People here keep listing diseases and chemicals when OP is asking about taste and smell.

Unless you’re drinking bleach, food will never destroy your sense of taste. It’s the same with smell. There are chemicals that are really smelly and can destroy your nose, but smell ≠ nose destruction.

Ghost peppers. Jus munch one piece (don’t do it). It will mess up your flavour on the first bite and wish for the sweet release of death (won’t come I think) for a long time after.

oh yeah, you can totally change your sense of taste of sweet and salty

remove either of these for several weeks and then slowly bring them back and you will find you are far more sensitive to them than previously.

the addiction to high level sweet taste is why dieting is so hard for so many and why sugar substitutes are targetted as an option.

Yeah, temporarily, I think. You ever indulge in a food repeatedly until it stops tasting good? I have, many times. It resets after a while, but the difference, I think, is that the light and sound are actually doing physical damage to your retina and ear follicles / ear drum. You could blow up a fire cracker in your mouth to get that outcome, but that’s not what you’re asking.

We used to occasionally have to put our kids on “sugar fast” when they ate too much sweet stuff because they then couldn’t taste sweet in lightly sweet stuff. So their palate needed to be recalibrated. I’ve had to do the same with salt before.

And I am desensitized to spicy things but like that because I can appreciate more foods that way, or more of the ones I tend to like. But surely it’s a form of damage.

What are you over here wanting to eat?

Corsodyl mouthwash, according to my dentist, is not supposed to be used every day because it can permanently alter your sense of taste. Corsodyl specifically.

Thats only 1 dentist though you’d have to ask the other 9 to know for sure.

There’s a specific chemical extract from some berry that makes EVERYTHING taste like Splenda. You can bite into a lemon and it will taste sweet. Lasts a few minutes, fun novelty

Smoking will make you less sensitive to taste. Still too early to tell on vapes.

Covid

One flavor is just detecting acid (sour), and so a strong enough sour flavor would chemically destroy your taste buds by basically dissolving them. I think this is fairly similar to the fact that too bright a light will damage the light detection in your eye. I’m not sure about any others tastes or smells though.

Hydrogen sulfide deadens the sense of smell. You can smell it in low concentrations, but not in high concentrations. So it is quite a dangerous gas.

you can close your nose shut and wont taste any flavours, except the 5 senses of your tongue wich is neurological. probably trauma or an infection to the nerves of the tongue. chronic nasal allergies can reduce your taste and smell off flavors, if you mean bitter, sweet, sour and salty something .

Smoke or go into space.

When i smoke too much weed - like as a lifestyle i mean, over the course of months - my sense of smell and thus most of taste pretty much disappears. I had to take a break from being a cupcake taster for an acquaintance because i could not possibly provide useful feedback.

Apparently low-gravity changes how mucus settles (iirc) in such a way that humans have reduced smell and taste in space. Astronauts always want hotsauce in part because everything tastes blander in space.