Day 2 Nugget – Tongue Cleaning

For fresher breath, tastier food, and healthier teeth and gums, cleaning your tongue ranks at the top of my list. So simple yet soooo forgotten and neglected- the poor coated, stinky tongue. Clean Your Tongue. Twice a day, every day with a metal tongue scraper.

And don’t be gentle, really aim for the back of the tongue and squeegee it with a tongue cleaner, not your toothbrush. Tongues are like a shag carpet. Toothbrushes just don’t squeeze out the plaque from the tongue follicles.

That’s where the bad breath germs live, germs like cadaverine, and putrescine which smell as bad as they sound.

Scraping the tongue removes plaque, sometimes thick plaque layers that look like peanutbutter. Yuck! and trust me, this smells (see above). And it really takes more than two swipes to remove. Keep scraping until nothing comes off.

The thing we forget is that the plaque living on your teeth is the same plaque living on your tongue. We spend all that time cleaning teeth and then… we close our mouth… and put those germs right back on the teeth. (I won’t gross you out with photos of tongue scraping results. But! Trust me when I say there is ten times more plaque on the tongue than we remove from brushing the teeth.)

Your breath will be better, so much better! (Mouthwash doesn’t work if the source of the stench is still there.) You will uncover taste buds, which will make food (and wine) taste so much better. Your teeth will stay cleaner for much longer and they won’t feel fuzzy in the morning which is SO MUCH BETTER! And best of all, you shouldn’t wake up with morning breath (as long as you remove all the plaque biofilm before bed!) Buy your entire family tongue cleaners!

Clean your tongue every 12 hours when you brush your teeth.

I never leave home without mine.

Warmly,

Barbara

Queen of Clean Tongues