Bugs and kisses

It’s that time of year that is full of pit-falls for the unwary party goer. The lackadaisical reveller may well find herself dipping into a previously double-dipped corn and capsicum dip. Equally a non-vigilant partier may find himself seated at the end of the dinner table with the geeks who talk computers and gaming all night. Most hapless of all is the poor soul who inadvertently stands holding their glass of Chablis in a quiet corner of the party not realising that the very solitude of that spot is because it is under the mistletoe… “not realising” that is until a drunken, sweating co-worker wraps a beer-holding arm around her shoulder and plants a cheese-and-onion-chip flavoured kiss on her lips. The “mistletoe grab” is a low-point of the human experience and, it has to be said, those who are so careless as to fall prey to it would, in harsher evolutionary times, have been weeded from the herd as too feckless to survive. This is not to say of course that there are not those who deliberately loiter under the mistletoe until the object of their affection swims into view at which point they can dive into the sort of kiss that is usually reserved for closed doors. When two consenting adults join in passionate kiss it is a blissful moment but according to new research they may be sharing more than they expected to.

Intimate kissing involving tongue wresting and saliva-swapping is a uniquely human thing and it appears that around 90 per cent of human cultures do it. To study what happens when we kiss passionately (tongue-kiss, French-kiss or whatever you want to call it) researchers had couples fill out kiss-frequency questionnaires. They then took swabs from the people’s mouths to measure bacteria levels. You have more than 100 trillion microorganisms in your body and there are millions in your mouth including more than 700 species of bacteria. The researchers then had the couples engage in a passionate kiss after consuming a drink containing specific varieties of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria.

The results showed that couples who engage in more frequent kissing a more similar microbiome (population of bacteria) in the mouth. The researchers were also able to estimate that in a ten second kiss you transfer around 80 million bacteria into your kissing partner’s mouth. Could it be that instead of sending “hugs and kisses” we should really be saying that we are sending “bugs and kisses”?

The other interesting little sidelight to emerge from this research was even within a couple, 74 per cent of the time men tend to estimate they kiss twice as much as do women. For example, if a female in a partnership estimates they kiss four times a day, the man will estimate that they kiss eight times a day. Which just goes to show, when it comes to matters sexual don’t believe anything a man says.