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Your Tongue is Important, Too!

Raise your hand if you take the time to brush your tongue when you brush your teeth? It is not hard to do, yet few people actually take the time to do so. When you brush your teeth, you know you are getting all those tiny food particles from in between your teeth. But, you will also need to take the time to get the food particles that collect on your tongue.

If you don't believe that you need to brush your tongue, then perform this little test. Go to the closest mirror. Stick your tongue out at yourself. Go ahead. Ahhhh, stick it out really far and look at it. What color is your tongue? Everyone knows that your tongue should be a healthy shade of pink. Does it look healthy? Does it look white? If it looks white, then you have a problem. Now, take a spoon and scrape it down your tongue and look at the spoon. What do you see? Do you see white gunk and build up on the spoon? That came from the inside of your mouth and that is what causes bad breath. If you can see it, you know that you and others can smell it, too.

Now that you know that brushing your tongue is important when it comes to halitosis, you need to know how to do it properly. If you practice good oral hygiene, then you should already know to brush your tongue each and every time you brush. You don't need expensive or fancy equipment to do it either. All you really need is a toothbrush—and some of the new toothbrushes actually come with a scraper on the back or the side of the brush. Simply swipe it up and down your tongue a few times and rinse. It takes very little effort to keep your tongue clean and the mouth ickies away.

If you feel like it, you can buy different products and tools that will help you get your tongue nice and clean. One special product is actually a tongue scraper. It looks a little like a mini windshield scraper, only it is for your tongue. You will gently run the tool down your tongue and rinse. Another option is to run a piece of floss down your tongue a couple of times to help get it clean and germ free.

Here are some facts about keeping your tongue free of germs. When you properly brush and clean your tongue, it can reduce bad breath and halitosis by 85 percent. It makes sense that you would start here when you are having bad breath issues. In fact, another statistic shows that when you just clean your tongue, it can reduce the bad breath by 75 percent and brushing alone, with no tongue washing will only reduce the odor by 25 percent. When you take the time to make sure your tongue is clean and germ free, you are taking huge steps in making sure that your breath is nice and sweet, but also that you are doing all you can to fight germs and bacteria that can multiply in your mouth.