Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun.

Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry.

With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves, we're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape.

We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show.

Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29,

we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world.

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With our growing season just around the corner, we're sowing seeds of knowledge and empathy on this week's episode of meat and three through four unique stories.

I'm always shocked at how aggressive people are with their language. And we'll have something like Japanese knotweed. And they'll say, you know, these are terrible, they're, they're foreigners that are invasive, and you know, but they're also you know, they're really healthy if you eat them.

We're surrounded by seeds that have already adapted to live with us and they're actually already kind of living in the future because cities are hotter, and they're more polluted and they're more fragmented and these are the plants that can deal with that

tune in to meet and three available wherever you get your podcasts

Hello and welcome to cookie issues this is Dave Arnold your host of cookie cutters coming to you live on the heritage radio network like from whatever to whenever heritage radio network I am joined by myself in the Lower East Side of Manhattan we got Anastasia back in New York How you doing Anastasia? Great Connecticut. Great doing alright, yeah, you enjoying the sweet sweet freezing weather we just got freaked out Why would anyone want to be anywhere else? Yeah well I'm glad to hear your usual sunny self that's awesome. John back from his grand jury duty How you doing John? Grapes you got your you got your fill of watching murders and kidnappings on videotape have Yeah,

yeah. Yeah. faith in humanity restored ready for cooking issues to come and bring it back down.

Yeah, you said it was like horrific right in terms of like what you're exposed to on the daily

Yeah, it's pretty crazy the crimes that you know happen in the city and in such like popular places right in the middle of the day. It's it was sober sobering.

Yeah. Yeah. Got Matt in his your your permanently Rhode Island hidey hole hold, right. Yeah. Doing it. Yeah. All right. So if we have time, which we won't because we have like a panoply of amazing guests today, but I have more updates on the vacuuming bread trails, we probably won't have time so I'm gonna get right into it today. We have three special guests. First, longtime you know, coming on the show friend of the show, Ariel Johnson, Dr. Ariel Johnson. flavor. Flavor chemists. How do you like to describe yourself right now? Oh, what's your favorite like author

of besides about to be filled author? No, I'm joking. I usually say I'm a flavor scientist or a food scientist, flavors scientist.

I like that. I think of it like not like most people who are flavor scientists are more or their flavor

wrists. I think flavor scientists might be a title that I invented. I'm not I'm not sure. But I think it best encompasses

what you know how to use technology, but you're not a technologist.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can pretend to be one, but mostly my, my job is to study and talk about flavor.

Yeah. Well, welcome back. It's good. Thanks for having

me. Yeah. Good.

Good to hear you're good here. And also, you might know are also now as Good Good Eats Chief Science Officer, which is also a good title. Did you come up with that?

I? No, I didn't I think altum like many of us like Star Trek. And I believe that's either the same or close to Spock's designation on the enterprise. So I'm not complaining about that. Certainly. Yeah.

You were pro Nimoy. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you fall on the George Takei. William Shatner spectrum?

I mean, how, like, how can you really choose, but I think I'm more of a to K

person. Yeah. So you don't like the you don't like that? Alright. Well, I don't like it. All right. All right. And of course, also longtime friend, Harold McGee on the line. How're you doing, Harold?

I'm very well. Thanks. How about you guys doing all right. So

the last time we had on was, you know, unfortunately for Maria Gorn, Shelley's Memorial show, but then also, we had you on about your new your new book nosedive? How's it going? Going? Well, I hope.

Yeah, it's it's now new ish. But doing pretty well, getting some good reviews. And, and so we'll see about sales.

