"How to Clean Your Tongue"
Previously, I’ve explored how tongue cleaning may be the best way
to cut down on bad breath and have the remarkable side-benefit
of potentially helping with blood pressure regulation,
as daily tongue cleaning appears to favor the increased abundance
and metabolic activity of good bacteria on your tongue
that help you make your body’s natural artery dilator nitric oxide.
But there’s another way tongue cleaning may improve your blood pressure.
After two weeks of tongue cleaning you can improve
your sensitivity to tasting salt,
and a follow up study found
that just a single cleaning can do it.
They applied a drop of tomato soup to people’s tongues before and after
they clean their tongues with a plastic tongue scraper
with the adorable name Scrapy, and they experienced
a significant increase in salt taste intensity.
Why is that good?
Because if a simple tongue cleaning could change the perceived
intensity of salt, it could be used to rapidly make
lower salt concentrations more acceptable to people
without changing the palatability of the food.
They therefore recommend that people scrape their tongue every day
in order to adapt to foods with lower salt concentrations,
to effectively decrease their taste for death.
After all, excess sodium intake is the deadliest thing
about the human diet, responsible for millions of deaths every year.
So that benefit alone could justify tongue cleaning.
OK, so what’s the best way to do it?
A systematic review and meta-analysis concluded that tongue cleaning
offers benefits, however, there is insufficient evidence
to recommend a specific frequency, duration, or method
of tongue cleaning, but let’s see what data are out there.
Tongue scraping was found to be slightly more effective
than tongue brushing in treating bad breath,
perhaps due to the fact that the width of a toothbrush
is smaller than the width of a tongue scraper,
but there are now toothbrushes on the market
with a tongue scraper on the back of their head.
Here’s what they look like, and they seemed to have
a similar performance in terms of breath improvement.
Some people feel that tongue brushing is more gag
inducing than tongue scraping, so appear to prefer scrapers.
On the other hand if you just brush your tongue
you don’t have to buy an extra gizmo.
Technique wise, you want to make sure you include
the back of the tongue, and importantly the cleaning
should be gentle to prevent damaging your tongue
Cleaning too hard with a tongue scraper can risk tongue injury.
And you should just clean the top surface of your tongue,
not the sides of your tongue.
How often should you do it?
Tooth-brushing should be twice a day,
but the tongue cleaning recommendations
seem to be more uncertain.
So researchers decided to study the rate
of re-formation of tongue coatings after scraping.
They took folks who had at least 20% of their tongue
covered with a coating thick enough to conceal
the pink color of their tongue.
They started out with about a third of their tongue covered,
and scraping reduced it to under 10%.
The question is how long would it take to regrow?
On average, tongue coating scores had returned to baseline levels
on day 2, so, if tongue cleaning is to be recommended,
it should probably be performed on a daily basis.
What kind of scraper is best?
Researchers had people try nine different tongue scrapers.
Here are the brand names, rated using six different criteria and
these two were most preferred out of the available options.
What’s the best way to disinfect tongue scrapers and toothbrushes?
In my video on the best water purifier I ended up
speaking about disinfecting your toothbrush
by soaking it in a 50:50 white vinegar water solution
for 10 minutes, but this is even easier.
Just microwaving your toothbrush or tongue scraper for one minute.
Then you don’t have to keep buying new toothbrushes.
And it’s interesting we don’t even know exactly why it works.
Like you’d think it’s just heat sterilization,
but there must be other factors
since I nuked my toothbrush for a minute
and it hardly even got warm, but it…
kills off the bacteria nonetheless.
What about all the fancy new tongue cleaners on the market?
Throughout the last century, there have been many US patents
on various ingenious tongue-cleaning devices.
I mean how much money can you make selling
plain little cheap plastic ones?
So, how about an ultrasound tongue cleaner or
tongue cleaning using a high-speed vacuum ejector,
or a Suction Tongue-Cleaning Device, like a tongue Roomba!
But alas, a consensus group of dental professionals say
there’s no evidence that substantiates the benefits
of using any kind of electrical device to clean your tongue.
In fact, the lowest tech option is in everyone’s homes right now
without buying a thing.
You can just use a simple spoon.