Having recently recovered from a cold during which I was blasting out gigantic gelatnous blobs of liquid snot from my nostrils, some approaching the size of a golf ball, I got to wondering: What’s in that stuff, anyway?
I suppose a large part of it is water. But what makes it so gooey in comparison to dry, non-sick snot? Why is diseased snot always more colorful than allergy snot? And why does my dog find my snot-filled kleenexen appealing?
I just wanted to note that if you type snot ingredients into a search engine you will be rewarded with a large number of recipes for alcoholic drinks with names like “Gorilla snot”, along with a few recipes for artificial snot like this one:
http://www.lsc.org/online_science/gross/gross_recip.html
But , at least in the few pages I’ve searched, there are no actual recipes for real snot.
If you type in snot constituents you’ll find out how much politicians really dislike their base.
The Internet is a wondrous thing!
Just go outside with wet hair and no jacket.
Other than water, it’s mainly glycoproteins - assemblages of sugar and proteins.
Fascinating, I know.
Plus all the crud it’s trapped, which is, I think, kinda the point.
So is blowing your nose good or bad when you have a cold? Does it help to get the mucus out little by little?
Are medicines that inhibit mucus production therefore bad for you in terms of getting over the cold?
The way I’ve always had it explained, is that yes, you SHOULD blow your nose and get the crud out of your system, as opposed to the sniffly/sucking it back down option, which only keeps the germy things in your body.
Color of the mucous plays a role here too - yellow/green indicates some sort of real bug working on you, and as you begin to clear the cold from your body, it gradually clears up.
I avoid antihistamines unless the sneezing and watery eyes are too unbearable to deal with. They’re ok at night, helping knock me out so I can get some sleep, but that’s the only time. I find a couple simple 30 mg pseudophedrine pills will loosen the snot enough that i can keep blowing and draining.