Admit it: After you blow your nose or aggressively clear your throat, you might steal a glimpse at what your body just discharged — maybe not every time, but every once in a while. Just a quick peek. There’s nothing weird about that. You’re simply checking that everything looks right. At a time of year (and an era in history) when people are particularly concerned about respiratory health, it only makes sense to occasionally inspect your output, as it were, to be sure things are working normally.
But when it comes to mucus, what is normal? Would you recognize warning signs even if you saw them? Can the color and consistency of that stuff actually tell you anything useful about your health?
Does this seem like an undignified topic for a respectable science website? What can we say, except: it’s not.
Honorable Discharges: Mucus and Phlegm
Before we tackle the question of color, let’s define just what sort of goo we’re talking about. The terms phlegm and mucus are used interchangeably by many laymen, yet they describe distinct but related — and disgusting — bodily phenomena.
