- A new chewing gum trial reversed covid taste and smell loss in most participants after just 12 weeks.
- 83% of participants reported improved taste, and 67% saw better smell — promising results for a covid taste and smell study.
- The decentralised trial ran entirely from home, making it unusually accessible for a clinical research programme.
- Researcher Dr Paul Wicks regained his senses fully after six weeks — his first win was tasting a blueberry at breakfast.
- A new chewing gum trial reversed covid taste and smell loss in most participants after just 12 weeks.
- 83% of participants reported improved taste, and 67% saw better smell — promising results for a covid taste and smell study.
- The decentralised trial ran entirely from home, making it unusually accessible for a clinical research programme.
- Researcher Dr Paul Wicks regained his senses fully after six weeks — his first win was tasting a blueberry at breakfast.
When Covid Steals More Than Your Health
Covid taste and smell loss is one of the pandemic’s most persistent and under-discussed aftershocks. For millions of people globally, the acute illness cleared up weeks or months ago — but two of the most intimate human senses never returned. No coffee in the morning. No smell of rain. No taste in a birthday dinner. For a significant portion of long covid sufferers, this isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a quiet, ongoing grief.
Estimates vary, but studies suggest that somewhere between 700,000 and 1.6 million people in the UK alone may be living with lasting olfactory or gustatory dysfunction as a direct result of covid-19. Globally, the numbers run into the tens of millions. And until recently, the medical establishment had frustratingly little to offer beyond generic smell-training kits — essentially, sniffing essential oils repeatedly and hoping for the best.
That’s why a small but compelling pilot study out of the University of Nottingham is turning heads. The premise sounds almost absurdly simple: chew specially formulated flavoured gum twice a day for 12 weeks, and your brain might just rewire itself back to normal. Yet the early results are hard to dismiss.
The Covid Taste and Smell Trial That Ran From Your Kitchen Table
The study was designed by Dr Nicole Yang at the University of Nottingham, and it took a deliberately practical approach. Rather than requiring participants to attend a clinic, the trial was fully decentralised — meaning everyone chewed their gum at home and reported results remotely. That’s a meaningful design choice. People dealing with long covid symptoms often struggle with fatigue and brain fog, and reducing the burden of participation likely improved both recruitment and retention.
Sixteen participants took part in the pilot. They were given chewing gums specially engineered to hold their flavour longer than commercial products and — crucially — to shift flavour profiles as you chew. The flavour combinations targeted distinct sensory pathways: sweet, salty, sour, cooling menthol, and spicy heat. The idea, as Dr Yang framed it, is essentially neural rehabilitation. If your brain has lost the ability to process flavour and scent signals, you don’t recover it by avoiding the problem — you recover it by repeatedly, deliberately engaging those pathways until the connections rebuild.
The results from this pilot were striking for such a small cohort. 67% of participants reported measurable improvement in their sense of smell. 83% reported improvement in taste. Those aren’t numbers you’d expect from a placebo effect alone, though a larger controlled trial will need to confirm that.
One Participant’s Story: From Grey World to Smelling the Bins
Among the 16 participants was Dr Paul Wicks, a 44-year-old medical researcher from Lichfield, Staffordshire. He caught covid in August 2022, and his covid taste and smell loss simply never resolved. He could eat the hottest curries without registering heat. Nappy changes were odourless. A birthday dinner with fine wine and good food felt, as he put it, like eating cardboard in a grey world.
What makes Wicks an interesting case study isn’t just his recovery — it’s his self-awareness about what he was actually losing. As a medical professional, he understood the neuroscience. Smell is deeply entangled with memory consolidation and emotional experience. The olfactory system is the only sense that routes directly to the hippocampus and amygdala without going through the thalamus first. Lose it, and you don’t just lose pleasant aromas — you potentially lose the ability to lay down the kind of rich, sensory memories that define a life.
“Your memory formation is influenced by smells — birthday cakes, your dog, things from your childhood,
Source: https://discover.swns.com/2026/05/chewing-gum-restores-dads-taste-and-smell-years-after-covid/
