Also sputum, Phlem, etc.
I am considering a run at the lucrative diet market and need to get pertinant data for my new book, “Spit and Thin”
Any insight would be helpful. If I use it in my book, I will send you an autographed copy with citations for your contribution in the Bibliography.
Very little. Saliva is essentially water and trace amounts of whatever you’ve eaten and a few enzymes.
If you’ve eaten something starchy the amylase in your saliva breaks it down into simpler sugars, so there will usually be tiny amounts of glucose in your saliva. Beyond that, the only caloric value would come from the protein in cheek or tongue cells floating around in there, I’d assume.
I’m talking about human saliva; animal salivas have lots of different enzymes and different amounts of yesterday’s lunch mixed in.
Saliva is about 99% water, and I think the only thing significantly calorific in saliva would be mucins - the proteins that make it sticky. But it’s like wallpaper paste, and doesn’t take much to do the trick: mucins are only present at around 2mg/ml (see here).