In addition to keeping the mouth moist and protecting us against germs, saliva can also be used for early detection of the risk of developing diseases associated with surplus body fat, a new study suggests.
For the findings, published in the journal Nutrition Research, the researchers in Brazil performed a study in which they used the level of uric acid in saliva to predict body fat percentages in teenagers and identify those with surplus fat even if they had no symptoms of chronic obesity-related disease.
The goal of the study was to identify reliable biomarkers in saliva that correlated with those found in the blood as a contribution to the development of quick tests to monitor health, especially in children.
The research showed the level of salivary uric acid to be a good predictor of body fat percentage even in adolescents considered.
“The idea is to enable saliva to be more widely used as an alternative biological sample for clinical analysis. The advantage of saliva is that it can be collected several times noninvasively and painlessly, like urine,” said study researcher Paula Midori Castelo from Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil.