Yeah, well, you know, whatever. So the, so the reason I have YouTube on is because we've gotten a lot of questions recently on coal, COVID and olfaction. Right. So I mean, everyone's thinking about COVID all the time. But a lot of people, especially for cooking, and in this show in particular. You know, they're asking, Well, look, you know, I've lost my sense of taste or my sense of smell, because COVID. And, you know, what can I do about it? Is it permanent? Is there any way to cook around it, etc, etc. So I thought, you know, the two of you would be perfect for this show, especially because Harold, I'm allowed to say that you had asthma as a result, like years ago, right? Or no, it's too late. He said, we could have cut it out. But yeah, Harold also has an interesting perspective, because he is a food guy, author who also suffered from asthma, which means lack of smell. We'll get into the technical stuff later, but I brought a special other guests whose first time I've known him for, I've known him for like, probably 30 years or something, but it's his first time on the program. Live from Harvard, we have Sandeep Robert data, who will now be called Bob, because that's what I've called him since I've known him. But he is in all factories scientist at the Harvard at the best lab name ever. What's the name of your lab?

The Data Lab?

How sweet is that? Because it produces data and his name is data. How sick is that? Is that the best name for a lab that's ever happened? area? What do you think about that?

That is that is quite quite the serendipitous name. Definitely.

Yeah. And just so you guys get a feel for kind of who Bob is. So like, what am I allowed to say any almost anything about you or not? Bobby, you're pretty like, go for it. Go for it. Are you so like, you know. So I actually know Bob through his wife, Eliza, who because Eliza and I were friends in college, I turns out I went to college with with Bob, but I didn't know it at the time. Anyway. So like, we became friends later. And especially because I found out he was a big food guy, not just an MD PhD with his own lab at Harvard, because he didn't have that at the time. But he used to throw a yearly party, instead of a birthday, he would have an I'm not dead party. And this is how I learned about Bob's kind of love of food. Because every year he would have this blowout crazy party where he would cook for days and invite people in to celebrate the fact that he was not dead. Right. Right. Still not still not dead. Well, because he had a particularly horrible like, medical procedure and, you know, problem that, you know, could have gone on, let's just say it could have gone either way. Right? But thankfully did. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll have him back on again. If you guys ever want to know about the perils of not paying your cryo bill. Like, five story, not paying your cryo bill will put you in tears

put you in tears. No matter how badly off you are. You should always check your mail. That's my advice.

Especially if you have important stuff in a deep freezer somewhere. Oh, no. You might want to all's well that ends well all's well that ends well. It turns out that the People who were who were threatening to turn off the switch on Bob's cryogenic storage products, also was lazy. And so it all's well that ended well on that one. Also a little known fact about Bob. Bob went to high school with Snoop Dogg. And after that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where did you grow up in Long Beach or what? Yeah,

I grew up in a town next Long Beach called Lakewood. So yeah, so basically, I kicked around the LBC all over the road. Now. I didn't tell you this. We just had our high school reunion. Snoop Dogg through the after party. I gotta tell you it was exactly Snoop Dogg came slick. Rick came collar me bad. Remember? picks you up? Oh, yeah. It was incredible. Incredible.

It sounds incredible. See, I'm trying to give you guys a flavor for who's going to be talking to you. All right. One last thing I'll give this is the cooking issues crowd especially with like this. You told me a story once that like you are at your house. You were a small child, your grandma came over I think was your grandma came over to your house and was like, What's wrong with you and the first thing she did to your parents? What's wrong with you? If she dug a hole in the ground and built a tandoor? True or false? This is what you told me.

100% true. And that was the best food I've ever eaten. She would like she dug the clay out of our backyard when she was in her 70s handbills on door and just killed it for the entire time. She was living with us. It was it was an incredible.

I mean, that's that's that's like, that's like grandma plus plus right there. Grandma plus plus. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Nice. Because what region was she from originally? From the prune job? Nice. Nice. Anyways. Alright, so that's enough of pre stuff. Now we're gonna give a word of warning. Since we have three people who like know all the fancy words. Let's try to stay away for some word salad when we're talking about this stuff. All right, let's keep it let's keep it on the on the on the normal. Like, I'll give you an example. I was reading an interview in advance of this that Bob gave to one of his Harvard cronies over there. And they were talking about COVID and smell right. And he's giving kind of a normal interview like, yeah, they played people boo. And he's like, he's like, you know, what? Suspend tacular cells, they're more important than you think. It's kind of like the like, Gil, like glial cell important. And I'm like, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. First of all, I don't want to hear anyone say sustained tacular unless they're saying how us doing? Hey, suspend Dacula. Like, for those of you that, for those of you that aren't hip to sustained tacular as I was not, you know, before, not before 8am This morning. You could just say support cell there doesn't need to be a word sus 10 tacular where you take, I don't know tacular and add it to sustain and get sustained tacular What the heck is that? Would that work?

