When it comes to maintaining oral health, most of us think about brushing, flossing, and visiting the dentist regularly. But one of the strongest allies for keeping your teeth in great shape is saliva.
We often overlook the benefits of saliva, focusing instead on how gross it looks. But this essential fluid plays a huge role in both oral and overall health. Saliva helps you keep your mouth moist, making it easier to chew, swallow, and talk. Plus, it acts like a natural cleaner, washing away unwanted debris and keeping your mouth in good shape.
In this blog, we discuss the benefits of saliva for your oral and overall health.
Saliva Helps in the Digestion Process
When you eat, your food mixes with saliva, which comes from different glands in your mouth. There are three main pairs of salivary glands: the parotid, submandibular, and sublingual glands, along with many tiny ones that also produce saliva.
Your body usually keeps producing saliva all the time, even if you’re not eating. Over a day, you can produce about 1 to 1.5 liters of saliva. When something touches your gums, tongue, or the lining of your mouth, or when you chew, your saliva production increases. It doesn’t have to be food; just having dry sand in your mouth or moving your jaw and tongue can make your mouth produce more saliva. This natural reaction to touch in your mouth that boosts saliva flow is called the unconditioned salivary reflex.
When you learn that a specific sight, sound, or smell is linked to food, just seeing or hearing that stimulus can make your mouth water. This learned behavior is known as the conditioned salivary reflex.
Saliva assists in the breakdown of some of the food that is chewed and swallowed as it travels through the alimentary canal. Saliva contains an enzyme called amylase that initiates the digestion of starch by breaking it down into maltose, a sugar. Amylase is not present in the saliva of animals like dogs and cats because they don’t consume much starch in their natural diet. For us to taste food, it needs to be dissolved, and saliva does just that.
The steady flow of saliva keeps your mouth and teeth moist and helps keep them clean by washing away food scraps and other particles. It also prevents bacteria from growing by removing materials they could feed on. Saliva has a protective role too; it contains lysozyme, an enzyme that can break down some bacteria. It also helps the body get rid of certain substances like lead, mercury, and some medications.
While we can live without saliva, not having it can cause problems like dry mouth, bad oral hygiene from too many bacteria, a reduced sense of taste, and trouble speaking.
It Changes the Flavor of Food
At first, saliva might seem pretty dull, just a way to wet our food. But it interacts with everything we put in our mouths. Even though it’s mostly water, it plays a big role in the flavors we taste and how much we enjoy our meals.
Saliva also acts as a middleman and translator, affecting how food moves in our mouths and how it hits our taste buds. New findings suggest that how saliva interacts with food might even influence our food preferences.
Saliva isn’t super salty, which lets you really enjoy the saltiness of a potato chip. It’s also not very acidic, so a little squeeze of lemon can wake up the flavors. Saliva also has water and salivary proteins, which help smooth out each bite of food. Its enzymes, like amylase and lipase, get the digestion process going. This moisture also dissolves the flavors into the saliva so they can reach and connect with the taste buds.
When you eat, you don’t just taste the food. You actually taste a mix of the food and saliva. For instance, you can only taste a sweet or sour flavor in a bite if that flavor can get to the taste buds, and for that to happen, it needs to go through the layer of saliva on the tongue.
Saliva also influences the smells that help us taste food. When we chew, some flavor molecules mix with our saliva, while others float up to our nose, where we can smell them thanks to various receptors. This means that people with different amounts or types of saliva, especially those containing certain proteins called mucins, might taste the same food or drink quite differently.
Saliva also plays a big part in how you feel textures in your mouth. For example, that dry feeling you get when drinking red wine or eating unripe fruit isn’t because the wine is drying you out. Instead, it’s due to tannins in the wine that cause proteins in your saliva to clump together, making it less effective at keeping your mouth moist.
Saliva Helps With Your Immunity
Saliva does some surprising things for our immune system. It is actually a key player in keeping us healthy in two main ways.
First, it helps form a layer of mucus in our mouths. This layer acts like a shield, stopping harmful germs from getting into our bodies. Saliva is packed with plasma B cells that produce Immunoglobulin A antibodies, which keep that mucus layer solid and support our overall health.
Second, saliva helps control our immune response. At times, our body incorrectly sees harmless proteins in foods as a danger, and as a result, inflammation and allergic reactions occur in our mouth and throat. Your salivary glands produce specialized cells that suppress your immune system to avoid overreacting to harmless food proteins.
Overall, saliva is remarkably important for health. We can use it to digest food and cope with allergens. Keeping up with regular dental care is important for maintaining a healthy mouth and ensuring your salivary glands work properly.
Saliva Acts As a Lubricant For Your Mouth
Keeping your mouth lubricated is really important for your overall oral health. When your salivary glands don’t produce enough saliva, it can cause dry mouth, which raises your likelihood of developing dental problems.
Without saliva, you risk injuring yourself just by using your teeth. Rubbing dry teeth against dry cheeks or tongue for too long can lead to ulcers and mouth sores. That’s why dry, chapped lips are one of the first symptoms of dehydration. It’s like your body sends a signal through your mouth to let you know it needs more water.
Dry mouth can happen for several reasons, like breathing through your mouth, smoking, being dehydrated, or taking certain medications. By staying hydrated, you help avoid irritation in your mouth and on your tongue.
