Taste · Your Results
Your taste, explained by your score.
Find your band below. Your app result points you straight to it. With taste, the first useful question is whether it is really taste, or actually smell.
Taste, monitored over time.
Taste is one of your five senses. Complete all five within 14 days to generate your full Sensory Score.
First, the most important idea
Much of what we call taste is actually smell. Your tongue handles sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, but the full flavor of food comes mostly from your sense of smell. So a low taste score is often a smell question first, and checking your smell is the most useful next step. As with every sense, the direction matters more than any single score: a reading drifting down from your own baseline is the signal to act.
Superior or Strong
Your taste is strong. Keep it that way.
Good news. Your sense of taste is working well. The job now is to protect it and keep a yearly record, so you would notice early if it ever started to shift.
- Look after your mouth. Brush, clean your tongue, and keep up with dental care. Oral health is one of the most common reasons taste fades.
- Stay hydrated and do not smoke. Saliva carries taste, and smoking dulls it.
- Keep a record. Re-measure once a year, so a strong score becomes a strong trend.
When to re-measure
Once a year. That yearly point is what turns a score into a trend.
Average or Typical
Your taste is in the typical range.
Nothing here calls for action today. Lock this in as your baseline and re-measure each year. The first sign worth catching is a drop from your own number.
- Set this as your baseline. Re-measure annually, sooner if food starts tasting flat or different.
- Keep up oral and dental health. Clean your tongue, and treat dry mouth if you have it, since saliva carries taste.
- Remember the smell link. If flavor ever fades, check your smell too, since the two travel together.
When to re-measure
Once a year, or sooner if something tastes different.
Low or declining
Your taste score is low. Here's what to do.
A low score means your sense of taste is reduced right now. That is common, it usually traces to a cause you can do something about, and it is not a diagnosis. The most useful first move is also the most surprising one.
Check your smell first
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory come from your tongue, but the full flavor of food is mostly your sense of smell. When people say food tastes bland, the problem is often smell, not taste. So before anything else, look at your smell result. If it is also low, that is likely the bigger driver, and smell is the more improvable of the two.
Start with your smell
If your smell is also low, the smell plan, including training, is where the real gains are. Taste tends to follow.
Check the causes you can fix
True taste loss usually has a reason, and several of them are straightforward to address:
- A new medication. Many common drugs change taste. If one started around when your taste did, tell whoever prescribed it. Do not stop it on your own.
- Dry mouth. Saliva is what lets you taste at all. Hydrate, and treat a persistent dry mouth.
- Oral and dental health. Brush, clean your tongue, and see a dentist. Gum disease and mouth infections are a frequent, fixable cause.
- Smoking. It dulls taste, and quitting helps.
- A possible deficiency. Low zinc or B12 can affect taste. Ask your clinician to check your levels rather than supplementing on your own, since too much zinc causes its own problems.
Give it time, then re-measure
Taste often recovers once the cause is handled, and sometimes faster than smell. Change one thing, give it time, then check against your baseline.
When to re-measure
Give it a few weeks after addressing a cause, then re-measure your taste. If smell is the real driver and you are training, follow the three-month smell window instead. We will remind you in the app.
Know when to see a clinician
Reach out if any of these are true:
- Your taste dropped suddenly or disappeared completely
- You notice it on one side only
- A persistent bad, metallic, or phantom taste that will not settle
- It comes with numbness, weakness, or changes in smell, vision, or memory
- You have addressed the causes above and a full cycle has passed with no change
If any of these apply, contact your primary care doctor, and your dentist if the cause may be in your mouth.
One practical note. When taste is reduced, it is easy to over-salt or over-sweeten food without noticing, and harder to tell when food has spoiled. Season by the recipe rather than by taste, and go by dates on food.
