Something Smells Fishy: Why Your Nose Matters for Longevity

 This episode reveals why losing your sense of smell is more than a nuisance — it’s a meaningful marker of brain and overall health. Dr. Rod and Karen explain how the olfactory system and cranial nerves connect to the brainstem, balance, posture, and cognitive centers. 

Research links smell loss to higher disability, hospital use, and even early signs of Parkinson’s years before motor symptoms appear. The hosts stress the importance of testing smell, recognizing asymmetry between nostrils, and seeking a neurological evaluation when sniffing problems emerge. 

Practical context frames smell loss as an actionable early-warning sign, not inevitable aging. 

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Transcript

Dr. Rodney: Welcome to Stance for Health podcast with Dr. Rodney and Karen Worth, where becoming healthy is not complicated.

Control your health by focusing on six areas of life that we teach you so you finally have the energy you have to do what you want instead of being a victim of your age.

I have over 20 years experience working as a chiropractor and Karen is an author, speaker, and longevity coach. We’ve seen how a tiny change in your habits today can open up your life to a powerful future. Start today and take your Stance for Health.

Karen: So glad you joined us today for Stance for Health, because today we're going to talk about something you probably don't even think about. Your sense of smell. We were talking about a possible title and Doc came up with Something smells fishy.

Karen: Isn't that great?

Dr. Rodney: Yeah.

Karen: So when we think about smelling, it's usually associated with smelling a good, wonderful smell of food. The different things like a perfume that reminds us of someone or the somebody that has bl or something fishy smell, maybe that someone cooked fish in the microwave at work and didn't clean it out. All of those things.

People are losing their sense of smell and not even realizing that it's important. So 22% of adults live with some form of loss of smell, and there's 5% that lose it completely, but they don't recognize it. They're like, okay, I can't smell. That's just part of getting older. And the thing that this research is showing that it is a marker of overall health, not just a minor inconvenience.

And so this podcast is dedicated to showing you why it's important and what you can do about it.

So why should a person be concerned if they're losing their sense of smell?

Dr. Rodney: Oh, I love this question. So a lot of you are thinking of something you can't see. And yet if you just considered these. These things called cranial nerves. What are those? 

Well, they're nerves that go in and out of the cranial vault. We call it just basically your skull. Go in and out of the skull by themselves. And underneath here, I don't know if you can see them or not, but for those of you that can't see it, this is obviously an audio podcast. There's little Roman numerals all up and down this thing that looks like a stem coming straight out of, say, like broccoli or cauliflower.

And those little areas would be something like, let's say you have something called a motor end plate that's fancy for where your nerve comes in. And stimulates your muscle.

Well, think of that in reverse. Think of these things as being like the muscle that gets stimulated. These are actually the parts of your brain that get stimulated. And if you don't stimulate a muscle, what happens to the muscle?

Karen: It gets weaker and eventually atrophies, which

Dr. Rodney: is why we call sitting disease a disease.

Karen: Right, right.

Dr. Rodney: And so this would be something like you're not going. The whole idea behind these cranial nerves is it really helps you figure out where you are in your environment better, along with a balance and posture, facial expression, and looking to the left, looking to the right, converging, looking down, your nose, looking up, looking down. All of those are in about the same area known as the brainstem. That area needs to be stimulated, and it needs novel stimulation. We don't just need the same stimulation over and over again. We need variance. And so that would be akin to going to the gym and not just working out your biceps. Well, if you don't do tricep presses, you're not going to have very big arms. You're just going to have big biceps and be Popeye. Yeah, you look like Popeye to some degree, and in fact, worse, because you'd only have muscles on the front of your arm.

Karen: So let me ask you this question. Why would this be linked to increased mortality risk?

Dr. Rodney: It's sort of like the chicken or the egg here, I think because if you're not getting the kind of stimulation that you need, that might mean that you're less social. It might also mean that you're not getting much movement. You're not using your nervous system to see things. You're not using your nervous system to be able to tell where you are in your environment, because your environment's too predict a room where your computer is or that warm fuzzy chair in the corner that you sit in and watch tv, rather than going out, being with your grandkids or being out with friends.

