and as a follow-up, why do our noses become congested in the first place? what’s the advantage?
In: 36
They don’t actually!
1st Q – Our breathing tubes are constantly kept moist and air moving against moist surfaces causes evaporation which causes cooling. So our brains interpret cold breathing tubes as clear, healthy, happy breathing tubes, its just a mental thing. Obviously when you are sick those tubes are coated with gunk and/or swollen which makes breathing harder AND prevents that evaporative cooling. Part of the sensation of having clogged breathing tubes is simply the lack of that cooling. Menthol (the active chemical your talking about in “minty”) chemically triggers your nerves to report “cold!” sensations, even though no cooling is actually happening, it’s just a reaction just like tasting a pepper triggers “HOT!” even though a chili pepper doesn’t actually warm you in any way. So when you smell something minty you are faking out your nerves to send “cold!” signals to your brain which tells you you are breathing well and healthy, but your not, it’s just a fake out. You’re still breathing as shittily as before.
2nd Q – Congestion is caused by a mixture of inflammation (your breathing tubes getting swollen) and the production of snot and mucus which clogs the tubes. The swelling is mostly a factor of your body responding to an infection and sending increased blood flow, nutrients, and immune cells to the area to fight the infection. The snot and mucus is they body’s way of gathering up the infected materials and ejecting them from the body (via sneezing or swallowing). Diseases that infect our breathing tubes have figured out that encouraging use to produce snot and sneeze is a great way of getting another person to breathe in our infected snot air and make them sick as well. So just like we hope to discover water on Mars to build rockets to fly back home, germs are hoping to find snot in our breathing tubes to make infections snot missiles so they can make other people sick.
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