Before Bridgette Arnold started taking a GLP-1, she was feeling “down in the dumps,” the 28-year-old content creator tells Yahoo. She turned to food for comfort, consuming things like fast food and ice cream. Arnold believes her health also played a role. “Because I had type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, I would crave these things quite literally every day,” she says. “Food is so much more addicting, the way they make processed foods these days, so my favorite thing in the whole world was eating.”
Then, two years ago, Arnold was prescribed the diabetes and weight loss medication, tirzepatide (she takes a compounded form). Within six months, her A1C — a measure of blood sugar used to diagnose diabetes — had returned to a normal level. But that’s not the only thing the medication had changed. Her cravings were completely different — almost nonexistent. Early in her tirzepatide regimen, Arnold sometimes tried to eat the foods she used to enjoy. The experience was “confusing,” she says. “I was like, This is weird because I used to love this. Why don’t I love this anymore?” After being on the medication for six months, Arnold tried a burger. “It tasted so salty to the point where it’s almost gross,” she says. Ice cream was so sweet and creamy, it made her nauseous. “It’s truly shocking,” says Arnold.
According to a recent study, lots of people on GLP-1s actually experience these very changes to their sense of taste. About one in five people taking Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjao became more sensitive to sweetness or saltiness, researchers at the University of Bayreuth in Germany found. So what gives? We spoke to experts and GLP-1 users to find out.
Why GLP-1s change taste
Medications like Wegovy and Zepbound weren’t specifically designed to change the way food tastes. Instead, they target hormone signalling systems that tell the body when it’s full and slow down digestion. But the drugs’ effects on that hormone system mean that they don’t just act on the gut; they’re going to work on the brain too. GLP-1s affect “brain areas that control hunger but also [act] on taste bud cells and brain regions that process taste and reward,” study coauthor and a professor at the University of Bayreuth, Othmar Moser, said in a press release. “This means they can subtly change how strong flavours, like sweetness or saltiness, are perceived.”
Our brains give us a little dose of feel-good chemicals, including dopamine, when we eat. Ultraprocessed foods, which often contain high levels of sugar, salt or both, are especially good at triggering a quick hit of these neurochemicals, which is why they can become so addictive. While researchers are still working out exactly how, GLP-1 drugs seem to be “ratcheting down reward center drivers,” Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, an obesity physician who treats GLP-1 patients, tells Yahoo. Moser also suspects that this change in taste might also affect appetite, but his research didn’t find a link between those whose taste buds change and those who lost more weight on the medications.
Nadolsky says that for some of his patients at the highest dose of tirzepatide, the drug is sometimes “dampening that dopamine reward system down so much that now, instead of just getting away from those addictive behaviors, they don’t feel like doing anything.” Some of those high-dose patients start seeking out sugar, not due to cravings, he says, but because their bodies are searching for some kind of stimulation to get the reward system going again. When that happens, he reduces their dose.
Why salty or sweet?
More than 21% of the participants in the University of Bayreuth study said that food tasted sweeter to them after taking a GLP-1. For nearly 23% of them, meals got saltier. The increased sensitivity to sweetness and saltiness may be due in part to the fact that these flavors are especially good at giving us that dopamine high, which is depressed by GLP-1s. One study also found gene expression changes that may increase salt and sweetness sensitivity and even encourage taste bud renewal.
Jess Loren, a 40-year-old chief executive officer of the tech company Global Objects doesn’t think the changes to her sense of taste led to her weight loss on a GLP-1. But things definitely taste different to her. She once loved sweet treats, but that’s all changed. “I 1-million-percent cannot eat a Krispy Kreme donut now,” she says. It’s just a burst of sugar to my brain and taste buds, and I just can’t handle it.” Loren has now been on some form of GLP-1 (currently Mounjaro) since 2023, and says she still enjoys food. But a recent attempt to have a pot roast tasted “like just pure salt,” she says.
Sweetness and saltiness aren’t the only flavors that sometimes turn weird for GLP-1 users. Nadolsky did a straw poll of his patients and while few reported sweetness or saltiness sensitivity, a sudden aversion to coffee was common. Loren says that when she first started a GLP-1, even the smell of coffee made her nauseous. And a number of GLP-1 users previously told Yahoo that animal proteins, especially steak or ground beef, started giving them the “meat ick.”
What to do when food tastes too salty or sweet
Nadolsky says that, so far, none of his patients have reported an aversion to foods they need to eat. If they did, he’d do the same thing he does when other problems arise, and lower their dose.
For most people, including Arnold and Loren, the overly salty or sickeningly sweet taste of certain foods comes as an odd surprise — but it mostly serves as another reminder to stick to healthier foods. “You become attuned to the sugar you’re putting in your body,” says Loren. When Arnold first noticed the change in her sense of taste, she wondered, “If food isn’t going to make me happy anymore, what is?” she says. But she figured it out in pretty quick order. “I have replaced the serotonin [and dopamine] and happiness I would get from eating all those foods with hobbies in my real life” such as weightlifting, knitting, playing video games and, most recently, running. “So I found my happiness elsewhere, which is huge,” says Arnold.