Karen: Maybe it's also because you stop going out, you stop eating, because food doesn't taste good anymore.

Dr. Rodney: That's one of those chicken or the egg sort of things. If your food doesn't taste good, it's because you haven't stimulated your gustatory centers in a while in your brain.

Karen: So could that explain then, that smell loss goes alongside greater disability, hospital use, and even early death?

We could say death because you didn't smell the gas. You know, that's an extreme that we link to having an explosion at our house or a fire. But it also has to do with the fact that it predicts other more serious things, such as Parkinson's.

Dr. Rodney: Right. And that goes to the. The basal cell issues along with, you know, the other really important things in that area like basal nuclei and the substantia nigra. Those are all inputs. There's all these different parts of the same stream that get polluted. Really, it's about us being active to for our whole lives and having purpose our whole lives. Because one of the things I find that's interesting is that a lot of these problems we have, we have them a lot of times we either don't know to test them or we don't think they're important. And smell is definitely one of them. One that's right next door to the olfactory lobe or the frontal lobe. Just beneath that, as you go backwards, is the optic chiasmo. Does that sound familiar? And just below that is cranial nerve 4. So that's where your eyes turn and look and converge and look left and right and then obliquely. So a lot of the people can't look down their nose. They can't converge, or if they do, they can't do it for very long. Along with that, another cranial nerve that we haven't mentioned yet that's in this area is cranial nerve viii. And you talk about people having balance issues and being a fall risk. These are all cousins. In fact, they're brothers and sisters. They're that close.

Karen: And so they're very close inside the brain. Feeding to the brain stem, or what this paper said is that people that developed full blown Parkinson's had lost their sense of smell five years before. So it could be an early warning sign, but we're not measuring it.

Dr. Rodney: I love that.

Karen: Now you do something when people come. By the way, if you're in North Texas, please come get a neurological evaluation. We do it for posture, but it is very detailed. And that is one of the way you test the cranial nerves.

Dr. Rodney: We just do them basically from 1 to 12 when people come in. Now, some of them are a little bit harder to test. But the ones that are most important to our study right now, that one's pretty easy. Just hand somebody an essential oil that smells like mint or smells like something familiar, they're off. And that's a sign that something could be going. A lot of times that's someone that's several decades into life.

Karen: And what you're talking about too is sometimes you're able to say they can smell it on one side and not the other. So that's beginning to show the imbalance already.

Dr. Rodney: And, and that's sometimes even third and fourth decades of life that I've seen that.

Karen: So when we're looking at how it's linked to our mental health and our overall longevity, we talked about diet because I noticed that with my mom and even my brother that both had dementia, that food stopped tasting good to them.

Dr. Rodney: Stopped tasting good. Yeah.

Karen: And smell is very associated to taste. How is that again?

Dr. Rodney: They're brothers and sisters.

Karen: Okay.

Dr. Rodney: One of them ways to tell neurologically that you're getting better is that, let's say a problem goes from far away from your core or far away from your central nervous system, brain and spinal cord to something closer to the midline, Something close as you look at the brain stem, you get closer to the center of the brain or the pons or the medulla oblongata. You're getting closer to something that you're likely not going to lose as quickly. It's closer. It could be that smell would be the first to go because look how far away it is. Even though it's a immediate into the brain, into the olfactory bulb of the brain.

Karen: That makes sense.

Dr. Rodney: It's further away from the center of your brain or the deeper parts of the brain.

Karen: Smell loss isn't necessarily just a nose problem or sinus, although that can be part of.

Could be a signal that something deeper has shifted in your brain, your breathing patterns in your daily environment. So what we have to see is that this is something to be aware of and to start taking some specific steps. I already said come and see us because if you get an evaluation here at Stance for Health, that will be part of it. And basically, why don't you pick some familiar non irritating sense you already have at home. Coffee. See, I love that. My barista, which by the way, if you don't know,

Dr. Rodney and I are married and he gets up before I do and makes the coffee. And so I will celebrate now when I wake up to the smell of coffee. But what about citrus or soap or something that's healthy for you to smell and just see if that begins to change over time. Awareness is a big part of this.