They're spectacular cells that sustain things.

If we like the spectacular, like, I like how high was the scientist who came up with that name when they did but when

they were first name systematizing right.

Oh my god. Sustained tacular Oh, my God, such a word salad. Alright, so the one like so we'll just get it straight. Are we going to use an osmia para osmia That word that means I can't taste? What's that one?

Well, that would be a good idea. If you're a nonsmoker as you can't smell and teraz me is you can smell but it's messed up. Alright,

now I got Bob on not just because he's an olfactory scientist. And by the way, Bob spent many years seeing like whether he could look at images of rats shrugging, and then figure out what was going on in their brain with a camera, right that with a visual camera, and then a camera that looked inside their actual brain while they were alive and developed a microscope to do this. Is this a true story? Am I making this up?

This is a true story. That work is ongoing. And it's pretty cool. I'll tell you about it later,

as well. And here's one more thing before we get into it, because that's again, the flavor. I like to tie this back to things even people who haven't had the COVID Here's some career advice from what Bob did as a as a younger researcher that I think is great career advice. I think erielle You're especially going to enjoy this. So he went to work for a famous person's lab at Columbia University for it was postdoc, right? Yep. Yep. All right. So he's doing his postdoc for and so he convinces this this guy to build a fantastically expensive new microscope, like the name of the microscope with a two photon microscope. It's a multi photon microscope. Yeah. And so how much that sucker cost?

You know, the laser to power was a quarter million dollars.

Okay. So that was hate, folks. That's just the laser. We're not talking about like,

the light bulb, or whatever. I noticed.

Yeah, so anyway, so we're talking like lots of money, not to mention, like, you know, all the rats that Bob was going through left and right, by the way, no illegal way to kill a rat in New York City. Anyway, the so what he did, and this is the genius for all of you growing up, I know that a lot of people who are when they're younger, they're worried that they're gonna go work for someone like for us, it's probably in a restaurant or hospitality. And they're gonna give all their good ideas to the person who's getting all the credit, right, Bob did the reverse. He gave his all he built like a great microscope. But since no one had built them before, he learned a lot about building this particular kind of microscope with somebody else's million dollars, right? became the guy who knew how to build the million dollar microscope and then got to build one that was like twice as good when he moved over to Harvard and got his own lab. So this is good career advice. My right bomb.

It's all Yeah, it's good career, right? All is spending somebody else's money. It's good advice.

Spend someone else's money first. Don't worry about giving up the idea instead, learn on somebody else's nickel and then become the heavyweight No. Easy peasy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought Ariel

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's, there's also the skill and finding someone who will give you that money. But in until then, what I've usually done is built built things out of garbage and scrap and lint in the first person to

you know, Arial Arial. And I have a secret business idea that I think that Anastasia and John know about to build something out of garbage. Yeah, for people.

But you know, it should be fun. You you've been very patient about my, my ever extending book deadline. But But yes, we

oh, I'm I'm familiar with ever extending. But anyway, so none of those reasons is the reason that Bob's on the show, it's not shrugging rats, although I'm sure it's related. But Bob, and a number of people in his lab it last March, march 2020, were some of the first people to realize that people who were getting COVID, in the first outbreak, were having problems with olfaction and did some of the early research. So you want to talk about what? Ooh, nice, Bob, you want to talk about about what you what you learned? And what you know. Yeah, sure. So

