Chemo Taste Changes: How to Eat Well & Fight Weight Loss

The Chemo Taste Struggle Is Real!

What happens when food stops tasting like food? For many people receiving chemotherapy, one of the most frustrating side effects is that everything tastes wrong. Meals that once brought joy can suddenly taste metallic, bitter, or bland.

In this episode, we explore why chemotherapy changes taste and smell, how it impacts nutrition and emotional well-being, and what you can do to find flavor again. From surprising foods that still taste good to creative meal ideas that help you keep eating, you’ll learn practical ways to nourish your body and reclaim one of life’s simplest pleasures.

In this Episode:

• 01:50 - A Man on the Inside, New Season
• 04:23 - Advice from a 90-year Old on Longevity
• 08:18 - Changes in Smell and Taste Perception with Chemotherapy
• 11:01 - Strategies to find Foods that Taste Good with Taste Changes
• 22:41 - Now I Have to Learn to Fly Solo - Greg, Who Lost His Wife to Alzheimer's
• 25:48 - Outro

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:50 A Man on the Inside, New Season
• 4:23 Advice from a 90-year Old on Longevity
• 8:18 Changes in Smell and Taste Perception with Chemotherapy
• 11:01 Strategies to find Foods that Taste Good with Taste Changes
• 22:41 Now I Have to Learn to Fly Solo – Greg, Who Lost His Wife to Alzheimer’s
• 25:48 Outro

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies. This week's discussion is about changes in how food tastes while taking chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Ever had a bad cold and nothing tastes good? Now imagine that happening for weeks during cancer treatment.

Today we're talking about why chemotherapy or radiation therapy changes the way food tastes and how small adjustments can help you find some joy in eating again. So relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death and bereavement. Because even though everyone dies, no one has to face it unprepared.

I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every person viewpoint to our podcast. We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions in a crisis.

Also, please remember, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. In the first half, Charlie starts a series about advice from 90 year olds on longevity and living well.

In the second half, we continue our series about everything you always wanted to know about cancer but didn't have anyone to ask, with a discussion about changes in taste during chemotherapy. In our third half, Charlie has a journal entry from Greg, an active poster in the Dementia Family Facebook group. Hi, Charles.

Hello, Marianne. How are you? Fine, fine. Hey, do you remember last year, that episode that was on TV with Ted Danson? Oh, yeah, yeah.

What was it called? It just flew out of my mind. You brought it up. This is not a good thing.

Oh, A Man on the Inside. Oh, right. Yeah, and it was based on a documentary in Chile where in a nursing home, objects, items were disappearing.

Well, anyway, so this became, I forget who puts it on, but a series where Ted Danson played the same thing and it just went through. He was a widower. He missed his wife very much.

He was grieving. He took on this job. It was the same situation.

Jewelry, expensive items were being stolen from this nursing home. And the underlying theme of everything was that different people were going through different griefs in their own way. So it's back now.

It'll start up again, I think it's like in two or three weeks. So I was able to see a couple of the first two episodes. It's different this time.

This time, he's strictly a private investigator and everything about the grief is not there. This is now simply a mystery. He's a private investigator.

So yeah, like I said, it starts up in about two or three weeks and they are already working on season three. Really? You're optimistic. Yeah.

So there you are. That's my news for the day. Well, that is truly exciting.

Yes. I laughed. I cried.

Very good. Thank you for that report. You're welcome.

Okay. So listen, in our first half, Susan Fitzgerald profiled people in their 90s and published their tips for longevity and living well. I'm still 20 years away from my 90s, but why wait till the last minute to make improvements to my health? Well, wait a minute, it's a rhetorical question.

Never mind. We start this week with Eunice, age 99, whose defining characteristics is being a rule breaker. Eunice has never been one for routine and regulations.

She prefers variety and spontaneity, saying with only a bit of exaggeration, I had something like 40 different jobs. Every time someone said, can you do this? I said, yeah. She has relished doing the opposite of what she was told to do.

If it said, do not enter here, I immediately opened the door, she says. One time she even went behind a closed door at an art museum. I had one of the most fascinating experiences, she says.

As she approaches 100, Eunice Black doesn't tend to overanalyze how she got here. It's crazy because I did everything people said you shouldn't do. I dyed my hair for 50 years.