Let's look at then what you can do for training your sense of smell. I've never heard of that.

Dr. Rodney: I love this in the very same way that you can actually resensitize your brain to visual stimulation or you can diminish overstimulation like the blue light overstimulation. If we've talked about that in prior podcasts, this cranial nerve will actually reconnect it's the part of the brain that can reconnect to the original parts. I wanted to say this earlier but it's in terms of Think of it like it's again it's like working a muscle. The parts of your brain need variation and need stimulation. And so it's no different. You can train your eyes to converge again. You can train your eyes to look left and look right. It might burn a little bit at first. Just like a workout, you know the olfactory sense, the bulb itself will get reconnected. All you gotta do is retrain it and start smelling different things. 

Karen: Isn't that amazing? Now we mentioned the essential oils. What this research is showing that if you are suspecting that you need to increase this particular cranial nerve, you would pick four distinct fragrances, let's say rose, eucalyptus, clove and lemon. And it says to sniff them for 20 seconds twice a day. Maybe when you first wake up. And maybe most people say yes, I want to sniff the coffee, one of them.

Dr. Rodney: I want to smell like a wake-up.

Karen: Make coffee one of them. And then have three, three essential oils next to your bed. That's a good thing. Now not everybody has a built in barista like I do. I am totally blessed. The thing is this is also about awareness and that's part of what we do with posture. And when I get to explain the neuro rehab, it's more about the fact that you begin to be aware. How are your eyes tracking? Are, are you depending on your dominant eye? So now I'm going to be thinking about the smells and doing something about that and help with that framework of increasing the smelling.

Dr. Rodney: So I'm under if I'm understanding this right so far what we've said is we need variation, we need novel stimulation. So specifically speaking of smells, could it be that we might have a diffuser in the house with these different scents?

Karen: I like that. And be aware if you don't smell them. That's why you would go more with the essential oil itself. So let's summarize. This has been fascinating.

Dr. Rodney: It really is a fascinating study.

Karen: Stance for Health is about things that you can do to improve your longevity. And here's a new one. So we'll be sniffing a lot more essential oils. First thing we started out talking about 22% of adults have some degree of smell loss. That's a high percentage, that's too high. And it appears years before the serious problems like memory decline, heart disease or reduced longevity become obvious. And so the loss of smell then is linked, like you were saying, to social isolation.

Dr. Rodney: Right. All the other contributors to early death. Right. Lack of motion, lack of social contact, poor diet. Poor diet. And if you're not going out to get your food or gardening to get your food, you're not going to smell the same things outside that you smell inside, and vice versa. You're going to have a lot more variation outside, even if you're in the big city.

Karen: True. We want to look at. If you see that you have a loss of smell, begin to check for neurodegenerative diseases, because it's not just a harmless part of aging.

So begin regular smell checks. Okay, now that's the thing. Not under your armpit because you can't smell yourself. Right. How about some training with essential oils? And then one part that we didn't cover is how important breathing and sleep patterns are to. To where you're breathing through your nose and not just mouth breathing, because that's so important.

Dr. Rodney: That is such a good point, because if you're not breathing through your nose, you're not going to smell it. You're not going to smell the world around you as readily.

Karen: And a lot of people not only do mouth breathing at night, they also spend most of the day unconsciously doing that.

Dr. Rodney: And shallow breathing.

Karen: Yes.

Dr. Rodney: Right.

Karen: So deep breathing is very important. And so this is something you can grab ahold of and you can begin to make some changes. And we're excited to bring these types of articles to you because we want you to take your stance for health.

Dr. Rodney: Thank you so much for listening today.

Thank you for joining us at Stance for Health podcast, where getting healthy and staying that way are not as complicated as you might think Subscribe now and discover steps and small changes that can increase your energy and open the door to vibrant health and longevity. If this podcast has been helpful, please write a review.We'll see you next time.