Saliva
Perhaps only people who have lived without it truly understand the great gift that is a perpetually moist mouth - Melissa Glim
HWN Suggests
The Mouth’s Guard
Humans secrete two kinds of saliva, stimulated and unstimulated, no more alike than most siblings. The prettier child is stimulated saliva. It comes from the parotid glands, between cheek and ear. When a plate of spaghetti carbonara makes your mouth water, that’s stimulated saliva. It makes up 70 to 90 percent of the two to three pints of saliva each of us generates daily. Stimulated saliva looks, tastes and flows like water — it is, in fact, 99 percent water with some proteins and minerals. Each person’s saliva contains minerals in unique proportions.
The main digestive enzyme in stimulated saliva is amylase, which breaks starches down into simple sugars that the body can make use…
Featured
Is Saliva the Next Frontier in Cancer Detection?
Scientists are finding tumor signals in spit that could be key to developing diagnostic tests for various types of cancer.
Articles of Interest
Restoring the Flow of Precious Saliva
It’s easy to take our saliva for granted. Most people have so much of it that they think nothing of spitting it out into a trash can when they finish chewing a stick of gum. Perhaps only people who have lived without it truly understand the great gift that is a perpetually moist mouth.
The Science of Saliva
Whether it’s salmon sizzling on the grill or pizza fresh from the oven, you probably have a favorite food that makes your mouth water. But what if your mouth couldn’t water—couldn’t make enough saliva? When salivary glands stop working and the mouth becomes dry, either from disease or as a side effect of medical treatment, the once-routine act of eating can become a major challenge.
Why do we make saliva?
The ingredients in saliva are complicated, but that 1% is important. Saliva can help protect us against cavities (holes in the teeth) by washing our teeth with special salts. And because it’s slippery, saliva stops the bugs that create holes from sticking to our teeth. We have hundreds of little salivary glands dotted all around our lips and cheeks. We also have six big glands (made of hundreds of little glands) in our mouth that produce most of our saliva; four are under our tongue and one on each side of our cheeks.
