A new study reveals that about 80 million bacteria are transmitted during a 10 second kiss between partners that kiss more than nine times a day.

The mouth normally hosts more than 700 varieties of bacteria. These bacteria seem to be influenced by people closest to each other with their oral microbiota.

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A team of researchers from The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) studied 21 couples that answered a survey about their kissing habits, including their average intimate kiss frequency. Swab samples were taken from the participants as the scientists examined the composition of their oral microbiota from their tongue and saliva.

Results show couples that intimately kiss at high frequencies exchange oral microbiota through their saliva and that these microbiota become similar. The average number of  intimate kisses was nine a day and this leads to a significant similarity in shared salivary microbiota.

Intimate kissing involves full tongue contact and saliva exchange. This is common in human courtship behavior across all global cultures, said lead author Remco Kort from the TNO's Microbiology and Systems Biology Department.

In order to measure how much bacteria was transferred during this controlled kissing experiment, each participant was asked to take a probiotoc drink with special bacterial varieties such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria.

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