let me start by saying, we still haven't figured it out. So it's been a it's been a year to the pandemic. And I think a bunch of us are still wondering and still working on this problem, which is, which is a big problem, I think, even bigger than we realized. So just to kind of step back and talk about some numbers briefly, I'd say the most recent data suggests that if you get COVID, about 80% of you are going to have a change in your sense of smell. Some of you lose entirely for some of you, you'll lose partially but like, you know, the vast majority of people who do go ahead and get COVID get some sort of anosmia or pure osmia loss of their smell, or a diminution in their style, and their sense of smell. And then of those, you know, for most people, it comes back pretty quick, two to four weeks, usually, but there's definitely a bunch of people 30% Maybe go on for longer. And so, you know, I think what that means, right, is that there are millions of people now across the globe, who are kind of dealing with this as an issue. And so as a consequence of budget cuts are trying pretty hard to figure out what's going on. And I think, you know, as I said, we just we still don't know, but I think the ideas we have now kind of go like this, that it's not the cold, you know, you get the cold and your nose gets stuffed up and your mucus changes, and you know, you can't smell and then you get better from the cold. And then your sense of smell back. Right. That's what happens to all of us. And it's pretty clear. Now that's not what this virus is doing is viruses doing something totally different. That is that's kind of changing our ways of thinking about what's important when we, you know, to the function of our ability to smell. And as Dave kind of mentioned, you know, the thing that we initially thought was that maybe the virus goes up into your nose infects a part of your nasal cavity called the olfactory epithelium, I'll try to keep the longest word. So minimum, it's like a part of the inside of your nose. It's responsible for detecting odors, there's muscle for selling for smelling. And you know, really, I'm a neurobiologist, right. So like I care about the brain, I care about neurons and process information. And that's what that's what, you know, wakes me up in the morning. And the olfactory epithelium is filled with these neurons, which are just like the cells in your brain, except they're live in your nose. And these neurons are responsible for sensing smells in the world, you take a sniff, right to get all these small molecules that are that are volatile, they're coming off of your food, they're coming off of everything in your environment. They come into your nose, and they interact with these neurons in your nose, and then your neurons that you're gonna love this, these neurons actually communicate with your brain because they have these little bits of wiring, which are called axons that actually poke through holes in the base of your skull. So you have these tiny little holes that like separate your nose, your nose, there's been separation your nose from your brain ain't right though, to prop the front of your brain up and not let it fall into your mouth. And into that little bone, which is called the cribriform plate, they're like a bunch of these little holes. And this wiring goes from the neurons in your nose, through these holes in your skull into your brain, basically, and so like the initial idea was, well, maybe what's happening is the virus is common, and you're getting infected. And that that virus is infecting the sensory neurons, which are responsible for smell messing up the neurons. And that's why we all lose our sense of smell. It looks like that idea is not true. It looks like instead, there are other sorts of cells that kind of prop up and feed the olfactory sensory neurons in your nose. And these are the support cells that Dave was mentioning. And it looks like the sustained tacular the spectacular asst tacular cell, and it looks like those are the primary cells that are getting infected. That's what it seems at least, you know, everything's subject to revision as a science, like we're not, there's no dogma here. But the data that we have currently, both in animals and in humans is that like, when you get infected, these these support cells that are the responsible for kind of maintaining your olfactory sensory neurons get infected, and then there's probably some local inflammatory process that effectively shuts down the ability of your sensory neurons to work. And so you kind of like a light switch, lose your sense of smell, and the assistant tacular. So I'll stop working. And then when the infection clears, for most people, right, this is an attack, your cells get better, the inflammation, the local inflammation goes away, and all of a sudden, your sensory neurons start working again, and now all of a sudden, you can smell,

which is better news that it's not messing with the neurons, right?

