Chewing Gum and the Quiet Comeback of Taste and Smell After Long COVID

For millions of people who caught COVID-19, the strangest legacy of the virus wasn't a lingering cough or fatigue. It was the slow, disorienting realisation that food tasted of cardboard, coffee smelled of petrol, and a partner's perfume registered as nothing at all. Years on, many are still waiting for those senses to return.

So when international outlets reported this month that a father — and, in another telling, a doctor — had recovered taste and smell lost to COVID after chewing gum, the story travelled fast. It wasn't a pharmaceutical breakthrough or a hospital trial. It was a packet from the supermarket checkout.

The case, picked up by SWNS, Yahoo and The Mountaineer, hints at something bigger than a single recovery. Across clinics in Australia, the UK and the US, Long COVID specialists are finding that some of the most useful tools for restoring damaged senses are also the simplest — and most of them you can do at home.

What COVID actually does to taste and smell

When the virus first swept through in 2020, anosmia (the total loss of smell) and ageusia (the loss of taste) became signature symptoms. Most people recovered within weeks. But a smaller cohort — by some estimates, around 5% of those infected — never fully did.

Researchers now believe SARS-CoV-2 doesn't usually damage the olfactory neurons themselves. Instead, it inflames the supporting cells around them, disrupting how scent signals are processed. As the cells repair, the wiring can come back crossed. That's why so many sufferers report not just less smell, but wrong smell — a condition called parosmia, where roast chicken smells like sewage and toothpaste tastes of rotting fruit.

For Australians who lived through 2022's Omicron wave, when daily case numbers were enormous, the long tail of this problem is still working its way through GP clinics and ENT waiting rooms.

Why chewing gum might actually help

The recent stories of a father — described in one report as a doctor — regaining his senses through chewing gum sound almost too tidy. But there is a plausible mechanism underneath the anecdote.

Taste and smell are deeply linked. What we call "flavour" is mostly aroma carried up the back of the throat to the olfactory receptors — a process called retronasal olfaction. Chewing gum forces a steady, repeated release of volatile compounds (mint, citrus, cinnamon) into that retronasal pathway. For someone whose smell circuitry is misfiring, that's the sensory equivalent of physiotherapy: repeated, low-intensity exposure that nudges the system to recalibrate.

It's the same principle that underpins smell training, a technique recommended by clinicians worldwide. Patients sniff four distinct scents — typically rose, eucalyptus, lemon and clove — twice a day for several months. Multiple studies have shown measurable improvements in olfactory function. Chewing gum may simply be smell training the body is already doing, on autopilot, every time the jaw moves.

The wider toolkit Long COVID clinics are using

Chewing gum isn't the only quiet intervention emerging from the post-COVID era. Across Australian Long COVID services — including those run through state health departments and major teaching hospitals — clinicians have been assembling a toolkit of low-cost, low-risk strategies:

None of these is a magic bullet. But, like chewing gum, they share three useful traits: they're cheap, they're safe, and they put the patient in charge of their own recovery.

Why the anecdote matters — and where to be careful

A single recovery story, even one as cheering as the one circulated this week, isn't proof of a cure. People recover from Long COVID symptoms at unpredictable rates, and it's genuinely difficult to disentangle which intervention — if any — actually flipped the switch.

It's also worth noting that not all chewing gum is benign. Sugar-free varieties contain sweeteners like sorbitol and xylitol which, in large quantities, can cause gastrointestinal distress. Xylitol is acutely toxic to dogs. And for people with jaw issues or temporomandibular joint problems, hours of daily chewing is its own headache.

The bigger reason to take the story seriously, though, isn't that gum is a cure. It's that it gives sufferers something to do. One of the most demoralising aspects of post-COVID sensory loss has been the shrug from the medical system — the sense that nothing could be offered beyond "wait and see". Anecdotes like this one push back against that resignation.

What to try if you're still affected

If you're one of the Australians still living with altered or absent taste and smell years after a COVID infection, the practical takeaways are modest but real:

1. See your GP and ask for a referral to an ENT specialist or, if available, a dedicated Long COVID clinic. Persistent anosmia warrants a proper examination to rule out other causes.
2. Start smell training properly — there are free guides from organisations like AbScent and Fifth Sense. Consistency matters more than intensity.
3. Experiment with strongly flavoured chewing gum — peppermint, cinnamon, citrus — for short, regular sessions. Treat it as supplementary, not primary, therapy.
4. Keep eating, even when food is unappealing. Texture, temperature and the trigeminal sensations (the cool of mint, the heat of chilli) survive when smell doesn't, and they keep eating from becoming purely mechanical.
5. Be patient. Olfactory recovery is measured in months, not weeks. Most people who recover do so slowly and unevenly.

A small revolution, one chew at a time

The pandemic forced medicine to confront how little it knew about smell — a sense that had been quietly neglected for decades. The result, somewhat unexpectedly, has been a renaissance in olfactory research and a flowering of cheap, patient-led therapies that don't depend on new drugs or expensive scans.

That a stick of chewing gum might play a role in someone's recovery isn't a punchline. It's a reminder that the body's sensory systems, having been damaged by something we still don't fully understand, can often be coaxed back by something we understood all along: repetition, stimulation, and time.

For the dad in the headlines — and the thousands of Australians quietly going through the same thing — that's not a small thing at all.

Related on Bleen

Sources