability to smell or taste again. But it seems the mechanisms the various senses use are so different that it just doesn’t work that way. I have enjoyed reading all the replies though.
One flavor is just detecting acid (sour), and so a strong enough sour flavor would chemically destroy your taste buds by basically dissolving them. I think this is fairly similar to the fact that too bright a light will damage the light detection in your eye. I’m not sure about any others tastes or smells though.
Ahh so that’s what happens with the old Warheads
I want the old ones back lol. The new ones are sour for like 2 seconds
There’s a specific chemical extract from some berry that makes EVERYTHING taste like Splenda. You can bite into a lemon and it will taste sweet. Lasts a few minutes, fun novelty
I didn’t find that everything was sweet. Most things tasted normal. Beer tasted oddly sweet, citrus was very sweet, but almost everything we ate at hotpot tasted the same. Maybe spicy things were less spicy.
It makes sour taste sweet. Not everything