They said, you have to drink so many glasses of water a day. I don't. They said, you can't eat red meat.

I do. If I went to a party and they offered me champagne, I took the champagne. When it came to raising her children, Eunice followed no textbook.

I have three extraordinary children, and I have nothing to do with them being extraordinary, she says with a laugh. A widow since 2010, Eunice has her own apartment in a senior community in East Windsor, New Jersey. She stopped driving a few years ago and has some trouble walking, so she has a scooter and three different walkers, which she uses depending on the circumstances.

Her days feel long, she admits. She keeps busy with on-site activities, three bridge games a week, and reading. She typically has three or four books going at once and often finds that a theme in one book connects with something in another.

The only genre she avoids is horror. Eunice grew up in New York City, lived in every borough but Staten Island, and worked in the aircraft industry during World War II. Later, when she returned to the workforce after raising her children, she had a job at a lawn sprinkler manufacturer that she claims was the most fun anyone can have at work.

As a systems analyst, I would go into a department to figure out how to make the employees' lives easier while at the same time increasing their productivity, she explains. Now she worries that she's not contributing to the world, although she takes pride in the accomplishments of her children, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. When pressed for a life lesson, Eunice says, I think everyone has a lifestyle that fits them, and if you find the lifestyle that suits you, you will be happier than if you try to allow what others try to tell you to do.

Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask for your financial support. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone.

You can donate at www.everyonedies.org or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Marianne? Thanks, Charlie. A frequent cause of distress for people living with cancer and taking chemotherapy or radiation treatment are changes in how food tastes.

Have you ever had a cold and you're stuffy and you can't smell and you can't taste? You feel like eating? I don't. Probably one of the few times I don't want to eat. Smell gives us a signal about how good something might taste, and we all probably start to salivate when we pass the Cinnabons in the mall, but no matter how good something smells, we took a bite of it and it tasted like metal.

We wouldn't want to eat it. Changes in taste perception is defined as a decreased or changed perception of the sense of taste, an unpleasant change of taste sensation, or a distortion of the taste feeling or sensation. It can be showed as a metallic, bitter, unpleasant, or salty taste.

Sensory perception of both taste and smell together provide the sensory information needed to perceive taste or flavor, and cancer and its treatment are known to affect both. Changes in taste are very common and can be noticed in 45 to 84 percent of people who are undergoing chemotherapy. Smell changes occur in 5 to 60 percent of people.

Weight loss and poor nutrition are common consequences of taste changes, a side effect experienced by people living with cancer who have chemotherapy or radiation treatment. Malnutrition is a significant challenge among people living with cancer, with 30 to 85 percent being reported as malnourished. This result in significantly reducing their quality of life can also affect treatment outcomes and contribute to death in extreme situations.

Taste and smell receptors multiply rapidly, every 10 to 30 days respectively, so they might also be sensitive to the cell damage from chemotherapy. Chemotherapy itself can immediately affect taste. Some people will report an unpleasant taste during infusion.

Although such taste changes may keep going for a couple of hours to a few days, there have been reports of these changes going on for quite a long time, or even months. For instance, 77 percent of patients treated with cisplatin had a metallic taste, which went on for a couple of hours to three weeks. The reasons for taste issues are a blend of different reasons.

These include the disappearance of taste buds, dysfunction in the salivary glands promoting the failure of taste elements to enter the taste pores, direct harm to the taste receptors or the nervous system. It's important that going through cancer treatments that we maintain our muscle mass and meet all dietary requirements, but this is hard to do if food doesn't taste good. One flavor that seems to taste good is milk-based strawberry foods.

Now even if you've never liked this flavor before, try it, because with the changes of taste from treatment, you might really like it now. Do you usually like sweet or sour flavors? If you normally prefer sour tastes, try orange juice based foods. Like you can get a vanilla flavored carnation instant breakfast, and instead of mixing it with milk, mix it in a blender with one cup of orange juice and a few ice cubes.

It tastes like a creamsicle. Wendy's chili is known to taste good to people with chemotherapy taste-related changes. Don't ask me why, I just know it's true.

While undergoing treatment, your body requires 25 to 30 calories per kilogram per day to meet your nutritional requirements. So if your ideal body weight is 140 pounds, you would divide 140 by 2.2, which is how you convert pounds to kilograms. This equals 64 kilograms.

