SALIVA
(Part 3)
Is It a Problem to Have Viscous Saliva?
It’s absolutely a problem to have viscous, sticky, thick, and mucus-like saliva. It ranges from mild discomfort to difficulties in swallowing or even breathing. It’s like you’re choking in your own spit that has the consistency of coagulated phlegm.
It’s also hard to expel because of how sticky it is. It sticks to your gums and teeth like glue or tasteless taffy.
It’s a nightmare to handle even in its mildest of forms, which is at the very least annoying to deal with. If you’ve ever been sick, then viscous saliva feels like your mouth is full of snot or mucus even though you don’t have colds.
Instead of feeling like it’s hard to breathe, you have difficulty swallowing, leading you to rather expel or spit out the phlegmatic saliva that isn’t really phlegm, but it acts like it.
Letting your saliva viscosity remain at such a high point can lead to other oral complications, or at least indicate the existence of other diseases of which it’s a symptom of, such as poor oral hygiene and maintenance.
Sticky or viscous saliva increases your chances of tooth decay, dental caries, teeth discoloration, enamel degeneration, tooth root infection, and nerve damage.
Free-flowing, thin, and watery saliva works as intended when it comes to washing out bacteria from our mouth and teeth without rinsing with tap water from time to time. It’s your body’s personal oral washing fluid to reduce infections and gum disease.
To prevent your mouth full of viscous saliva from suffering any acute or advanced oral diseases, you should find ways to resolve it.
Effective Home Remedies for Viscous Saliva
- You can also try out home remedies first to see if that can water down your spit back to normal. But to be on the safe side, talk to a doctor for an evaluation ASAP.
- Drink a Lot of Water: You can drink plenty of fluids like coffee, tea, juice, soup, and so forth, but your best bet is to drink plain water. Sweetened drinks like juice and soda can worsen your condition. Specifically, drink cold water for best results.
- Quit Smoking: Are you a cigarette smoker? Or even a marijuana smoker. Vape smokers might also be included with the smoking group. Quit smoking cigarettes or e-cigs and marijuana joints to increase saliva production and reduce viscosity.
- Avoid Sugary Foods (Sometimes): The reason why we recommend you drink non-sugary liquids or eat non-sugary fruits is that sometimes it’s the sugar (or starch) content of your mouth that’s causing viscous saliva, bacterial growth, or even halitosis.
What Else to Avoid:
- Avoid consuming hard raw fruits or vegetables, potato chips and pretzels, the toughest cuts of meat like barbecued steak, chewy candies, chewing tobacco, cigarettes, alcohol, and hot/spicy/acidic foods.
- Chew Unsweetened Chewing Gum: Sometimes, simply chewing bubblegum or a mint gum can stimulate the production of saliva, thus reducing saliva viscosity and watering down your coagulating, sticky spit.
- Eat Sugarless Hard Candies and Suck on Ice Chips: Aside from drinking cold water to lower spit thickness, you can also suck on ice chips to get your cold water from there. There’s also the option to suck on hard mint candies (preferably sugarless).
- Eat Very Sweet or Very Sour Foods and Beverages: If your trip to the dentist determined that it isn’t bacteria or poor hygiene that’s causing your dry mouth, you can try sucking on sweet hard candies or lollipops as well as sour gum balls or sour patch candies to stimulate saliva production and reduce viscosity.
- Eat Citrus Fruits or Drink Citrus Juice: Eat a lemon or an orange. Peel them up and eat them. Oranges taste better while lemons might leave too much of a sour aftertaste. Regardless, they’re also great saliva production stimulators.
- Drink Cranberry Juice or Lemonade to Thin Out Saliva: Thin out your thick or viscous saliva by drinking cranberry juice or lemonade (sweetened or unsweetened depending on the cause of the viscous saliva).
- Eating Smaller Portions: Aside from having a diet with less sugary food, you should take smaller bites from what you eat as well. Also chew your food well. Masticate carefully and wash the food by sipping liquids with meals. Moisten what you eat to make them easier to swallow.
- Brush Your Teeth and Floss: Reduce bacterial growth and infection risk by practicing good oral hygiene. Brush twice daily and floss before brushing to prevent bacterial buildup and infection, which contributes to viscous saliva.
- Avoid Alcoholic Mouthwashes: While alcohol can kill bacteria, it might not necessarily thin out thick or viscous saliva depending on what’s making it thick in the first place. Therefore, avoid alcohol or even store-bought mouthwashes with alcohol in them.
- Use Steam Bowl Therapy: Like with asthmatics who have to deal with suffocating phlegm in their lungs, patients with viscous spit can thin their saliva out by leaning over a bowl of hot steamy water with a towel covering your head. It’s good enough to loosen viscous saliva, mucus, and phlegm!
- Invest in a Humidifier: Your mouth might be dry, and your saliva might be viscous because you’re in an office setting and you’re sitting in front of the A/C for too long. Combat the dry air by using a cool-mist humidifier in your offices or rooms to moisten the atmosphere.