Yeah, it's definitely a frickin most people. But David, you know, one of the things to keep in mind is that there is this relatively large fraction of people that lose their small for longer. And we think in those cases, the neurons are probably being messed with, there's like, denied support from the support cells for a while. If the support cells are really hit hard, the neurons go on to die. And, you know, that can cause a prolonged sense of loss of your sense of smell, but also creates other issues. We talked just a little bit about para Rosmini. That's right. So and asked me is the loss of smell erasmia is areolas describing is when different, smells smell wrong, and they often smell really funky and unpleasant. So you'll smell a flower. And they'll smell like sewage, for example, which is horrible. And actually, if you have plasmids, you know, lots of patients who have her as presenters now have trouble finding something to eat. And so

we don't want that's what that's why we're here because we have a bunch of people asking how to fix this or what's going on, they want to know.

Yeah, so as I started, like, if we know a little about how COVID causes anosmia, we know even less about how COVID causes paralysis, but there are some ideas. So one interesting idea comes from the third type of cell that's in your olfactory epithelium. So there's these neurons that detect odors, there's the support cells, there's a third kind of cell called a stem cell. So in me and in you, and everyone, when we breathe in and out, what we're basically doing is breathing in a bunch of garbage in the air, right pollutants, pollen, viruses, particulates, cigarette smoke, toxins, like just like day in day out, this olfactory epithelium is bombarded with all sorts of toxic trash. And the reason why we have nose hairs, and we have mucus is to, like help prevent that crap from, you know, damaging our neurons. But inevitably, our neurons are damaged. And actually they die, just as part of the normal wear and tear of your olfactory epithelium, so that the special cells called stem cells that actually rebuild the epithelium when it's damaged. So they regenerate neurons. Now that that process kicks into high gear, when a virus like like the Coronavirus, you know, really damages your olfactory epithelium. So, what has to happen in order for that neuron, that new neuron that was just made to repair your epithelium, what has to happen for that thing to work? Well, you have a new neurons born in your nose. So obviously, it has to be able to detect odors, but also it has to send one of those wires up through one of those holes in your brain in your skull. And it has to go to just the right place in your brain. And so that's hard, like that's a huge distance between your nose and this part of the brain that's like that information has to go to. And so it takes a long time for that process to actually occur. And then often when the wiring the axon enters the brain, at the beginning, it's actually in the wrong place. And so one idea about paramitas is that it actually kind of reflects a process of repair and recovery, your neurons are getting rebuilt, they're getting rewired and you know that information is going to the brain, but it's not quite going to to the right place. And confronted with this kind of weirdness, your brain turns that into like a nasty smell. And the idea is that over time, the wiring will refine itself, and the axons will increasingly go to the right places, and then the participants will go away and you'll recover your sense of smell. So that's that's just one idea. There's probably more going on than we know. But that's the that's the current predominant theory.

So the theory is eventually your brain will integrate it in the same way that it used to or You'll just get used to the new integration and your you'll tell yourself that it doesn't smell like gasoline anymore. It smells like whatever we think it probably

is going back to the way it was before, but part of what's definitely happening and this kind of touches on what we can do to help patients, right. Part of what's happening probably is also your brain is relearning. You know what smells are. And so, you know, I don't know if you've heard about this thing, but like the one clinical thing that has, you know, some evidence to support it to help with folks who are in osmek hypothermic meaning they have kind of less of a sense of smell, or periplasmic. After after COVID infections is this thing called smell training, where basically take a bunch of purified or essential oils, and there are a lot of websites actually online that can help kind of guide you through this process. There's one particularly good one called avocent, ABS, C, E and t, that sells kits and has guides for how to do this. Basically, you smell the various smells are essential oils, you know, throughout the day, whose identity is known to you. So you smell lavender or you smell peppermint, you smell this, you smell that. And you just remind yourself, Oh, this is peppermint. This is lavender. You know, this is apricot, this is peach. And you just do that over and over and over again. And it's thought through this kind of repeated smell training, your brain really learns what smells are and helps to reintegrate the new information as it's coming in from your nose as your nose repairs itself.

