Why we gargle with salt water

If you don’t, it’s time to start

This piece went out today in the RealStevo.com email newsletter.

If you go to bed after eating something sweet, even if you brush your teeth, you end up leaving some sugar on the back of your throat. It creates an acidic environment where strep bacteria is fed and thrives.

The counter to that is to gargle and rinse your mouth with salt water. By gargle, I really mean make the guttural sound middle easterners and Frenchmen alike make when they talk. It accesses the folds in the back of the throat. By salt water, I mean a few pinches into 8 ounces of warm water, so that it’s got some detectable saltiness to it and is probably just a little more salty than something you would want to eat or drink.

That salt water washes away some of the sugar and promotes a basic environment. This is true whether the sugar is “natural sugar” or not. If you are getting a sore throat, sipping some orange juice while falling in and out of sleep on the couch is about the worst thing you can do, since it promotes proliferation of that bacteria.

The same is true of other sweets — even the glorified sugar-water marketed as “honey” in stores. And a scoop of ice cream before bed, even if you brush your teeth after, is begging for a sore throat.

And from the sore throat comes the sinus infection, from the sinus infection comes the chest infection, as the bacteria creep through the airway.

Don’t believe me — the guy who used to be sick from September onward with intermittent respiratory infections up until about a decade ago and now seldom is — try it yourself. A small collection of behaviors are useful for defending against most illnesses. The thing we often call “strep throat” is a common illness.

Some online schlock website says “Only about one-third of cases of pharyngitis are caused by Streptococcus and really need an antibiotic.” Salt water is notably absent from the search engine optimized schlock medical websites.

Nonetheless, when your doctor thinks “anti-biotic” or “rapid strep test,” think “salt water,” especially BEFORE the infection has set in, but abstaining from sugar, staying warm, resting, and gargling with salt water can be tremendously effective even after infection has set in. The CDC unfortunately has nothing so effective listed on their website either.

Three or four courses of antibiotics a year were what many parents welcomed into their children’s lives as normal. This began to take place long before three or four courses of Covid vaccines a year were spoken of by the medical establishment as what is done by parents who are sophisticated enough to really love and protect their children. You may notice strikingly derelict suggestions in the parallels.

And maybe what I say here doesn’t comport with your view of how germs work in the world. I can accept that. Maybe I’m wrong about the “whys” of the process I’ve describe — germ theory v. terrain theory. I’m sure I sound like a real rube to you. My feelings will survive. It is the “hows” of the process that concern me more, because I want you to have access to things that work. The next two sentences I’m not wrong about; I’ve seen them proven far too many times and among far too many people.

The illness we generally call “Strep throat” is often a result of something bad allowed to sit on the back of the throat as you sleep. Thirty seconds of gargling with salt water before bed makes that nearly impossible.

There are things that just work.

There is wisdom that gets passed down and that, for all our data that we have access to in this era, there is so little wisdom that seems to circulate.

Two years ago, I sat down to methodically read through the Bible for the first time. When I did that, I didn’t believe anything as “superstitious” as the idea that the Bible comes from God. It was just another good book of wisdom, a useful classical text — that’s what I had assured myself. I was too refined to believe otherwise, though I was raised to believe otherwise. Somewhere I got very far away from what previous generations of my family had known to be true. This was how I saw the Bible even though I was a church-going Christian.

And how I have grown since then when I did something as seemingly simple as coming back from the wilderness of contemporary thought and grounded myself more in the Bible.

I am about to read through that book for the fourth time now, cover to cover, front to back, and I would like to invite you to join me. Free you can join me. Paid you can join me. Those options are open to you and what you prefer.

Why am I reading it cover to cover?

Because there are some things that just work.

I know it is going to be an amazing time. We start January 1, 2023, and will read it front to back, but signing up early means you pay less and get more.

Join me here in the Bible project.

And I have a second thing that works — a class that will be a hands on workshop in which I go through the steps of starting a business. These are steps I have used successfully over and over again, with great success.

Join me here in Ten Weeks To Build A Successful Business.

Allan Stevo