Healthy Mouth, Happy Mouth

2562 Words6 Pages

The oral cavity is home to a great variety of primitive organisms. It is the gateway to two of the most imperative body systems, the gastrointestinal and the respiratory systems. The oral cavity is the drainage to secretory glands called the salivary glands of which there is between 600-1000 small glands located throughout the mouth. They are exocrine glands that release their secretions through tiny ducts that open into the mouth. There are three major pairs of salivary glands however that contribute the most to the oral secretion and these are; the parotid gland, which is the largest and it is located at the back of the jaw, the submandibular gland, located in the lower jaw, and the sublingual glands, located under the tongue ( "Composition of Saliva 2010"). All salivary glands release the substance Saliva, which not only moistens the mouth, but it has a myriad of components that carry out differentiated functions within the mouth.
As insignificant as it may seem, Saliva is an expression of the status of many of the body's tissues, organs or even systems. It consists of 98% water and only 2% of it are substances whose concentrations and contents as secreted into the mouth are effective biological indicators ( " Saliva"). They change with illness, they change with a change in diet and they change periodically. The periodical change in the salivary secretions takes many forms and rhythms, monitored by internal biological clocks. These biological clocks are simply groupings of interacting molecules in cells and they are responsible for a great variety of oscillations in physiological processes in animals, plants, and even prokaryotes. In humans, all the biological clocks in the body are controlled by a "Master clock" in the...

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