Why our mouths water

In one year, you could make enough saliva to fill two bath tubs. Saliva can help protect us against cavities holes in the teeth by washing our teeth with special salts. If you have a cut inside your mouth or lose a baby tooth, saliva can help you heal faster. It can also fight most nasty germs and makes it difficult for bad bacteria or bugs to stick and grow in our mouth. Read more: Curious Kids: how do tongues taste food? Saliva helps you enjoy the flavours in your food by helping your taste buds break food down into smaller bits.

Saliva even helps you talk by making it slimy enough for your cheeks, lips and tongue to slip and slide around your mouth to form sounds.

Follow us:. What Causes Excessive Saliva Production? Medication All medications come paired with some sort of side effects. Poisoning One of the more serious, yet rare, causes of hypersalivation is poisoning. Reserve your free Invisalign consultation during Invisalign week! This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Digestion begins as soon as you shovel a forkful of those mashed potatoes into your mouth and masticate or chew the food. Your mouth secretes saliva up to 1.

One of these enzymes, called salivary amylase, breaks down starches, and a new study finds that humans carry extra copies of the gene that encodes the enzyme, which may have helped spur human evolution. Most of our saliva is made up of water, 98 percent to be exact. The other two percent contains different enzymes, minerals and proteins, including mucus that help to prevent bad breath and kills germs.

Saliva also helps to stave off gum disease and tooth decay. Saliva assists in the breakdown of the food and drinks for proper digestion. It keeps the mouth moist which helps with chewing and swallowing. Saliva also helps to deliver a speedy recovery to open wounds. There are three glands, the salivary glands, that contribute to the production of saliva. The parotid, which is inside the cheeks, the sublingual, which is under the tongue, and the submandibular, which is near the jawbone.

These salivary glands work in sync with the hundreds of smaller glands within the mouth to produce up to 4 pints of saliva per day. The salivary ducts are very small tubes that bring saliva into the mouth from the salivary glands. Salivation occurs when salivary glands are triggered, sometimes by just the smell of food.