Do Your Senses Change When You Go Vegan?
When you begin to dabble with the world of veganism -- or, maybe you’ve jumped into the lifestyle head first -- you’re likely going to anticipate the obvious changes that come with your new identity.
The food you eat is the first big and obvious change, along with the products you buy, the conversations you have, and the restaurants you eat in.
You’ll also notice some physical changes that perhaps you weren’t really expecting.
One of those physical changes has to do with your senses.
Quick review (in case you forgot)...our senses are made up of the following five things:
Sight
Hearing
Taste
Touch
Smell
If you’re fortunate enough to have all five senses active and functioning in your body, you may notice some subtle -- or even striking -- changes to your body’s sensations as you shift into a vegan lifestyle.
Whether you’re a healthy vegan or a not so healthy vegan is entirely up to you, but cutting out animal products has one impact and adding in more fruits and veggies has another.
If you want to learn more about the changes your body experiences when you stop consuming meat, dairy, poultry, fish, eggs, and other animal products, check out this article: What Happens To Your Body When You Go Vegan.
When you start consuming more fruits and vegetables, your body will begin to blossom.
Seriously.
Your body may just come to life in ways you likely never experienced before and you might notice your senses changing in ways you may not have believed were possible.
Let’s start with sight.
How Your Sight Changes When You Go Vegan
If you wear glasses, don’t have perfect eyesight, or have any vision loss, pay attention here.
VEGANISM + CATARACTS & MACULAR DEGENERATION
One of the top tips that the Royal National Institute of Blind People suggests for protecting your eyesight is to consume fruits and vegetables such as:
Mango
Squash
Broccoli
Green Beans
Spinach
These are foods that contain either lutein or zeaxanthin, which can help prevent eye conditions like cataracts and age-related macular degeneration.
When you go vegan and you start to consume more fruits and vegetables in place of animal products, your eyesight will thank you.
Teri L. posted on 30bananasaday.com that she was curious if she could improve her eyesight with her diet, so she tried out a vegan lifestyle.
She wore contacts and had astigmatism before she started her personal experiment.
Once she introduced more fruits and veggies to her diet, her vision improved so much over time that she could claim she had 20/20 vision.
While this may be anecdotal, you can’t tell me that’s not mind-blowing!
VEGANISM + CONTRAST SENSITIVITY IMPROVEMENT
In one study, 53 people were given daily supplements that contained lutein, meso-zeaxanthin, and zeaxanthin (all macular pigments found in certain fruits and vegetables -- some mentioned above) for a year to track their contrast sensitivity.
A placebo group was also part of the study, where their contrast sensitivity was also tracked over time.
The group that took the supplement containing macular pigments showed significant improvements in their contrast sensitivity in two different measures.
“The three plant pigments, characterized as xanthophyll carotenoids, make up the macular pigment (MP) in the human eye. This is the yellow pigment found only in the macula of the retina, which controls central visual acuity and color vision. Macular pigment also is a powerful antioxidant and helps protect the retina from damaging effects of high-energy visible light (blue light).”
There’s power in plants, people!
VEGANISM + GLAUCOMA
Two major medical studies done at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School followed 100,000 people for over 28 years who were 40 or older. At the start of the study, none of the participants had glaucoma.
Their research discovered that the study participants who consumed a lot of leafy greens had a 40 - 50% lower risk of developing Primary Open Angle Glaucoma (POAG).
1,483 people in the study developed POAG and the researchers recognized that their diets did not contain nearly as many leafy greens as the ones who didn’t develop the eye condition at all.
They concluded that 1.5 servings of leafy greens per day can help protect you from glaucoma.
How Your Hearing Changes When You Go Vegan
Like your vision, your hearing is also connected to the foods you eat because the health of your body manifests in a variety of ways.
When you let go of the animal products and begin to consume more nutrient dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, seeds, roots, etc., you may experience an improvement in your hearing health.
Health 24 suggests the following nutrients will help you maintain or improve your hearing.
Potassium
Folic Acid
Zinc
Magnesium
While you can get most of these in animal products, by going straight to the source -- i.e. plants -- you’re actually getting the nutrients in a purer form.
Consuming them through animal products is a second hand way to get the nutrients you need.
Plus, eating the plants instead of the animals means there’s no victim involved (so it’s good for your conscience, too).
POTASSIUM + HEARING
The fluid in your inner ear is actually regulated by potassium.
The sounds your inner ear captures translate them to your brain for the interpretation of those sounds.
When the potassium levels in your body are healthy, your ears can better translate those sounds to your brain.
“As we become older, those levels unfortunately drop which could be one of the causes of presbycusis, the most common type of sensorineural hearing loss caused by the natural ageing of the auditory system.”
Having a potassium-rich vegan diet is imperative for good hearing.
Potassium-rich vegan foods are:
Bananas
Avocados
Spinach
Potatoes
Melons
Oranges
Apricots
Tomatoes
Lima beans
FOLIC ACID + HEARING
Folic acid is responsible for new cell growth in your body. Like a diet low in potassium, a diet with low levels of folic acid can also contribute to the aforementioned condition, presbycusis.
Folic acid may slow down hearing loss because it promotes better circulation by metabolizing homocysteine, an inflammatory compound that reduces circulation.
With better circulation comes better hair growth.
When your body has healthy levels of folic acid, the hair in your inner ears are more likely to grow well, which helps to protect your inner ear.
