Olfactory Training, Better

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Our sense of smell may diminish as we age, but it can also be a sign of cognitive decline

  • Research has suggested the mechanisms of this could run both ways, meaning that preserving a sense of smell may (much like other senses) help slow cognitive decline too

  • Olfactory training is the regular go-to, and a lot more people are doing it these days (on account of COVID), but there are ways to make it better

  • Specifically, easily-arranged cross-sensory stimulus may help cut out months of “just keep trying” to smell something one cannot smell, and skip straight to the “re-adding smells to the brain’s olfactory database” bit.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Guide to Resistance Bands: Styles, Uses & Tips (13:02)

Resistance is useful! Especially for keeping our body supple and our bones strong as we get older:

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Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

😋 RECIPES WORTH SHARING

Tasty Scrambled Tofu

This one’s from Christel Oerum at Diabetes Strong. Enjoy this high-protein, low-carb, diabetes friendly staple recipe! It’s great as a lighter alternative to scrambled eggs.

_{For all those who asked for more text-based recipes… Enjoy!}

👃 MAIN FEATURE

Anosmia, by any other name…

The loss of the sense of smell (anosmia) is these days well-associated with COVID and Long-COVID, but also can simply come with age:

National Institute of Aging | How Smell & Taste Change With Age

…although it can also be something else entirely:

Read more: Harvard Health | Is it normal to lose my sense of smell as I age?

We’d love to look at and cite the paper that they cite, but they didn’t actually provide a source. We did find some others, though:

Read more: Neurons, Nose, and Neurodegenerative Diseases: Olfactory Function and Cognitive Impairment

What’s clear is the association; what’s not clear is whether one worsens the other, and what causal role each might play. However, the researchers conclude that both ways are possible, including when there is another, third, underlying potential causal factor:

Another study explored the possible mechanisms of action, and found…

• MCI = Mild Cognitive Impairment

• NfL = Neurofilament Light [Chain]

• WMH = White Matter Hyperintensity

• AD =Alzheimer’s Disease

Read more: Anosmia, mild cognitive impairment, and biomarkers of brain aging in older adults

How to act on this information

You may be wondering, “this is fascinating and maybe even a little bit frightening, but how is this Saturday’s Life Hacks?”

We wanted to set up the “why” before getting to the “how”, because with a big enough “why”, it’s much easier to find the motivation to act on the “how”.

Test yourself

Or more conveniently, you and a partner/friend/relative can test each other.

Simply do like a “blind taste testing”, but for smell. Ideally these will be a range of simple and complex odors, and commercially available smell test kits will provide these, if you don’t want to make do with random items from your kitchen.

If you’d like to use a clinical diagnostic tool, you can check out:

Clinical assessment of patients with smell and taste disorders

…and especially, this really handy diagnostic flowchart:

Algorithm of evaluation of a patient who has olfactory loss

Train yourself

“Olfactory training” has been the got-to for helping people to regain their sense of smell after losing it due to COVID.

In simple terms, this means simply trying to smell things that “should” have a distinctive odor, and gradually working up one’s repertoire of what one can smell.

You can get some great tips here:

AbScent | Useful Insights Into Smell Training

Hack your training

An extra trick was researched deeply in a recent study which found that multisensory integration helped a) initially regain the ability to smell things and b) maintain that ability later without the cross-sensory input.

What that means: you will more likely be able to smell lemon while viewing the color yellow, and most likely of all to be able to smell lemon while actually holding and looking at a slice of lemon. Having done this, you’re more likely to be able to smell (and distinguish) the odor of lemon later in a blind smell test.

Read the study: Olfactory training: effects of multisensory integration, attention towards odors and physical activity

Or if you prefer, here’s a pop-science article based on that:

One in twenty people has no sense of smell—here’s how they might get it back

Take care!

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🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals about Diet, Insulin and Successful Treatments – by Gary Taubes

We've previously reviewed this author's "The Case Against Sugar" and "Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It". There's an obvious theme, and this book caps it off nicely:

By looking at the history of diabetes treatment (types 1 and 2) in the past hundred years, and analysing the patterns over time, we can see how:

• diabetics have been misled a lot over time by healthcare providers

• we can learn from those mistakes going forwards

Happily, he does this without crystal-balling the future or expecting diet to fix, for example, a pancreas that can't produce insulin. But what he does do is focus on the "can" items rather than the "can't" items.

In the category of criticism, one of the strategies he argues for is basically the keto diet, which is indeed just fine for diabetes but often not great for the heart in the long-term (it depends on various factors, including genes). However, even if you choose not to implement that, there is plenty more to try out in this book.

Bottom line: whether you have diabetes, love someone who does, or just plain like to be on top of your glycemic health, this book is full of important insights and opportunities to improve things progressively along the way.

Click here to check out Rethinking Diabetes, and rethink diabetes!

Wishing you a wonderfully restorative weekend,

The 10almonds Team