From saliva ‘pools’ to one of your strongest muscles – weird and wonderful facts about your mouth

WE use our mouths constantly.

We speak, breathe, chew, swallow, smile, make faces, stick out our tongues and much more!

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The mouth is also where the digestion process begins, as it is right at the beginning of the gastrointestinal tract.

So let’s discuss some weird and wonderful facts about the complex organ that is your mouth.

1. You produce a lot more saliva than you think

Saliva is produced from glands in the mouth, and even thinking about food, smelling it, or seeing it can be enough to get the juices flowing!

Saliva helps keep your mouth moist and helps protect your gums and teeth by removing waste from your mouth.

It is involved in digestion as it contains the enzyme amylase, which is involved in the breakdown of carbohydrates.

You produce on average approximately 0.5ml of saliva per minute, or 720 mls per day.

If we multiply this by 80 years, that’s around 21,000 liters of saliva produced during a lifetime, or enough to fill around 260 bathrooms.

Some people produce more, enough to fill two swimming pools!

2. Your teeth are unique

There are several parts of the body that are unique to each of us.

This includes your fingerprints, your iris (the colored part of the eye), and your teeth.

No one else has exactly the same teeth as you, which is why dental records are often used in forensic medicine to help solve crimes.

3. We’ve been brushing our teeth for millennia

The importance of brushing your teeth and dental hygiene has been part of human history since the Ancient Babylonians and the Ancient Egyptians.

Historians have discovered that they used weathered twigs to brush their teeth.

Fast forward to China in the 15th century^th century until the invention of the toothbrush made of bone or wood with bristles and then animal hair attached to brush teeth.

It wasn’t until the end of the 18th^th century since the most modern style toothbrush was invented in the United Kingdom.

4. Taste is complicated

Taste is mainly the sense of smell – hold your nose and the food will taste different.

Or think about how bland food is when you have a stuffy nose from a cold. The combination of smell and taste creates flavor.

You taste things through the taste buds on your tongue, which can identify salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami (salty) flavors.

But without saliva you wouldn’t taste it, as saliva acts as a solvent, dissolving substances for you to taste and transporting food particles around the tongue.

5. Your mouth is home to millions of bacteria

You may have heard about the gut microbiome, which is the bacteria we all carry in our intestines.

But what you may not know is that this includes the mouth.

In fact, your mouth contains more bacteria than there are people on Earth!

It is estimated that our mouth carries around 20 billion microbes from around 500-650 different species.

We are discovering more and more about the many important functions of the gut microbiome and the importance of protecting and cultivating good bacteria and a healthy microbiome.

6. Your mouth becomes hormonal

There are receptors for hormones like estrogen throughout the body, including in the mouth.

This means that after menopause, lower estrogen levels can cause mouth symptoms such as dry mouth, burning mouth syndrome, and even tooth movement.

Menstrual cycle hormones may also be involved with other symptoms.

For example, it is known that women of reproductive age can identify smells that are 11 times less concentrated (or weaker) than men.

Add to this the fact that about 35% of women are supertasters, meaning they have an extremely sensitive and heightened sense of taste and smell, compared to just 15% of men.

7. Your tongue is super strong

The little bumps you can see on the tongue are not taste buds, but papillae, which contain taste buds and heat receptors and are important for eating.

The tongue is made up of 8 muscles, four of which connect to the mouth and throat and the other four make up the tongue itself.

Your tongue is super strong. If you think about it, you won’t realize that your tongue gets tired like your legs do after a run.

The muscle is also extremely flexible, as it is able to extend and lengthen, twist, curl or even roll – although not everyone can do the latter!

It doesn’t get tired because it contains a lot of muscles, so there is a kind of built-in redundancy system.

8. Wisdom teeth don’t make you smart

It is believed that wisdom teeth are called wisdom teeth because they appear much later than other teeth, perhaps when we become a little wiser!

However, not everyone will have them, and this, again, is not linked to IQ.

Scientists think they developed due to our ancestors’ diet, which contained rough foods that required a lot of chewing, meaning teeth wore down more quickly, so perhaps the few extra teeth were useful.

9. Teeth are harder than bones

Diamonds may be the hardest natural substance on the planet, but teeth are quite tough.

In fact, tooth enamel is more resistant than bones.

Enamel makes up the outer part of the tooth, covering the slightly softer dentin that makes up most of the body of the tooth, and the central pulp that contains nerves and blood vessels.

The teeth are also much larger than the part you can see, with approximately 1/3 of the tooth hidden below the gums.

10. Some people have three sets of teeth

When you think of a baby smiling, you think of a big gummy smile, but some babies are born with teeth.

These are called natal teeth and babies may have one or more, although this is not very common, occurring in 1 in 2 or 3,000 babies, although the cause is unknown.

They are not the same as first teeth or baby teeth, they can be discolored and often have weak roots, which means they can be loose.

They are usually removed because they can cause problems with breastfeeding and run the risk of causing choking or other problems if they fall out. But whether or not they have teeth visible above the gums at birth, all 20 primary or baby teeth are already developing in your baby’s jaw!

One last myth – contrary to popular belief, people do not preferentially chew on the same side because they have the dominant hand. And yes, there was Completed research on this!