What is saliva?

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Even if you haven’t had any water to drink for a little while, your mouth always seems to still have some water in it! You’re probably used to referring to that water as saliva, or maybe “spit.” Saliva is the wet and slimy liquid that helps to keep your mouth moist. It’s made up of mostly water and a few other natural chemicals found inside your body.

Saliva has a few main jobs, such as helping you to talk more easily and making it easier for you to chew and taste your food! Saliva also helps you to start breaking down your food before your food even reaches your stomach!

Polly want a cracker?

If you want to see for yourself the way saliva starts to break down your food before it reaches your stomach, try this experiment -- all you need is a salty cracker and a little bit of time!

Take the salty cracker, and start chewing it up like you normally would. However, instead of swallowing the cracker once it's chewed, keep on chewing! Chew for longer than you usually would without swallowing the cracker. Chew, and chew, and chew for a long time until you notice that instead of the cracker tasting salty, it starts to taste sweet!

When your stomach digests food like crackers, it breaks the cracker down into little units of energy in the form of sugars. The reason the cracker starts to taste sweet is that your saliva is breaking down the cracker the way your stomach would if you'd swallowed it, so it's starting to turn into sugary bits of energy while it's still in your mouth!