Folic acid-rich vegan foods are:
Asparagus
Broccoli
Spinach
ZINC + HEARING
Zinc is incredibly important for ear health, because it helps ward off infections many people can get in their ears.
To avoid getting ear infections, you can start by improving your immune system. One of the best ways to do so is by ensuring you are consuming healthy levels of zinc-fuelled foods.
Zinc is also responsible for healing wounds, cell growth, and warding off germs (the bad ones that tend to cause the infections).
On a healthy vegan diet, you’ll likely be consuming the right amount of zinc for your ears.
Zinc-rich vegan foods are:
Cashews
Almonds
Peanuts
Beans
Split peas
Lentils
Dark chocolate
Oats
Popped quinoa
Raisins
Dried cranberries
Coconut flakes
MAGNESIUM + HEARING
Magnesium is incredible for treating people with noise-related hearing loss.
“Research conducted at the University of Michigan Kresge Hearing Research Institute has shown that people treated with magnesium were protected from noise-related hearing loss. Researchers believe the reason for this is magnesium's ability to fight the effects of free radicals generated by loud noise, acting as a barrier that protects the hair cells in the inner ear. Lack of adequate magnesium in the inner ear causes the blood vessels to shrink as a result of a lack of oxygen.”
Magnesium-rich vegan foods are:
Bananas
Artichokes
Potatoes
Spinach
Tomatoes
Broccoli
How Your Taste Buds Change When You Go Vegan
When you’re born, you naturally crave your mother’s breast milk and potentially anything else she had eaten when you were in utero.
If your mother ate a lot of animal products when she was pregnant with you, it may be harder for you to slow your cravings for certain animal-product-based foods.
However, it’s not impossible.
When you introduce more fruits and veggies into your diet and start eliminating animal products, the inflammation in your body tends to decrease.
How does this affect your taste buds, then?
“An omnivorous diet creates and exacerbates inflammation, an immune response that can circulate through the body and be destructive when intense or prolonged. Chemically reproducing inflammation...actually shortens the lifespan of isolated taste bud cells. Chewing ‘omnivorous food’ hasn’t been shown to instantaneously generate an inflamed tongue, but sticking to an omnivorous diet perpetuates inflammation and may lower [your] ability to taste.”
Plus, on a vegan diet, you’re less likely to be obese or overweight, which can help improve the sensitivity of your taste buds should you shed the extra weight in your transition.
“When obesity is observed as a model of chronic inflammation’s effect on taste buds, chronic inflammation lowers taste functioning, which may contribute to a change in eating habits.”
Your gut health is dramatically impacted when you go vegan. In fact, internal changes are noticeable within 24 hours.
Your gut starts at your mouth -- i.e. your taste buds -- and ends at your anus. The healthier your gut, the healthier your taste buds and cravings will be.
Other research indicates that when you transition to a vegan diet, if you’re not careful, your zinc levels may deplete.
Zinc deficiency, known as dysgeusia, can translate to a distorted sense of taste.
So, if you’re noticing a dramatic change in your taste ability, get your zinc levels checked and/or start consuming more foods with zinc in them (zinc-rich vegan foods listed above).
You can also take a zinc supplement, which are available in most pharmacies or health food stores.
Bonus: Zinc also helps with health immunity, skin, energy levels, and sexual function. Wahoo!
How Your Sense of Smell Changes When You Go Vegan
The research around a changing sense of smell when you go vegan is mostly anecdotal, however, it isn’t information worthy shying away from.
After two weeks of being vegan, many people have reported that their sense of smell heightened dramatically and they were able to smell things they hadn’t smelled before.
Some new vegans have mentioned that their sensitivity to seafood, meat, dairy, and synthetic cleaning products increased and it was harder to deal with the smells.
A few individuals agreed that the smell of meat almost seemed sour, which is very different than they had remembered it before going vegan.
On on discussion board, one person reported:
“I've been vegetarian for 16 days now and everything seems to be going well. However, I was making my brothers dinner yesterday and something odd happened. I was in the midst of making him fettucini alfredo when I got a bag of frozen shrimp out to thaw. I opened the bag and was overwhelmed by such a strong, fishy aroma.
The smell was so pungent that I got another bag out thinking that the first one was spoiled. So, I open up the new bag and it smells just as strong. I asked my brother to smell the shrimp and he said he smelled nothing at all.” - Rock n Roll
One theory suggests that when you stop consuming dairy, the reduction of phlegm in your throat may make way for a better sense of smell.
How Your Sense of Touch Changes When You Go Vegan
While I couldn’t find any research discussing any changes in your sense of touch when you go vegan, I did come across some resources that discuss how your body detoxes through your skin when you remove animal products from your diet.
Animal products and by-products are full of:
Old toxins
Hormones
Mercury
Pesticides
Bacteria
When you go vegan, your body needs to not only clean out the toxins from your system, it also goes as deep as to clean out anything harmful left in your cells!
“As your body cleanses itself from many sources of harmful animal protein stored in your cells, keep in mind that your liver, digestive system, kidneys, and lymph system are in major “cleaning house” mode.”
The best recommendation I can give you is to exercise regularly when you’re transitioning into a vegan diet, so that your body can rid itself of toxins by sweating it out through your skin.
Anything written in this article should not be taken as medical advice.
If you have any questions, consult your doctor.
Resources & Further Reading: