Your sense of taste is one of the most important tools you use in the kitchen, but it isn't always as dependable as your favorite wooden spoon. In fact, there are a number of ways to damage your sense of taste, either temporarily or permanently — and this list includes quite a few everyday habits.
Bon Appetit spoke with two doctors specializing in taste and smell to generate a list of the habits or conditions that can negatively affect our sense of taste. Yes, smoking is one of them — it can paralyze nasal cilia, which diminishes our sense of smell and consequently, our sense of taste — but so is drinking sugary drinks, which can dull our sensitivity to sweetness.
Other surprising items on the list include drinking alcohol (it numbs your mouth's tactile receptors), taking zinc lozenges (they are reported to make people insensitive to taste for long periods of time), and ageing (not a habit, but as we grow older, cells in the nasal cavity lose the ability to regenerate, which affects our sense of taste).
Take a look at the article to read the full list and explanations.
• Check it out: Toques and Smokes: Habits That Cause You to Lose Your Sense of Taste at Bon Appetit
Do you have any habits that seem to affect your sense of taste?
Related: The Charlie Brown Phase: Why Spicy Foods Taste Better in Outer Space
(Image: ktynzq/Shutterstock)
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
Perfect Summer Cocktail Recipe: Honey Bourbon Lemonade
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Elizabeth Apron fro...
100 DIY Ideas for the 3-Day Weekend
Danielle's Charming, Classic Walk-Up
My husband loves to bake cookies and of course eats some of the dough while in the process. He insists he can't taste the actual cookie right after they come out of the oven because the batter taste is on his tongue, so happily, I get to be the taster.
Okay, note to self: Don't use cocaine! It affects my sense of taste!
I've got a severe allergy to cats, such that even when I'm not around cats, I've got a perpetually semi-blocked nose. I've been to an ENT specialist, who's told me there's nothing wrong with my olfactory sense, but that my nostrils are inflamed so that the sweet-smelling molecules can't reach it. (For the curious, the olfactory sense is behind your nose, right between your eyes.)
Yes, this means that I've got a sub-par sense of both taste and smell and pretty much always have. It means it's been taking me *a lot* longer than some people to teach myself how to cook, because I have to memorize a lot of stuff by rote. I honestly can't taste differences other people can.
Huh... I didn't know salt can dilute bitter tastes! I'm not a big fan of bitterness (I much prefer... well, salty things, and umami, and sweet), so I might try salting bitter greens. Could be a good experiment!
Gee, I sure hope old age isn't a "habit".
note to self: don't get old.
Also, a lot of these seem a little unsurprising. Try eating a bunch of junkfood and soda for a week, then try to eat fresh, healthy food. This is, at least in my experience/opinion, a big reason why a lot of people have so much trouble losing weight: it isn't that you don't like the taste of healthy foods, but that you just really can't taste them at all when you've trained your mouth to handle only the most intense flavors, and so much (cheap, fast, bad) food out there is overflavored. This is why I understand the whole fasting thing: I don't really see it as a mind-altering experience, but once you're done with a fast, food that was bland before is suddenly so much more flavorful, and it is suddenly easier to stick to "bland" food now that you can taste it. At the end of highschool I came to that realization, ate rice cakes/saltines and water and little else for a week or two, and ended up losing 20lbs in the longer run just from essentially recalibrating my sense of taste. I still do a short semi-fast every now and then when I notice that I'm craving more and more junkfood so that my tastebuds don't get stuck in an arms race with salt fat and sugar.