Smoking Decreases Your Taste Buds
Every professional practicing dentistry in Gold Beach will tell you how smoking can have more undesirable side effects than what you know. Smoking causes cancer and this is the most widely promoted fact to get people to quit the habit. Smoking affects the lungs, their functionality and can lead to a plethora of cardiac problems. Even before smoking can cause cancer and other problems with the heart and the lungs, it creates a series of myriad problems for an individual.
Smoking decreases your taste buds. It affects your respiratory systems leading to infections and breathing troubles and also brings with it a horde of oral health problems. From discoloring teeth to weakening gums, smoking has more than a dozen consequences which are unavoidable unless you quit smoking.
Latest research and scientific findings establish that smoking adversely impacts the taste buds. First, the nicotine that is inhaled during smoking changes the attributes of the taste buds, which are also known as gustatory cells. These taste buds, when subjected to consistent supply of nicotine, lose their ability to identify taste of food. Thus, food that may be delicious will taste bland to smokers. You may still feel something to be salty, bitter, sour or sweet but the extent to which you would feel them would be compromised heavily. Put simply, you would find strawberries less sweet, steaks less delicious and citrus fruits less sour. Upon consistent smoking, the taste buds can be damaged to an extent when an individual wouldn’t get any distinct taste of any food.
While smoking, the tongue and the mouth, the taste buds and the nerves embedded inside are also exposed to high temperatures. There is a burning sensation which damages the cells and also affects the nerves. These nerves are responsible to send signals to the brain where different chemical reactions make one feel hungry, filled, influence the taste of a food and impacts overall appetite as well. Upon consistent smoking, the nerves get damaged and they do not send the adequate signals to the brain. The brain consequentially doesn’t recognize the food or the taste that it should. Consequentially, there is less craving for food, reduced appetite and poor blood circulation of the blood in the tongue region. Metabolic rates are hyped up which also affect the heart rate.
Along with toxic smoke, unwelcome heat and the effects of nicotine, the decrease of taste buds is another major reason to quit smoking.