If you’ve ever woken up with a dry mouth, your first instinct was probably to go get some water.
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Despite it still being nighttime, a quick trip to the kitchen for a refreshing glass of water can be well worth it.
After all, you may find that drinking water at night actually makes it taste better.
If you’ve ever found that water tastes better at night, you may wonder why.
Here are 10 reasons water tastes better at night.
Why Does Water Taste Better At Night? (10 Possible Reasons)
1. Toothpaste
One of the reasons water tastes better at night is toothpaste.
In most cases, you probably brush your teeth before bed.
As you sleep, if your mouth remains closed, the remnants of the toothpaste linger in your mouth.
If you wake up before the toothpaste is completely gone, then take a drink of water, you might get some traces of your toothpaste in the water.
If you use mint-flavored toothpaste, for example, your water may taste a little minty.
That might make the water taste better to you.
That’s also why water doesn’t taste minty during the day.
Even if you brush your teeth in the morning, there’s a good chance you’re either off to work right after or eating breakfast.
Breakfast and time can make the toothpaste flavor in your mouth disappear, so the water just tastes like water.
2. Good Oral Hygiene
Another reason water tastes better at night is good oral hygiene.
Even if you don’t have the flavor of toothpaste lingering in your mouth, the fact that you brushed your teeth means your mouth is clean and fresh.
If you scrub your tongue while you brush, that’s even better.
Scrubbing your tongue frees it from the slime and build-up of the food you’ve eaten during the day.
Since tastebuds rest on your tongue, if you clear them off, they’re able to sense taste a little better.
When you wake up in the night and drink water, you’re able to pull the water over your fresh tastebuds.
This might mean your tongue is more aware of the sweetness or goodness of the flavor of the water.
If you hadn’t brushed your teeth, the tastebuds may not be as sensitive and you might miss the flavor of the water.
This is also why you might not taste the water’s flavor during the day either.
If you don’t brush your teeth after each meal, there’s a good chance that your tongue has a lot of residue on it.
This can block your ability to taste the water or may even make the water taste bad.
Since the water is mixing with the residue on your tongue, the residual taste might be unpleasant.
Brushing that off, however, can make water taste better.
3. Dry Mouth
Waking up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth is unpleasant.
If you’ve become so dehydrated, you may even experience a headache.
The best way to cure that dry mouth is to drink some water.
While drinking the water, you may find that it tastes better than usual.
That’s because your mouth becomes more acidic when it’s dry.
The process of drying your mouth is essentially acidic.
That’s why many dentists encourage their patients to maintain a wet mouth.
Acidic mouths can lead to cavities and other oral health problems.
However, because water is neutral, it makes the acidity in your mouth more neutral.
This usually means water will taste a bit sweeter which makes it taste better at night.
It’s also why drinking water is ideal when you eat spicy food.
Because spicy food can make your stomach more acidic, drinking water can help neutralize it and provide relief.
4. Reward System
Your brain uses a reward system to teach good behavior.
For example, when you do something that makes you happy, the brain releases serotonin as a reward to reinforce that happy feeling.
When you feel hungry, the brain rewards you by releasing endorphins or other happy hormones to reward you for eating.
Since the human brain seeks pleasurable feelings rather than punishing ones, it helps guide a person’s survival.
This can also impact the taste of water.
When you wake up dehydrated and in need of water, your brain is telling you that you need water to survive.
You may feel ill or even have a headache.
This is your brain’s way of telling you that your body needs water.
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To encourage you to seek water in the future, your brain will also make drinking water a rewarding experience.
One of the ways it will do that is by making the water taste a little better.
It may actually taste the same, but your brain might give a phantom taste to it that makes it taste just a bit better.
This encourages you to keep drinking and restore your body’s hydration.
It also encourages you to seek water in the future.
Since the taste was pleasant, you’re more likely to seek water in the future.
5. Calcium And Iron
Those who have private wells may also find that their water tastes sweet or good because of the presence of calcium and iron in their water.
Both of these minerals are common in wells because most wells don’t have a water treatment center connected to their wells.
This means that, as calcium and iron build up inside of the well, it passes into your water.
Calcium can make water taste a bit sweet.
If there’s too much iron in your water, you might get an unpleasant metallic flavor instead.
When iron levels are low, however, the iron reacts with calcium to give the water a slightly sweeter taste.
You may find that water tastes a bit sweeter at night because the well has had time to replenish itself.
Since you’re taking your first drink of water in a few hours, that water might have a larger dose of calcium and iron in it.
Those minerals were marinating in the water while the well remained untouched.
When you pulled the water from the well, the water had more calcium and iron on it which results in a sweeter taste.
During the day, because you likely use more water, calcium and iron don’t have the time to accumulate in the water.
That’s because water is constantly pulling out of the well.
At night, however, the minerals have that time.
6. Other Elements In The Water
There’s also the chance that there are other elements in your water that are making it taste better.
As water passes through your pipes, it starts to collect anything that may be clinging to or growing in them.
These small traces then stay in your water.
When you drink it, you may taste them and find that it makes your water taste pleasant.
Because a lot of pipes are metal, there’s no shortage of minerals and other elements that can accumulate in them.
Their presence may be stronger at night because they had time to grow.
They may not grow as well during the day because water is constantly pushing through the pipes and cleaning them off.
