Why does your saliva start to taste like blood if you ride your bike up a hill or run fast for a while?
Edit: Thanks for the Awards and the nice Comments.
Also blew up bigger than I thought!
In: Biology
There are many theories but no one knows why, some of the explanations here are a likely culprit but overall there likely isn’t a single root cause for everyone.
Not everyone experiences it, and it seems not to be directly correlated to your level of fitness either.
Also not everyone experiences it due to stress levels alone for example I only experience it when running in cold weather, the likely explanation for me is that colder dryer weather might cause more raptures in blood vessels in the throat, nose and tear ducts which means more blood cells get funneled into my mouth as I exhale or through the mucus.
P.S. some people mentioned metallic taste before throwing up, the metallic taste before throwing up isn’t related to this, that happens every time you are about to throw up and it’s due to a reflex trigger that increases saliva production to provide lubrication to reduce choking and to protect your throat and mouth from your gastric acid and any thing you might have swallowed that didn’t or couldn’t be digested (historically and even today some animals including mammals throw up bones that they swallow and also may throw up other particulates like sand or small rocks that they swallow intentionally or unintentionally during feeding, so the vomit reflex is likely shared across all of mammals just like the mammalian diving reflex).
You could quite likely cause that sensation at will by thinking about throwing up.
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