Olfactory Performance in Culinary Arts Students

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic brought impaired smell and taste to the forefront of international public awareness and clinical importance. Loss of smell can impair awareness of environmental hazards, alter appetite, and have negative effects on social behavior and well-being. Despite the significant functional impact associated with impaired olfaction, few effective treatments are available. Olfactory training (OT), the mainstay of treatment, is a self-administered therapy which involves a routine of repetitive brief odor exposures over several weeks. The process has been shown to improve odor discrimination, identification and detection threshold. However, the structured design and daily time commitment may be difficult to adopt for some patients, leading to poor compliance. Moreover, OT only exposes patients to a limited number of odours, failing to replicate the complexity of odor mixtures experienced daily in our chemosensory environment. OT has mainly been studied with four conventional odours encompassing the major odor categories; phenyl ethyl alcohol/rose (flowery odor), eucalyptol (aromatic), citronellal/lemon (fruity), and eugenol (clove) (resinous); however, this neglects the importance of emphasizing odors that culturally specific or personally relevant to the patient. For some patients, these factors could hinder their ability to adopt and comply with therapy.

In contrast, cooking is a culturally ubiquitous activity that is already performed daily by most people, and naturally exposes us to personally meaningful and culturally relevant odors. However, there have been no published studies investigating the impact that odors encountered during meal preparation have on olfactory performance and development. The present study aims to compare the olfactory effects of culinary skills training to those of a conventionally designed OT program. To achieve this, olfactory testing will be conducted on students enrolled in a professional culinary skills training program at Fanshawe College, and a control group consisting of students in non-olfactory dependent programs at the same institution. To compare the effect of cooking to conventional OT, the study will be repeated for a second semester and students will be asked to perform concurrent OT.

Conditions

• Loss of Smell
• Olfactory Disorder

Interventions

OTHER

Olfactory training

Olfactory training will be performed by sniffing four specific essential oils twice daily for 30 seconds each. Participants are encouraged to visualize the item they are smelling, while they perform the procedure, in a quiet room, with their eyes closed. The odors will comprise four major odor categories: flowery (phenyl ethyl alcohol/rose), aromatic (eucalyptol), fruity (citronellal/lemon), and resinous (eugenol).

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Fanshawe College

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Leigh Sowerby

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-09-25

Primary Completion

2024-09-25

Completion

2024-11-21

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations