Earwax is of two types, dry and wet, and curiously it depends on genetic inheritance. Thus, most Caucasians, Blacks, and South Americans have moist, oily, slimy, tan-colored earwax, while Asians and Native Americans also have slimy, dry, brittle, gray cerumen.
The nose is another story. Of all the cavities in contact with the outside, it is the most hospitable: warm, well ventilated, humid and provides almost unlimited amounts of food thanks to the nasal mucosa, an inexhaustible source of glycoproteins and dissolved salts. In short, our noses are a good place for bacteria to thrive …and they do! Among the usual microorganisms among us are the Staphylococcus aureus , of a golden hue, and the so-called Pseudomonas aeruginosa , which secretes various pigments, among which the greenish-blue pyocyanin stands out. Then the pale greenish color of the mucus may very well be a mixture of these bacterial secretions : blue plus yellow, we already know…
What to say about phlegm, that sticky secretion that oscillates between green and pale yellow! Haven’t you ever swallowed it? If an individual is healthy it is usually transparent or white, but yellow indicates that the body is preparing itself against a budding infection. If it changes to a greenish or grayish… the disease is practically a fact. A major danger sign is that it has a rusty appearance or with rust-red dots : it is indicative of pneumonia or internal microbleeding.
Would they be able to swear that, at least as children, they haven’t picked a snot out of their nose and eaten it? One would be tempted to think that it is preferable to avoid the germs accumulated in the mucus instead of eating them, but there are doctors who think that picking the nose and eating the fruit of the nariguil mining is not as bad as it seems , especially if we are children . For two reasons: one, the finger cleans the nooks and crannies that are out of reach of the handkerchief, leaving a cleaner nose; and two, by eating the remains stored in the nose (and already dry) the immune system is strengthened. “The nose is a filter where a large number of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture reaches the intestine it works as if it were a medicine,” says the Austrian pulmonologist Friedrich Bischinger.
Of course, it’s also not bad to wipe your nose from time to time without having to use the digital appendages. The method is to directly insufflate physiological serum (which has the same salt concentration as blood), although recent studies point to the use of hypertonic solutions, with a greater amount of salt. In Sanskrit, nasal irrigation is called Jala neti , which means cleaning by means of water, and it is carried out in India and Southeast Asia with the same frequency as brushing the teeth and is done by hand or with the neti jar, designed to that effect. Be that as it may, it is not very pleasant, as anyone will have checked if water has gotten into his nose.
Mucus, whose main component is water, is a clear representative of the dirty work that the body must do to keep it free from possible enemies. The pellets, those dry pieces considerably larger than the classic snot that give drivers such a good time while they wait for the traffic light to turn green, are true accumulations of dust, pollen and bacteria : little is gained by eating them. Those who see something quite disgusting in such a gastronomic dish should not forget that, on average, a human being swallows less than a liter of mucus during the day: let us remember that the nose and throat are well connected…
Do you recognize this process? Nausea or nausea, then retching to end in vomiting (medically it is called emesis, from the Greek to vomit). The truth is that the process is a perfectly coordinated action involving the brain, the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract and the abdominal muscles. Its content, as we well know, is part of half-digested food soaked in sticky stomach mucus, saliva and acids such as hydrochloric acid , which help to carry out digestion. That greenish mixture, which just by smelling it makes many repeat the feat, comes out for various reasons, among which are food in poor condition, certain diseases, nervousness, eating too much, drinking more than necessary and precisely Otherwise, don’t taste or drop. This happens because a kind of vomit button is pressed in our brain, the emetic center, which sends the instruction to throw food out of the stomach. The greenish color has its origin in the bile , which is not found in our stomach, but lower down, in the intestines. This is so because when we return part of the crushed food in the intestines, it passes to the stomach and goes outside. The nauseating smell (and never better said) is a mixture of bile and stomach acids. But the stomach effluvia do not end here.
Intestinal gas comes from different sources : air we swallow, gas that leaks from the blood, gas produced by chemical reactions that digest food, and gas caused by bacteria that normally live inside our guts. The bad smell that we all perceive -except perhaps the cause itself, if we pay attention to the popular saying-, is caused by a mixture of gases that contain sulfur and the ubiquitous mercaptan, the same that is injected into the butane so that we can detect any escape and which is also present in bad breath and foot odor. Thus, the more foods rich in sulfur we eat, the more stinky gases produced by bacteria and intestines: cauliflower, eggs or meat are good sources, while the famous beans, which we associate with loud and continuous farting, do not cause odor. Beans contain a type of sugar that we cannot digest, but the bacteria in our intestines do, and with a lot of gas as a by-product. A piece of advice: if, in addition to eggs and meat, you are a big fan of broccoli, cabbage, apples and milk, it is good that you distance yourself from the rest of us mortals…