However, at night, since they had time to grow and condense, when you take that first sip of water, there are more of those elements in your glass.
The result is water that tastes better.
7. Changes To Sense Of Smell
Your senses of smell and taste come from the same airway.
This enables you to taste and smell things at the same time.
For example, if you ever smelled chicken or chocolate, you could probably get a phantom taste of it in your mouth, too.
Your mouth knows what chicken or chocolate tastes like, and as a result, your tastebuds respond.
This also means that anything affecting your sense of smell is also going to affect your sense of taste.
For example, if you get a cold or the flu, then your sense of smell might go away for a time.
That usually means you also don’t taste things as well either if at all.
It can also skew your tastebuds.
If you pick up some sort of virus or you’re experiencing allergies, it might also impact your ability to taste.
Even though you shouldn’t taste something sweet in the water, you do.
Because your sinuses and the olfactory system can sometimes encounter problems while you sleep, you may not even realize that something is off with your sense of smell.
When you drink some water, it may taste better because of something affecting your olfactory system.
8. Dirty Or Clean Cups
It isn’t just your senses that can impact the taste of water either.
What you’re drinking out of can also impact the flavor of the water.
If you wake up at night and stumble into the kitchen, you might grab the first glass that you find.
If this glass just came out of the dishwasher, it might carry with it that dishwasher taste.
You might enjoy the flavor, however, which is why the water tastes better at night.
You may also reach for an older cup that has yet to be washed.
There may be traces of food or other flavors still lingering in the cup.
When you fill it with water and drink it, you’re also tasting those traces of food.
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That might also make the water taste better.
9. Acid Reflux
If you’re someone who suffers from chronic acid reflux, that might also be impacting the flavor of your water.
Even if you don’t suffer from chronic acid reflux, an episode of acid reflux could also be the reason your water tastes better at night.
That’s because acid reflux acts similarly to dry mouth.
It acidifies your mouth.
When you have acid reflux, some of the stomach acid in your stomach is regurgitated into your throat and mouth.
This means those areas have high acidity to them.
When you wake up and drink water, you’re introducing a neutral liquid to that acid.
The result is a sweet taste.
It also helps reduce some of the acidic behavior which can cause some relief.
That might also make the water taste better than it actually does.
Water tastes better at night when you suffer from acid reflux.
10. Diabetes
A final reason water tastes good at night is that you suffer from diabetes.
Diabetes is a disease in which your body is no longer able to regulate blood sugar.
Since your cells rely on sugar to activate and perform functions, regulation is key to a healthy life.
In particular, glucagon and insulin work together to either raise or lower blood sugar levels to keep your body healthy.
When one of those systems becomes impaired or unable to do its job, diabetes occurs.
This makes water taste better because it often leaves a sweetness in your mouth.
Since the body is unable to regulate sugar in your blood, it ends up sitting in your mouth.
When you wake up and drink water, the flavor gets added to the water that you drink.
As a result, it tastes better at night.
The reason you might only experience this at night is that your body is digesting the food you ate while you sleep.
This also means that your body is attempting to regulate blood sugar.
When you wake up, you have sweetness in your mouth from your body’s inability to regulate blood sugar from the meal you ate earlier.
Water sometimes tastes better at night if you have diabetes.
How To Remove The Sweet Flavor From Water
While some might like that their water has a sweet or pleasant flavor to it at night, others might want it gone.
They might be concerned about the cause of the good taste and want to get rid of it.
Here are a few ways that you can remove the sweet flavor from your water.
1. Brush Your Teeth
One of the easiest ways to get rid of the sweet flavor of water is by improving your oral hygiene.
In particular, you’ll want to spend some time cleaning off your tongue.
If you have residual food there, it might be causing your water to taste sweet.
You can brush your tongue with your toothbrush, but there are also tongue scrapers out there that do the job a bit more effectively.
You’ll also want to brush at least twice a day to ensure your oral health is at its peak.
When you no longer have food debris lingering in your mouth, you can reduce the chances of your water tasting sweet.
2. Eat Earlier At Night
Another way you can remove the sweetness from your water is to eat earlier in the evening.
In particular, you’ll want to reduce any chances of developing acid reflux during the night.
By eating earlier, you give your body plenty of time to digest before going to sleep.
You’ll also want to drink plenty of water during this time to further neutralize anything acidic that you might have eaten.
At the very least, you’ll want to eat four hours before you go to bed.
This should give your body plenty of time to digest and deal with acid reflux before you need to sleep.
Without acid reflux rearing its ugly head while you sleep, if you wake and drink water, you’ll find that it doesn’t have that sweeter flavor.
3. Install A Filter
If the sweet flavor that you’re experiencing is coming from minerals in your water, the best thing you can do to remove them is to install a filter.
Since calcium and iron are both common minerals in the water, there are plenty of filters on the market which can remove them from your water.
You can find cheap filters that you need to replace every few months or big expensive filters that filter out the minerals before the water passes into your home.
Removing calcium and iron from your water can also help your pipes and appliances last longer.
By removing the minerals, your water will no longer have its particular flavor.
Conclusion
There are several reasons and causes for your water tasting better at night.
It can stem from your personal hygiene and health to the cleanliness of your cup.
If you don’t want your water to have a particular flavor, the methods above can help you remove that flavor.
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Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