So if you take 64 and multiply it by 25, which is the low end of the number of calories per kilogram per day that you need, that comes out to 1600. And if you multiply 64 by 30, which is the higher end of calories per day that you need, that's 1920. So the number of calories a 140 pound person would need is to stay between 1600 and 1920 calories.

And that might sound like a lot if food doesn't taste good. So given the challenges of eating when you're taking chemo and radiation, what are the strategies to make food taste better? So if you're having issues with a metallic taste, you want to use plastic utensils because you won't get the metal flavor. Avoid canned food.

Add citrus or vinegar, as long as you don't have mouth sores, and that can help neutralize that metallic taste. If you're experiencing problems with a dry mouth, rinse with salt baking soda solutions or equal parts salt and baking soda and rinse that around in your mouth. Don't swallow it.

Just rinse it and hold it in your mouth and then spit it out. You can suck on ice chips or use saliva substitutes. So many people don't know that these exist, but if you go to your local CVS or Walgreens or wherever you buy your drugs and things, ask the pharmacist where the saliva substitutes are and you'll be surprised to see that there are a few different ones to choose from.

And there's sprays or there's liquids, but it just does what your body normally would do and keeps your mouth nice and moist. If you're experiencing a bitter taste, try eating cold foods. Add mild sweetness or acid to balance the taste.

If you have a loss of appetite, focus on texture and temperature. Have smoothies, soups, cold plates, and see what tastes best for you. Now a zinc deficiency can be caused from the chemotherapy, and so you can ask your oncologist if you're having problems with taste to check your zinc level because they can always replace that for you.

And you want to discuss supplements with your oncology team before you use any of them. So specifically, what can you do? Eat what tastes good to you. Now your preferences may change daily, so try things you normally don't like.

When I was working with patients and they would say, oh but I don't like, you know, fill in the blank, I'd say just try it now because your taste buds have changed and you might find that you do like it. You want to experiment with temperature and texture. Have things that are cold, smooth, or crunchy foods.

You want to use plastic or bamboo utensils to reduce the metallic taste, and you know we're all concerned about the environment. You can wash those and reuse them, you don't have to throw them away. Rinse your mouth before eating with a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and an eighth of a teaspoon of salt in one cup of warm water.

Like I said, don't drink this, just swish it around, hold it in your mouth, and then spit it out. If food tastes bitter or metallic, choose mild proteins, things like eggs, beans, tofu, dairy, yogurt, cottage cheese, fish, or chicken. Try acidic or tart foods, as long as you don't have mouth sores.

Things that are lemon, lime, vinegar-based dressing, pickles might taste good. Eat foods cold or at room temperature. Avoid metal utensils, canned foods, and iron cookware, and limit coffee or chocolate if they both taste harsh.

If your food tastes bland or if you've lost taste, try enhancing the flavor with herbs like basil, cilantro, parsley, and mild spices like paprika and curry. Try umami-rich foods like tomato paste, soy sauce, mushrooms, parmesan cheese. Add small amounts of healthy fats like avocado oil, my god, add small amounts of healthy foods like olive oil or avocado for flavor and calories.

If food tastes too sweet, add a pinch of salt, lemon, or vinegar to balance the sweetness. Avoid overly sugary foods or drinks if they're unpleasant. If you have a dry mouth, choose moist foods, soups, stews, smoothies, sauces, yogurt, applesauce.

Sip water or herbal tea between bites. Suck on sugar-free mints or citrus drops to stimulate saliva. Avoid alcohol and caffeine which dry the mouth.

So what are some easy to tolerate meal ideas? So for example, you could have for breakfast oatmeal with berries, yogurt with fruit, eggs with herbs, lunch chicken or tuna salad with lemon dressing, hummus wrap with cucumbers, dinner stir-fried tofu or chicken with ginger and vegetables, pasta with olive oil and herbs, and for snacks, smoothies, cottage cheese, nut butters, avocado toast, fruit slices. So some helpful tips to help you eat more. Eat smaller frequent meals every two to three hours.

Don't put a huge amount of food on your plate and expect that your stomach's going to say, oh I'm happy with this choice. Those smaller meals every couple of hours can help you get calories in. Try new recipes.

