Everything you DIDN’T want to know about snot..
15 FABULOUS FACTS ABOUT MUCUS!
■ TALK about getting in a sticky situation! Forget passing a pal a tissue to catch their sneeze, swapping snot to stick up each other’s hooters could be the cure to hay fever, according to boffins as we revealed yesterday. Here KIM CARR digs into 15 snot facts to cling on to…
1 Politely known as mucus, the gungy stuff which dribbles out of your schnoz is made up of 95% water, 3% proteins such as antibodies and 1% salt and other substances.
2 When your mucus glands release snot it swells several hundred times in volume within seconds of coming out.
3 Snot in your nasal passages helps keep them moisturised.
4 We produce less snot when we’re asleep but it’s always working to move along dead cells and other debris we breathe in all the way down to the stomach to be recycled.
5 Dried mucus, dirt, dust and pollen equals bogies.
6 You can tell a lot about your health by looking at the colour of your snot. Yellow mucus means a cold and green suggests infection-fighting white blood cells are at work.
7 Mucus is also inside our eyes, ears, reproductive organs, urinary organs and gastrointestinal tract, which goes from the mouth to the bum.
8 Yes, there’s mucus inside your poo but too much can be a bad sign. Food allergies can cause overproduction of mucus in stools and if there’s bloody mucus, call your doctor!
9 Snot in the lungs is better known as phlegm – like the stuff Leonardo DiCaprio’s Titanic character Jack Dawson brought up when he was teaching Kate Winslet’s Rose DeWitt
Bukater how to “spit like a man”.
10 People diagnosed with chronic bronchitis and cystic fibrosis can see their mucus glands multiply between three to four times higher than the average person.
11 Been trying to batter off that 100-day cough this winter? Blame snot. In most young, healthye people, the post-nasal drip of mucus is usually to blame for a cough as the nasal cavity tries to clean itself up.
12 Boffins have argued over whether milk and other dairy products are linked with extra mucus production and are best avoided by those who suffer from hay fever and asthma.
13 It’s been disputed also whether dairy causes extra mucus production that affects the vocal cords but Lionel Richie swears it affects his singing so swerves the stuff.
14 Actor Martin Freeman had to spend days filming covered in fake snot while making The Hobbit when his character Bilbo Baggins was sneezed on by a giant. He said: “It’s kind of like hair gel. Sticky, very cold, not comfortable.”
15 During a recording of the Jay Leno US chat show, actress Scarlett Johansson spread her snot into a tissue when she struggled to hold back a sneeze, caused by a cold she caught from The Spirit co-star Samuel L Jackson in 2011. The tissue was sold on eBay for charity USA Harvest for over £1,500.