Modern medicine once thought that saliva was only the digestive juice secreted by exocrine glands in the mouth. Its function is to help digest and stir wet food. However, the research results in recent years show that although saliva is not immortal water, it is not only digestive juice, the function of saliva and the benefits of swallowing saliva frequently:
The first is immune function. Fumio Shimizu, a professor at Tohoku University in Japan, collected saliva samples from 22 healthy people aged 2-40 when he was studying AIDS. Each person's saliva sample was mixed with 0.5 ml of saliva containing HIV and kept at 37C 1 hour. It was found that 17 samples contained 99% HIV.
Has been destroyed; Further study found that this is the inactivation of saliva lysozyme. It is not only the bane of HIV, but also can kill some pathogenic bacteria that enter the mouth.
Secondly, it has recently been found that saliva can also transform a variety of carcinogens into harmless substances. Professor Nishiooka of Japan believes that if food can be chewed in the mouth for more than 30 seconds, peroxidase, hydrogen peroxide and other 13 enzymes in saliva can basically eliminate trace carcinogens such as nitroso compounds and aflatoxin that may exist in food. This shows that saliva is a unique anticancer agent for human body.
Thirdly, salivary glands can also produce a variety of bioactive substances to participate in regulating life activities. For example, nerve growth factor secreted by salivary gland has high efficiency in stimulating the growth and differentiation of sensory sympathetic nerve; There is a kind of protein called epithelial growth factor in saliva, which can promote the growth of epidermis and epithelial tissue. In the past, people used to apply saliva to the wound to heal it. This is the unintentional use of saliva to sterilize and promote wound growth and healing. Epithelial growth factor (EGF) has been used as a drug to treat various body surface injuries. Most notably, the parotid gland can secrete a hormone that can regulate blood sugar. It has been proved that parotid gland is an important tissue outside pancreas, which can increase the level of insulin in blood. Some experts are optimistic that if we find a way to strengthen parotid gland function, we may find another way to treat diabetes.
Finally, people invented many methods to monitor health and diagnose diseases by measuring the composition and changes of saliva. Because the composition of saliva is very similar to serum, the change of saliva composition also reflects the disease and health status. Saliva detection is very popular with doctors and patients because it is convenient and painless. For example, saliva samples can be used instead of blood samples to detect AIDS patients and HIV carriers. The content of bacteriolytic alcohol in saliva can reflect the quality of living environment very sensitively. After living in a room with poor sanitary conditions for 15 days, the lysozyme in saliva dropped to the normal level of 1/4. The content of carbon dioxide in saliva of patients with intestinal ascaris increased, and the acidity increased. It is more sanitary and convenient to detect ascaris than to check stool. Measuring the ratio of sodium to potassium in saliva can distinguish whether sympathetic nerve or parasympathetic nerve is hypertonic. Elevated Lipase in Saliva of Patients with Hypertension and Renal Insufficiency: Elevated Amylase in Saliva of Patients with Mumps and Gallbladder Fibrosis.