"Do Tongue Scrapers Cause Cancer?"
Tongue cleaning can reduce the stinky gaseous compound
that cause bad breath by up to 75%,
whereas just brushing your teeth alone may only reduce by 25%.
This is why tongue cleaning has the greatest priority
in the treatment of bad breath.
Are there any downsides?
Well, most people do not enjoy placing an object towards
the back of their throats, as it can trigger the gag reflex.
Tips to help prevent this include momentarily stopping breathing
during tongue cleaning.
You can experiment and if the mint flavor in toothpaste
sensitizes your throat to an elevated gag reflex,
you may want to clean the tongue before tooth brushing.
Some recommendations even suggest
doing it on an empty stomach in case vomiting ensues.
That doesn’t sound very pleasant, but when tongue cleaning
is practiced on a daily basis, the process evidently
becomes easier and less objectionable over time.
So the main complaint of the subjects is the gagging reflex,
and also, you know, tongue carcinogenesis
related to mechanical stimulation.
Wait, tongue carcinogenesis means the development of tongue cancer.
“These are unpleasant side effects associated
with tongue cleaning devices.”
Cancer is more than an unpleasant side effect!
I mean I know there’s alcohol- containing mouthwashes,
and one might expect that to predispose people to oral cancer.
I talked about this in my alcohol and breast cancer video.
A single sip of an alcoholic beverage, one teaspoon swished
and even spit after just 5 seconds
results in carcinogenic concentrations of the toxic
alcohol breakdown product acetaldehyde
being produced from ethanol in the oral cavity instantly
after a small sip of strong alcoholic beverage,
and this exposure continues for at least 10 minutes
after just those 5 seconds.
And yes, this concern extends to alcohol-containing mouthwash.
Researchers determined that alcohol-containing mouthwashes
offers a rather low margin of safety
and that prudent public health policy should recommend
generally refraining from using them.
OK, yeah, we know alcohol causes cancer, but why tongue scraping?
Well, animal experiments have shown that mechanical injuries
of the tongue may be carcinogenic.
Ok, even if you could extrapolate to people,
are you actually injuring the tongue when you scrape it?
What exactly did these experiments entail?
Concerns have been raised based on an experiment in rodents
involving the experimental induction of tongue cancer
using carcinogenic dimethyl benzanthracene, a powerful carcinogen
found in cigarette smoke and broiled meats.
And they evidently produced more cancer with the carcinogen
if they injured the tongue using a root canal instrument.
Here’s the study they cite.
Indeed, scratching their tongues with essentially a little piece
of barbed wire did result in more cancer, presumably because
the ulceration or injury allowed for greater retention
and penetration of the carcinogen into deeper tissue layers,
but people don’t scrape their tongues with barbed wire.
Ah, but evidently even a regular toothbrush can do it.
This appears to be the study they cite for that,
but it doesn’t say regular toothbrush,
but rather extreme mechanical stimulation.
Though then in the figure they say it was just
“Just one stroke of a dental broach with a very light force
that did not cause bleeding,” which was apparently enough
to cause the cancer to show up about a month earlier.
So what was it a toothbrush, extreme stimulation
or just a light scratch?
Here’s the original data, and thanks
to our wonderful Japanese volunteers
I am told it was no toothbrush.
And even if it was and could be extrapolated,
that was with a carcinogen.
So unless you were smoking or using chewing tobacco
or eating barbequed chicken every day,
there doesn’t seem to be any parallel.
If you just scratch a hamster’s tongue
with a barbed wire every day, no tumors develop.
And another thing…. Most human tongue cancers are found
on the side of the tongue, and so the relationship between
tongue scraping and cancer has not yet been confirmed in humans,
though there is still a possibility that mechanical stimulation
may be a cause, so I’d recommend taking it easy.
In this study, they had been brushing their tongue with an
electric toothbrush with medium hard bristles and ended up
causing an increase in the expression of c-fos in tongue muscle cells,
which is a protein that may be involved in cancer development.
Any kind of electrical device
for tongue cleaning is not recommended,
but even a manual toothbrush can cause some damage,
so-called micro-bleeding, therefore, tongue cleaning
should be carried out gently with low force
to avoid unnecessary tissue trauma and just
the top surface of the tongue should be cleaned, not the sides.