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There are no health benefits of gleeking. (Photo Credit: YouTube)
Gleeking oddly became a social media trend in 2021, with a number of people sharing tutorials on how to do it.
From trying the Kylie Jenner lip challenge to cooking pasta with energy drinks, social media can offer some of the weirdest trends. One of such weird trends is gleeking. In simple words, gleeking means shooting saliva from under your tongue on command. Interestingly, while many people are learning gleeking, some people end up doing it accidentally when they open their mouths. On the other hand, many people find it hard to do gleeking at all.
The science behind gleeking is simple. There are three major salivary glands and thousands of minor ones inside our mouth. These glands get activated while we are eating so that saliva can make the food softer and break complex carbohydrates into sugar. Gleeking happens when one puts pressure on these salivary glands, causing the saliva to shoot up.
A few years ago YouTuber Kyle Krueger shared a “tutorial” on gleeking. He started by biting his tongue. As per his instructions, one has to bite the tongue “just hard enough that your eyes have water”. This will activate the glands to get the “saliva pumping”. After some time, one needs to put their tongue on the roof of their mouth and then flick the tongue forward. Just like that saliva will squirt out of one’s mouth.
This video has 6.5 million views, a testament to how many people are interested in gleeking. In the comments, many people recalled how they accidentally gleeked.
A YouTube user wrote, “I remember me and my sister were having an argument and this just randomly happened to me and she laughed so hard.” Another person recalled, “The first time I gleeked by accident I thought I had superpowers and I was the one god chose to be the next supergirl.”
One person shared, “When I was in grade 3. There’s this one boy in my class that just keeps gleeking at everyone. One day I saw him gleeking at my best friend and I punched him- ended up at a principal’s office.” Someone else noted, “Gleeking actually runs in my family to where I can just do it out of nowhere when I talk and I can ‘t even tell you how many times I’ve done it and spit in the face.”
It is unclear how and why something as random as gleeking became a trend. Mark S. Wolff, the dean of the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told Health.com, “There’s nothing medical about gleeking. But there’s nothing harmful about it. It’s the salivary glands doing what the glands are supposed to do.”
