You're watching the game, you've got a cold one on the way, you grab a piping hot slice
of pizza, put it in your mouth, AAAAAND -- WAAAAHHHH I BURNT MY TONGUE.
WHY GODS.
WHY?!
Pizza is one of the worlds greatest inventions, but when I was watching sportsball over the
weekend I totally put a piece in my mouth and now I can't feel this part of my tongue.
The act of burning your tongue falls under the medical term of glossitis -- which also
covers dry mouth, infection, or hormonal factors -- plus simple things like biting your tongue
or reactions to spicy foods.
Hot food renders our tongues pretty much useless because it's burned off the top layer of our
taste receptors -- we call them taste buds.
The receptors vary in number from person to person from 2,000 to 10,000.
They're are all over the tongue, the roof of the mouth and the back of the throat.
Those tiny bumps on your tongue ARE NOT your taste buds, those are called lingual papillae
-- there are four types of papillae in your mouth, some contain taste buds, and some do
not.
If you burn your tongue, you've probably damaged the fungiform papillae, named that way because
they look like tiny mushrooms.
Each one of those fungiform papillae contains six taste buds.
Commonly, a tongue burn is a first-degree burn -- the lowest of the three levels of
burn.
An example on the skin would be an accidental brief touch of a hot pan that leaves a shiny
red line.
When you burn your mouth, the taste buds are destroyed, which in itself isn't a big deal,
because they're constantly being regenerated.
Underneath the top layer of your tongue are basal cells.
Every 10 days, the basal cells mature into place at the top of the taste bud, where they're
eventually replaced.
The good news is, mouth wounds heal relatively quickly; twice as fast as rest of the body
because it's in the body's best interest.
Taste evolved to protect us from poisons which commonly taste bitter, and allow us to eat
things which keep our body in tip-top shape like salty sodiums and sugary fatty energy
foodstuffs.
If you burn your tongue, there's not much to be done but wait until it heals -- which
might take a couple of days.
If it's REALLY bad, like the burn has blisters or you see charred tissues -- Go to the damn
hospital.
But even knowing ALL THIS, WHY IS IT ALWAYS PIZZA?!
I found, surprisingly, this was pretty well studied.
In one paper, titled "Thermal Characteristics of Mozzarella Cheese," the researchers found
the specific heat capacity of mozz -- or the amount of heat the physical molecules of cheese
can hold -- is 2.7 kilojoules per kilogram.
That's a lot!
More than rubber or fiberboard and a little less than balsa wood or paraffin wax,! Cheese
can get pretty darn hot before bursting into flame.
Thank you physics students.
Y'all are great.
Do you have a burning science question?
See what I did there?
With the… burning?
And since we're talking about burning, Do you think eating spicy foods makes you more
macho?
Because there's a link between testosterone and those spicy meatballs!
Watch me and Julian talk it out in this video… (sound up) thanks for watching DNews!