Life is pretty snotty!
Every day, you produce the equivalent of a large fast-food drink cup (32 ounces) worth of snot. And when you are sick, you produce far more than that. Where does all that mucus go?
When you are sick and all stuffed up, you spend a good amount of your day sneezing or blowing some of it out. Our own studies have shown the average blowing of the nose when you have a cold adds 1.5 grams of mass to a tissue. In other words, you blew out 1.5 grams of snot.
Our research also found that you blow your nose about 23 times a day during a bad cold. Therefore, you are blowing out about 34.5 grams of snot each day you have a bad cold.
Some of your excess snot travels into your lungs and air passages. Your lungs do not like this, so they make you cough, which expels that snot back up into your throat, and that brings us to our next situation.
You swallow the vast majority of the snot you produce in a day. Remember, on a normal day, you produce about 32 ounces of snot. When you have a cold, you produce far more. Most of this goes into your stomach. On really bad days, you feel it go down and refer to that as drainage, but you really have snot drainage every day.