Your taste preferences are going to shift, so try something new. Avoid strong food orders if they cause nausea. A way to deal with that is to serve foods cold and maintain your oral hygiene.

You want to brush your teeth gently. Get a soft toothbrush because with the chemo and radiation therapy, your blood counts can be lower and your gums can bleed. And rinse your mouth after meals.

So those are some things that can help you maintain your calories and maintain your joy of eating. Charlie, do you have any questions or thoughts? Well, the first thought that comes to mind when you speak about flavors and everything, so I was at my favorite bar, and the bartender introduced me to a new type of rye, and it was just a very, very flavorful rye. And I'm not trying to just be stupid and crack jokes, but it was just very nice when you're talking about just the full flavor.

And I'm not going through any sort of therapy or anything like that, but I'm just grateful that still at my age, yeah, I know what it is to miss a full flavor of food. My mom and I had the same taste buds, very high-level sensitive taste buds, and I'm very grateful for that. So I know it's a real pain in the butt when you don't have that, you don't have your taste buds.

So thanks for saying all this. And I have friends who now are losing their sense of taste and things are not, the thing people will say, wow, this used to taste a lot better back in the old days, back when we were in college. And sometimes I say, no, Skippy, we're all getting older, and it's just our taste buds change.

And that's with people who are healthy. So with people who are going through chemo or any of that, I can't imagine. So, yeah, thanks for all those choices and all the different ways people can enjoy tastes.

So I have a question. You have a friend named Skippy? Well, it'll depend how many martinis have been knocked back. Eventually, everyone becomes Skippy.

Ah, I see. I prefer the creamy instead of the chunky. So thank you very much.

I'm here all week, folks. Try the rye. Four hours, third half.

So in case somebody wants to try the rye, what brand was it? Oh, I can mention it. Rittenhouse. Okay.

Rittenhouse Rye. And they don't sponsor us, but they should. You know, I agree.

I wonder if I can reach out to them. All right, I will look into that. Yes, I do recommend it.

It just has a nice full body to it. And God knows you like a full body. Four hours, third half.

Long-time listeners are familiar with our sharing of Greg's blog posts from Facebook. Greg has been writing for years about his girlfriend from grade school whom he married, had children, and in their later years cared for during her end of life with Alzheimer's disease. His girlfriend died on October 14, and with his permission is a recent blog post.

I'm not really sure what to write in today's journal. Tomorrow, November 5th, is my girlfriend's memorial service. I'm running on emotional fumes, so I will speak from the heart and see where it takes me.

We will place her ashes in the columbarium niche at my church tomorrow. My faith knows she is in a much better place than the urn that holds her ashes. But still, it feels like the closing chapter of a beautiful book.

I miss my girlfriend. I am someone lost without her. My duty is complete.

Where do I go from here? Some of you long-timers may remember one of my posts from 2021 about a goose and the gander at the side of a busy road. The goose had been hit and was dead, and the gander paced back and forth hoping his love would get up. You know, they made for life, so you know the gander was panicked and frightened.

My window down, I could hear him calling for her with his squawks. Get up, honey. Honey, for God's sake, please get up.

I watched him from the parking lot of my wife's memory care facility. Tears ran down my face as she stayed at her side. I finally yelled from my car to the gander, you must move on.

It is dangerous to stand so close to the road. You have to move on to protect yourself. He paid me no heed.

He stood by. Like the gander, I stood by for so long. I wish I had stayed in that parking lot a little bit longer to understand when it is the right time to move on, to learn from his pain and his self-survival instincts.

P.S. Over the years that my wife traveled Dementia Road, I often thought of that gander. When it turned cold enough to fly south, did he go? Did he learn to fly solo? Now I have to learn to fly solo. I'm not sure if I can ever fly again.

Respectfully, G.H. P.S. Tomorrow is November 5th, 2025. Do you remember what happened on November 5th, 1965? Sixty years to the day that I asked her to go steady. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor? Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies and thank you for listening.

You can find most episodes from our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show. Share it with someone who needs a little hope today.

This is Charlie Navarrete. And seen in a New York City subway, what if your greatest contribution came after you were gone? By donating organs, you or a loved one can save up to eight lives. My kid did.

And I'm Marian Matzo. And we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift.

Medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.