During my bout throat infection recently, everything that I ate tasted bland. The coffee and green tea that I drank daily tasted extra bitter. The milk tasted funny and I thought that it had gone bad. Foods that are sour tasted even more sour to me. When we had lunch at a restaurant that serves healthy food, I commented that most of the dishes were tasteless but I was the only one who found the food bland. My nasal wasn’t congested but I had massive amounts of mucous in my throat, causing me to lose my voice and eventually developed a bad cough. I wondered if the change in my palate or tongue had anything to do with my bad throat.  Well, it does!

What causes impaired taste?
Having a cold, sinus infection, strep throat, or upper respiratory infection can result in a decrease in taste sensation. Water might even taste off to you when you’re feeling under the weather. Post-nasal drip is what happens when mucus drips from the back of your nose to your throat, and it’s a common cold and flu symptom. The mucus can mix with your saliva, which can affect your sense of taste and makes everything taste weird for you. Once your cold goes away, you’ll likely feel better.

Yet another reason that your sense of taste may be messed up is because your sense of smell is affected when you’re not feeling well. Your senses of smell and taste work hand-in-hand, so if you aren’t able to smell anything, your taste buds will be affected as well.

When you chew food, aromas are released that activate your sense of smell by way of a special channel that connects the roof of the throat to the nose. If this channel is blocked, such as when your nose is stuffed up by a cold or flu or you have an inflamed throat, odors can’t reach sensory cells in the nose that are stimulated by smells. As a result, you lose much of our enjoyment of flavor. Without smell, foods tend to taste bland and have little or no flavor.

Illnesses and infections
When you have a cold, sinus infection, or other illness, your body naturally releases a regulatory protein called Tumor Necrosis Factor or TNF, which is released by the immune system to help fight off inflammation due to an illness or disease. The protein is also responsible for increasing sensitivity to taste, making food extra bitter and far less appetizing, according to researchers. This protein is highly produced when people are sick and is involved in creating greater sensitivity to food taste. What makes the food taste bitter are certain chemicals in the food.

Even if water tastes gross to you when you’re sick, you should still drink as much water as you can until you’re better, and even when you’re better, you should continue to drink 8-10 glasses of 8 ounces water everyday.