When you kiss your partner, you share emotion, your expression and your passion. But one thing that may amaze you is that during a 10-second French kiss, you also share up to 80 million bacteria.
Briefing about the research findings, study author Remco Kort, said, “French kissing is a great example of exposure to a gigantic number of bacteria in a short time.”
Kort is a professor at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.
According to Kort, the exchange of bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing always.
“Several research works show that if the diversity in bacteria increases, there are more different types of species, which is a good thing,” Kort asserted.
He further said that some bacteria could help in building resistance to bugs that are not good for health.
According to the study, the couples who are in extended relationships share similar oral bacteria if they kiss once a day.
For the study, the researchers visited a Netherlands zoo where they involved 21 couples for a kissing project. The tongues and mouths of all the participants, both male and female, were cleaned before and after a kiss. The researchers found exchange of probiotics between the partners from a drink they sipped. They also observed more the couple kissed, more the bacteria were exchanged between them.
“If you look at it from this point of view, kissing is very health. These types of investigations may help us design future bacterial therapies and help people with troublesome bacterial problems,” Kort said.
Hence, the researchers concluded that even if as many as 80 million bacteria get exchanged, kissing may not be a bad idea.
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