Harold, did you have? Do you do something like that when it happened to you? What would you want talk about your story about going through this pre COVID

Yeah, I was very different. Because I mean, it was it was similar in the sense that I woke up one morning, I made myself a cup of coffee. And after a minute or so realize that I actually wasn't smelling it wasn't, I was tasting it, but I wasn't getting any of the the pleasant smells. And then I noticed through the rest of the day that I wasn't smelling anything. And that lasted for several weeks. And I didn't have any symptoms. I didn't have any, I didn't have a cold, everything else seemed normal. So that was scary, because I was in the middle of writing a book about smells. And so I got in touch with friends of mine at the modell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, you know, asking them, What could I do. And they basically said at the time, and this is maybe six, seven years ago, just hanging in there. And usually it comes back, but sometimes it doesn't. And you won't know until it does or doesn't. And I didn't actually think of training. I know trying to trying to exercise those muscles because I didn't really know what was going on. So I just, you know, cross my fingers. And it was a really unpleasant few weeks, because I wasn't getting any pleasure from food. Except you know, taste and so I was I was you know, upping the hot sauce in everything just to get some kind of sensation. And stop going out to restaurants because there was no point stop drinking wine. Because there are cheaper ways to enjoy alcohol. And it and even just, you know, walking into my house or going out of my house, you know, and you get a blast of fresh air and you kind of you know, just get a sense of the the environment. All that was gone. It was it was really upsetting. So anyway, I lucked out, it came back eventually and gradually. And so yeah, it's it's not a not a nice experience.

Well, you say you didn't train but I remember I saw you like we hung out. Like when you were coming out of it. At one point, I forget what we were doing. And you were doing kind of a b testing. You're you were you're you're talking you were making mental notes of what something smelled like before versus now. I mean, you probably didn't even notice it. But that's kind of like the way that you operate. So maybe your natural way of being was helpful in terms of helping you get your smell back because I remember you being like, you know, bring it up. Look, take it down, bring it up, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I was certainly testing myself every day and multiple times during the day hoping you know, for some sign that something was coming back. And I would try everything. You know, bad smells good smells, but but I wasn't you know, smelling something and then thinking that smell, you know, food Trying to make the association. I was just it was kind of a, an A B test in the sense of, Is it there or not? And does it smell right or not?

Yeah. And then not to freak the listeners out even more, but I saw a study that says that more people have olfactory deficits as a result of COVID, then they know, in other words, that the odds that you have a deficit and don't know that you've been somewhat impacted are quite high. Is that accurate?

Yeah, absolutely. People are really lousy at, believe it or not reporting their own kind of self sense of smell, right? They're not really good at that. So if you ask folks, you know, the prevalence of COVID associated Latino changes and spell it are like 60 65%. But if you test them, it's more like 80s. And as more objective testing kind of makes its way into the world, given the pandemic, you know, that number could even arise. So yeah, I think it's, it's it's people's lack of self insight into their sense of smell that might be under, under representing how badly this virus is really infecting that this particular sense.

And, lastly, on this kind of, like, nuts and bolts aspect of it. I saw some data that country by country, the reported rates are different, but that's probably almost certainly just the way it's being reported. Right?

Yeah. And actually, you'll get a kick out of this. You know, initially, a lot of the reports had women getting in as being much more than men, but that's just because women are much more insightful about their sense of smell than men are. When you objectively test them, they're basically the same. Really, yeah. So the initial particles, were really wondering whether there was

a sex difference, like 3060, right? The original data was like, 3060. Yeah, it all washes out with objective testing.

Yes. Oh, sorry. Ah, that's really interesting. And like what you said before about people not being good at reporting their own, like decline in smell sensitivity. I mean, it definitely jives with like what I've experienced training people to do sensory analysis and the sort of like general one paper put it as humans are extraordinarily good at distinguishing smells, but extraordinarily bad at describing smells. Although that's generally linked to like experience and culture. So the difference in men and women makes me think, you know, since perfume and like scented body products are marketed so heavily to women, like maybe culturally, they tend to be, you know, more more trained and attuned to noticing these like differences in smell.

So speaking of that, erielle and testing, so Mike Baskin wants to know what kind of what are the what are the objective tests that they use, rather than just your subjective perception of it?

