Air travel messes with your body in really strange ways
Airplanes are rife with health dangers, and the risks are greater than just picking up the common cold: Flying can trip up your taste buds, make your limbs swell and even make you more emotional.
“It sounds strange, but I never order tomato juice unless I’m on an airplane,” Dr. Benjamin Tweel, an ear, nose and throat specialist and assistant professor of otolaryngology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai tells The Post. “It just tastes so good on a flight.”
There may be real cause for those cravings. In 2010, Lufthansa Airlines commissioned a study to find out why it was selling as much tomato juice as beer. In 2015, Cornell researchers also looked into why umami (meaning “savoriness” in Japanese) tastes so good at 30,000 feet. The first study pointed to cabin pressure conditions affecting taste buds in a manner similar to what happens when you have a cold. The second found that the background noise on an airplane (that humming white noise we are all so familiar with) enhances umami flavors like those found in tomatoes, making them taste even better. Sweet flavors were dulled, and savory was enhanced.
“There’s a connection between taste and smell, and studies suggest a great percentage of taste is actually smell,” Tweel says. “Other studies suggest when there’s decreased humidity, then your sense of smell is also decreased, and airplanes have very low humidity.”
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Or it could all be in your head.
“Flying involves a lot of anxiety and worry,” says Curtis Reisinger, a psychologist with Northwell Health. “Essentially, you’re at a heightened level of alertness and arousal, so everything is felt more intensely.”
If you’ve watched a sad movie on a plane, and you’ve found yourself crying more hysterically than you normally would, next time, you can just blame the airplane. Reisinger likens the sensation to being in a haunted house during Halloween.
“When you’re in a dark, spooky place and someone comes up behind you and startles you, it seems even scarier because your senses are much more heightened and aware,” he says. “It’s the same when you’re on an airplane.”
Reisinger also says this amplified sense of worry could be what’s actually impacting your senses of taste and smell, perhaps instead of — or in conjunction with — the previously discovered factors like cabin pressure and noise levels.
“If you’re anxious or frightened, that can dull your ability to taste foods you normally enjoy,” Reisinger says. “Physiologically, our focus has now shifted from the food sensations to the heightened sense of threat.”
There is one symptom of flying that you’re definitely not imagining: swollen limbs.
“The limbs swell when you sit for a prolonged period of time and the ankle isn’t moving,” says Dr. Ettore Vulcano, chief of orthopedic foot and ankle surgery at Mount Sinai West. “The ankle is important because it pumps the fluids away from the legs back to the heart.”
Vulcano says that if you’ve been sitting for four or more hours, the swelling will start to kick in. This increases in people who are elderly, diabetic, have varicose veins, and those who recently had surgery, especially in the abdomen or legs, he says.
One simple solution is to wear compression socks while flying, which “squeeze the fluids that would otherwise accumulate in the legs” or just get up and walk down the plane’s aisle, Vulcano says. But, if going for a walk isn’t feasible on your too-crowded flight, you can help reduce swelling without even standing up.
“If you are sitting down, whether on a plane or at your desk, just move the ankle up and down, and activate the pumping mechanism,” he says.
