0749 – Why Cough Sweets Are A Con

2023.01.19 – 0749 – Why Cough Sweets Are A Con

First up, it’s important to realise that nothing you swallow touches your vocal folds. Yep, those soothing cough sweets you take for example, go nowhere near them and any help they might give is either somewhere else in the vocal tract, or simply psychosomatic. (Indeed, as we’ll see later, such lozenges may actually be causing other problems!). I mean it stands to reason doesn’t it?: your voice comes from air from your lungs passing over your vocal cords, so logically (and physio-logically) anything you swallow can’t also pass over the cords, or it’d end up in your lungs! No, breathed air goes down one pipe, and swallowed food goes down another.

Your neck has ‘two tubes’. The trachea moves air to and from the lungs. (It is of course breath that powers your voice and part-way down the trachea are your vocal folds.) The other is the oesophagus down which food and liquids go to your stomach. If food and liquid go down the wrong one, you choke or drown. Fortunately, when you swallow, a flap called the epiglottis moves to block the entrance to trachea.

So, any fancy throat teas you drink, lozenges you suck, won’t actually soothe your throat as they won’t go anywhere near where the problem may lie.

Having said that, what you eat and drink can still affect your voice. And the most important element is H2O, water.

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