For an hour, a day, or your life… Have you ever wondered how much saliva you produce? The answer can be extremely surprising.
On a normal day, the average person produces between 0.5 and 1.5 liters of saliva. If we average as low as 0.7 liters per day, this equates to about 255.5 liters of saliva per year. This translates into about 20,440 liters of saliva production over an average human lifespan of around 80 years. In other words, it is possible to fill a small swimming pool with the saliva that a person has produced throughout his life.
But why does a person produce so much saliva?
Saliva is a complex biofluid with many important roles in your mouth. For example, it contains the enzyme amylase, which breaks down starch, providing calcium and phosphate to help remineralize tooth enamel, and is key in defending against pathogenic microorganisms that enter your body from the oral cavity.
Saliva consists mostly of water (99 percent) and to a lesser extent a mixture of proteins, electrolytes and digestive enzymes (1 percent).
It is produced by the three main glands and numerous minor glands in your mouth. The three main glands, called the parotid, submandibular, and sublingual glands, provide 90 percent of the total saliva produced, while the remaining 10 percent is secreted by the minor glands.
In an unstimulated state (for example, the resting state when not eating), about two-thirds of the total saliva volume is produced by the submandibular glands. The parotid gland is activated under stimulus (usually with chewing or taste stimulus), and in this case it makes up about 50 percent of the saliva in the mouth. However, the sublingual glands contribute a small portion of saliva in both the unstimulated and the excited state.
2,000 years of attention
For over 2,000 years, saliva has held an important place in medical traditions around the world. Ancient practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine believed that saliva and blood were “brothers” because they came from the same source in the body. There are miracles involving saliva in the holy books, including the Bible. Even in the late nineteenth century, the purported healing properties of saliva were considered important by some physicians.
We no longer believe that saliva is a therapeutic agent, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a purpose in modern medicine. Today, saliva plays an important diagnostic tool role as it can provide important insights into the overall health of the body. Because saliva is made up of many components, it can contain a variety of disease signaling biomarkers that are useful for identifying diseases as well as monitoring and predicting disease progression.
In addition, the ability to easily take samples by non-invasive methods, unlike blood, makes it easier to analyze. There are even techniques to use saliva as an indicator of prostate cancer.
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