Well, I mean, you know, technically speaking, no, perception is truly subjective. I mean, it's going to vary person by person, but like, for the most part, a glass of wine is not going to smell subjectively, to somebody like a cheeseburger. So, which I know I am, you know, belaboring a sort of pedantic, pedantic point, but I don't know how they test in a medical context in doing a sensory analysis of wine, or whiskey cocktails, or rum, which is what I've, I've done. I mean, we train people, not in the ability to physically smell things, but in the ability to name the smells, that they're, they're smelling. And we always do that with physical references. So if they say celery, we give them some, you know, fresh celery, celery, seed dried celery, and they have to tell us which one aligns with what they what they mean, when they say celery,

for example, one of the studies I saw I was actually using the commercially available smells of the Naidu van. Oh, yeah. The net divan? Yeah, that's the thing stank man those things?

Well, I mean, you're you're smelling small molecules and concentrations that like no human is really supposed to, or finds in nature. But But yeah, the the NE Duvall is, is one example of trying to standardize these these references, because it's based on like specific blends of molecules.

And I know there's some researchers who are trying to come up with the smell kits for people to test themselves at home in a in a more objectively verifiable way based on kind of easy to purchase. odorants Yeah, and have you guys like,

Oh, I've heard of that. I mean, I'm just spitballing here. So Sunday, please correct me if I'm, like talking outside my discipline too much. It sounds like it could be kind of analogous to, to like testing for concussions where it's like much better to have a baseline baseline reading or baseline test to compare to rather than trying to figure out from scratch, like post post trauma, if something has happened,

you know, that's completely true. You know, my buddy Noam Sibella at the Weitzman Institute came up with a kind of clever solution to this, which is he wrote up a phone based app, where you just go into your kitchen and you pick five, kind of canonical smells. And he has a long list of like, 100 you can pick from he had fun five of them. Toothpaste is one of them. I think that's my kitchen. And then you just measure them, measure your perception of them longitudinally. Yeah. So it's thought that like, it's the Delta, it's the change really is indicative? Because you know, human perception, as I'm sure you're aware, is so varied and so individualized. Absolutely. You know, what's normal, for me is very different from what's normal for you. And so this kind of logical testing ends up being really important.

Very cool. All right. So you talked a little bit about, well, we'll go this one first on treatment. So Jim wanted to know, other than steroids and platelets stuff, is there any thoughts on STEM stem stem cell therapy for fixing, fixing this problem in the future? Like, how many years away? Are they from being able to fix this, like that way? Oh,

you know, like, like I said, there are stem cells in your nose that repair your epithelium. And so people have long been fascinated with that. Because the thing that maybe you guys don't know is that or maybe you do know, right is that like, your brain isn't very good at repairing itself precisely because it doesn't have very many stem cells. There's a very small population of stem cells in your hippocampus, for example. But that's, that's basically it, except for your nose, which continuously regenerates these neurons. So people have actually been taking those tissue, and like putting it in damaged spinal cords, for example, to try to see what the the stem cells from your nose can rebuild other parts of your nervous system. My buddy, Greg Goldstein, at Duke has actually done this for smell in animal models. So you can damage the olfactory epithelium of a mouse, and then you can transplant back into that mouse, some new olfactory stem cells, it turns out that works, it actually repairs the epithelium. As far as I know, this has never been tried in a human. And so this kind of work is going to be several years off before it'll help us. But it's a thing that, in principle could work. And I think it's a subject of active research.

How many years do you guys this is not related to COVID? How many years until like, the average high school student can CRISPR themselves up and turn themselves into a glow in the dark, rave? Rave Party person?

I mean, I know a guy that sells kits for that.

You know, it's coming, I would wait, I don't know, I'd wait.

Yeah, I haven't I haven't tried it. I just

mean, if I was going to Chris, for myself, it would be a glow in the dark, like huge, like patch right in the middle of my forehead. So I wouldn't need to worry about a headlamp. And then when everyone turns the lights down, I'll still be able to see, you know, I mean,

there's an artist, I'm gonna look up his name, who made a rabbit glow in the dark somehow.