It Helps to Prevent Cavities
Saliva acts as a natural defense against tooth decay. It plays a big role and can even help repair your enamel. After consuming food or drink, particularly sugary or acidic food, plaque bacteria release acids that can attack tooth enamel. Saliva balances out these harmful acids and, subsequently, the pH of your oral cavity.
The balance is vital because it stops the acidic environment from triggering demineralization, which is the first step towards enamel erosion and cavities. Saliva helps to balance these harmful acids and controls your mouth’s pH level.
This balancing act is important because it prevents the acidic environment that can lead to demineralization, which is the first step toward enamel erosion and cavities. If saliva didn’t continuously neutralize these acids, your teeth would always be under threat, raising the chances of decay and making you more likely to need serious dental work.
Saliva plays a key role in fixing early tooth decay before it becomes a bigger problem. It has important minerals like phosphate and calcium, which help build enamel. When enamel loses these minerals due to acid (a process known as demineralization), saliva steps in to replace them. Saliva adds these essential minerals back to the tooth to strengthen the enamel. This way, saliva can reverse early enamel wear before cavities appear.
Not only does saliva protect and repair your teeth, but it also works as a natural cleanser of the mouth. The constant flow of saliva rinses away food particles and harmful bacteria from your gums and teeth. This cleaning provides less opportunity for plaque to accumulate and cause sticky deposits that promote tooth decay and gum disease. By perpetually rinsing your mouth, saliva keeps the oral environment cleaner, ultimately decreasing the chance of gum disease and decay.
Saliva Can Heal Wounds in the mouth
You may think of saliva as gross, but it does have some surprising healing benefits. There’s a special protein in saliva called histatin that scientists have been looking into because of how well it can help heal wounds.
So, every time you develop a sore or cut in your mouth, the saliva helps out by providing that special protein, which can really speed up the healing process.
Saliva Plays a Crucial Role in Balancing Good and Bad Microbes in Your Mouth
Saliva is important for balancing harmful and beneficial microbes in your mouth because it contains mucins and proteins that disassemble, aggregate, and adhere to specific bacteria. Mucins promote a decreased adherence of bacteria to surfaces in the mouth, which also limits the opportunity for bacteria to cluster. This protects the health of the oral microbiome and inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria responsible for cavities.
It Helps to Form Pellicle
When dental erosion happens, the minerals in your teeth dissolve, which softens the surface and can cause permanent damage. Saliva is beneficial because it forms a protective layer called pellicle on your teeth. It acts as a protective layer against enamel erosion. The pellicle mostly contains proteins and minerals and forms another layer of protection between your enamel. So, when your enamel comes in contact with acid in the mouth, the pellicle slows down the erosion of enamel.
Brushing your teeth will have the potential to wear down the pellicle. That is why dentists recommend giving it a little time after eating/drinking before you brush. You should also avoid consuming acidic foods or drinks right after brushing. You should also avoid consuming acidic foods or drinks right after brushing. Plus, don’t brush too many times a day. After you brush, it takes around 2 hours for the pellicle to rebuild itself.
Saliva is Useful in Making Diagnoses
Dentists, doctors, and researchers use saliva for diagnostics because of its immense potential. By sampling saliva instead of urine or blood, they can effectively find various biomarkers like proteins, hormones, electrolytes, antibodies, and RNA/DNA that help predict or identify diseases.
Using saliva has several benefits. It’s easy to access, noninvasive, and many patients prefer it over giving blood or urine samples. Plus, it usually delivers quicker results and is more affordable. Collecting saliva also lowers the risk of spreading infections compared to blood collection. The process is straightforward, painless, and can be done repeatedly without causing discomfort. Since it doesn’t need special training or equipment, diagnostics using saliva could be done at home or in dental clinics, making it easier for patients who struggle to access preventive care for personal, logistical, or financial reasons.
Salivary diagnostics can do a lot, including:
- Help in the detection of viral diseases like HIV and hepatitis
- Using chairside testing with “lab-on-a-chip” technology to find oral fluid markers linked to good health and diseases like Sjögren’s syndrome
- Offering portable tests for drugs like cocaine, alcohol, and opiates, plus monitoring medications like methadone and certain anticonvulsants
- Determining salivary protein concentrations to help diagnose, treat, and monitor breast cancer. For instance, doctors might recommend regular saliva tests for women who are healing from breast cancer to check if their cancer is in remission
- Keeping track of how well treatments for anxiety and depression are working
- Measuring hormone quantities, including estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and cortisol. That is particularly crucial for estradiol, which can indicate risks for premature births and low birth weight in babies
- Providing a saliva test kit for immediate use that targets markers for gum disease, salivary gland issues, cavities, infections, diabetes, pancreatic cancer, steroids, kidney diseases, and inflammation related to heart and lung diseases
Find a Trusted Dentist Near Me
Saliva plays a big role in keeping our mouths and teeth healthy. A lack of saliva in the mouth can lead to issues. So, if you see any change at all in your saliva production, it’s best to see a dentist as soon as possible.
At The Hawthorne Dentist, our goal is to keep patients comfortable. We’re proud to provide quality and affordable dental treatment in Hawthorne, CA. We will take care of your oral health concerns and provide useful tips to improve your oral health. Call 310-775-2557 to schedule your next dental appointment with us.
