Posted by Larry Hoover on May 28, 2006, at 8:50:10
In reply to Re: Today's score (food trigger) » Phillipa, posted by llrrrpp on May 25, 2006, at 21:40:51
> I lose the connection between pleasure and taste. And sometimes a little sense of taste (although it's all aromas anyways..)
Taste is distinct from aroma. Sweet sour salt bitter and umami? I think that's the taste part. The rest is aroma.
>
> My mom, however, lost her sense of smell within 2 weeks of starting AD last fall.It may be too little, too late, but zinc metabolism is involved in some cases of loss of taste or smell. I have a hereditary zinc problem, so I'm aware of some of the issues. Anyway, here's a "can't hurt, might help" suggestion.
Assuming a person is taking a typical multivitamin/multimineral already, a person with loss of taste or smell should take 50 mg/day chelated zinc, and 3,000 mg/day vitamin C, in divided doses. The zinc is best taken 20 minutes before a large meal. The vitamin C with your three meals.
There are very special proteins that stud the very tips of your chemosensory arrays in your nasal sinuses. There's a special little folded protein called a zinc finger that is essential to their function. No zinc, no smell. That's what *can* happen. If your body needs zinc elsewhere, it can prioritize things. Smell is not the last thing to go. Your body needs zinc in other places that are more important than smell.
The problem is that your nervous system will adapt to the loss of signal, over time. It will down-regulate central sensory circuits from any sense that is not supplying data to the network. It might be too late for your older relatives. But it can't hurt to try.
If your problem is zinc, this would work for you. It takes about two weeks to turnover the sensory field, and it takes a little time to get the zinc levels up, so you could expect gradually increasing sense of smell over about a month. *If* your problem is zinc.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:648572
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060527/msgs/649626.html