Gargling With Salt Water

Years ago when I was a young child my mother had taught me to gargle warm salt water when I was sick, especially if I had a sore throat. So this health tip has been around for eons, but I’m sharing it in case it’s something you regularly employ as part of your wellness routine. I am not sick, but I’ve been doing this 2-3 times a week. There are two main reasons that I’ve been utilizing this brilliant home remedy as part of my wellness routine. It’s definitely two fold.

Reason One

First salt is purifying. It’s an amazing cleanser. Biblically, believers were actually compared to salt as the salt of the earth by Yeshua. The job of the believer is to provide a clean spot on the earth amongst the funk of the enemy as well as adding flavor, which salt does as well. Great Grandma was smart to use salt. Even our family healthcare provider recommends gargling with salt. Studies like this one and this one also show that salt water may help reduce infection severity.

Sick or not, our mouths and throats can carry a ton of bacteria. Therefore especially when well the salt can help strengthen our natural terrain without destroying any good bacteria. Our tonsils are a key part of our immune system. The tonsils trap invaders of various kinds and then work in tandem with our lymphatic system to take out the trash. We want to keep the tonsils healthy and not over run with the non-benefical bacteria. While yes, if they do get removed we can live without them, but why lose a body part that was put there by our creator to help us thrive?! No part of our bodies are unimportant or without purpose.

We want to make sure that we are using clean filtered water and a high quality salt to gargle with as well and not just regular table salt. The quality of most salts is highly lacking due to the processing that takes place. Most salt is stripped of it’s minerals, those are sold to mass supplement companies, and then the salt is bleached to be made pure white. Often salt is also mixed with harsh chemical anti-caking agents. The three salts I really like are Redmond Real Salt, Celtic Sea Salt, and mSalt by Crucial Four. I really like Redmond because of their testing for plastics. Did you know that 80-90% of table salt, even sea salts, are mixed with microplastics? These little plastics come from every day items that are tossed into the ocean and over time gets broken down and mixed in with the salt. So yes, that means it’s in the fish we eat too, but that’s a topic for another day. You can also buy both Redmond Real Salt and Celtic Sea Salt at Thrive Market. You can also buy both salts through Azure Standard.

You can do this any time of day, I typically do it first thing in the morning before brushing my teeth.

Gargling Recipe:

1/2 Tsp Salt

4oz Warm Filtered Water

Mug or Glass Jar ( I like mason jars, like the 8oz ones because you can easily just fill it half way)

Warm the water on the stove in either a pot or a tea kettle. Add the salt to the jar. Pour the water in the jar and stir until dissolved, you may need to stir in between. Take a mouthful at a time and gargle in the back of the throat then spit into the sink. Continue until you’ve used all of the water. Gargle hard for at least 30 seconds.

Reason Two

This has to do with actual act of gargling. For the last several years the holistic health world the vagus nerve has been on display. It’s for good reason since the it connects our body to our brain and turns on our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). It’s the longest nerve we have in our bodies. The PNS is where our nervous system should sit most of the time. This part of our nervous system lets us be at ease and function normally. It’s actually a group of nerves.

When we run into more stressful situations that is when our sympathetic nervous system turns on so we can better handle that stress. That’s exactly what is supposed to happen so we can survive, such as in a car accident. The issue is when we never calm down and constantly stay in that stress monster like state where everything feels like the other shoe is going to drop. In today’s society due to unhealthy habits, too much screen time, EMF, lack of outside time, lack of being present, too many prescriptions, poor diet, unhealthy relations, weaponized pathogens, shedding, not enough down time, staying up past 10pm, and stored trauma our sympathetic nervous just thinks it’s supposed to stay that way. I’ve personally learned what it feels like to be in that state this year to an extreme due to trauma as well as weaponized pathogens. It has taken a lot of retraining to come back from being in that state.

Gargling is one way to gently stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system to begin doing it’s thing again. Gargling works because the throat muscles get contracted and that communicates to vagus nerve which further opens up for the digestion process to go more smoothly. While the idea of stimulating the vagus nerve is actually not new at all, and acupuncture has achieved this forever, self stimulation is a bit on the newer side. Gargling is just one way. Check out some studies here here and here on the benefits of self stimulation. I am always willing to try and appreciate free, non-invasive treatments like this that don’t take much time that support my body better. Let me know if you’ve taken up gargling too 🙂