If I could crisper in photosynthesis, and you you wouldn't take

right, I like eating so much. need sugar injected into me, you know? And then I don't know. I mean, it would be a good use of my extra carbon dioxide. Anastasia tells me I have enough of it. Right? Yeah. All right. And and I'm going to want a specific answer to this. Nicole wrote in I know we've touched on it, but do they have any information on the frequency of full versus partial recovery? And does it come back the same? She's personally panicked and dying to know.

My understanding is that when people recover, they feel pretty normal. And I think the data are still emerging about rates of recovery and the nature and the course of the recovery. I mean, there's only been in this pandemic for a year. And I'll just remind you like this is the biggest old factory crisis perhaps humanity has ever faced. I realize it sounds kind of ridiculous, but it's true. No, it's

totally true. Right. I

mean, new onset anosmia is extremely rare, right. And so now all of a sudden, we're just confronted with this, and we're learning about it as we go.

Well, the question I have then is like, also, you know, because this disease is also impacting, you know, people, like for instance, in nursing homes disproportionately, and they're having they have trouble typically eating and enjoying what's going on anyway. Are we going to see more people dying from lack of nutrition over the next, like, year because they just don't want to eat anymore? And they're already in a compromised position?

Yeah, I mean, there's really three things here. One is that spells essential distance danger, right? So on like, there's actually a family of nine, I think, in Texas, or eight of them were in asthma, and there's a fire in the house, and none of them noticed, except for the one person who wasn't an asthma who dragged the other eight out. So like, that's a real thing. That the nutrition thing is absolutely an issue. It's an issue, you know, as you get older, it's just kind of implying, you know, people begin to lose their sense of smell is it senses of smell and if you look at people in their 80s, lots of them are functionally anatomic. And that goes with a change in nutritional status. I actually want to focus on a thing that Harold was bringing up. You know, he was describing his personal experience with anosmia and basically He was describing feeling blue. And I think lots of people who have lost their sense of smell, have that sense that they're kind of floating in the world and a little bit emotionally out of sorts. And that is, in a sense to be expected, your sense of smell is very directly connected to the emotional and memory centers in your brain. And when you lose your sight, when people lose their sense of smell, it's actually a known risk factor for depression. And so for your listeners, I really want to emphasize that if that's how you're feeling, it's it's like, kind of expected, it's part of what happens to people when they lose your sense of smell. And you should seek help. You know, it's, it's, I think one of the things that the medical community is going to face is a lot of depression that's related to people with prolonged loss of their sense of smell. And it's important to be really aware of that, and sympathetic to that.

Speaking of going back to age and training and sense of smell in general, so if training helps you with COVID, related, you know, loss of smell, whether entire partial, could training help everyone, as they as they're getting older, to train their nose to constantly be aware of being aware of smells around, you're going to keep your sense of smell longer. Is there any data on this?

I don't know if any did it Ariel, do you know what he did?

Oh, no, I was I was just trying. I mean, it's a super interesting question. I was just trying to think of if I knew any papers to talk about that.

Any, I don't know any specifically, but I do remember reading that, in fact, you can, to some extent, improve older people's what acuity or just, you know, the appreciation of that sense, by getting them to use it in a in a kind of focused, calm, conscious way. So I think there there there is, there have been studies like that done. I don't know how big, how long ago, but yeah, I think I'm certainly thinking as I turned 70, that I'm going to be exercising my sense of smell as much as I can.

Because that because I know there's data on cognition, right, people who like, you know, relatively challenged their brains, like tend to keep their cognition in better shape monitor, right, so um, maybe same is true for smell so nose, right? Yeah,

I mean, it's totally reasonable. It actually, you know, the part of your central brain that's responsible for processing smells, and assigning them to perception and maybe helping you make decisions based upon smells. That part of your brain is super plastic. It's really really flexible. And so I can imagine that working it out would be really helpful as you get older.