eli5: Why does your mouth water when you see something delicious?

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It’s always something I have thought about. Is it lubricating our mouth?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes it is.

When you’re eating, your mouth needs to make each bite soggy and slippery enough to easily swallow. To do this, it makes saliva fast.

It would be a waste to always be making saliva this fast. And you couldn’t sleep without it running all over. So instead there’s a “speed control” and your saliva production is only set to “high” when necessary – right before and during actually eating.

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