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How to Clean Your Tongue

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What is the best technique and the best frequency for tongue scraping?

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Previously, in my video “Tongue Scraping vs. Tongue Brushing for Treating Halitosis (Bad Breath)” [NT1] I explored how tongue cleaning may be the best way to cut down on bad breath. And it has 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 the 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 cleaned their tongues with a plastic tongue scraper with the adorable name Scrapy. 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.

Okay, 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 seem to have a similar performance in terms of breath improvement.)

Some people feel that tongue brushing is more gag-inducing than tongue scraping—so, they 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 percent 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 percent. The question is: how long would it take to regrow? On average, tongue coating scores had returned to baseline levels on day two; 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 them using six different criteria. Meridol® and Scrapy® were the two most preferred brands out of the available options.

What’s the best way to disinfect tongue scrapers and toothbrushes? In my video on the best water purifier “Is It Best to Drink Tap, Filtered, or Bottled Water?” 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 that we don’t even know exactly why it works. 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 U.S. 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 home right now without buying a thing. Just use a simple spoon.

Republished from NutritionFacts.org
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Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.
Michael Greger
Michael Greger
Author
Michael Greger, MD, FACLM, is a physician, New York Times bestselling author, and internationally recognized professional speaker on a number of important public health issues. He has lectured at the Conference on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the International Bird Flu Summit, testified before Congress, appeared on “The Dr. Oz Show” and “The Colbert Report,” and was invited as an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the infamous “meat defamation” trial. This article was originally published on NutritionFacts.org
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