Your Tongue: Should I Brush or Not?

Yes, your mouth is covered in biofilm, often known as plaque, by the time you get home from work. Because bacteria are social creatures. By releasing a slimy matrix that shields their colony and allows them to freely multiply, they learn to cooperate and defend one another.

When your teeth are dirty, do you notice the gunk your tongue makes on them? You're licking microorganisms and their slime, along with a good portion of their waste products.

To be honest, we don't know what will encourage you to maintain good dental hygiene if that doesn't. However, it also brings up a rather typical question: Is it necessary to brush your tongue in addition to your teeth?

Reviews like this one have typically shown little evidence that tongue washing makes much of a change in the bacterial load, despite some study showing that brushing and scraping the tongue lowers levels of S. mutans in the mouth, one of the primary offenders in the decay process.

And now a new study in the Journal of Periodonal Research leads further support to those findings.

18 adults who were otherwise healthy but had moderate to severe gum disease and some degree of tongue covering participated in the study. For a period of two weeks, each person was allocated at random to either brush or scrape their tongue as part of their daily hygiene routine.

The amount of tongue coating, the patient's opinion of the cleaning, and the microbial load in each patient's saliva and on the top of their tongue were all measured at the start and finish of the trial.

Even with far reduced tongue coating, neither brushing nor scraping was observed to have an impact on bacteria counts.

After two weeks of tongue cleaning, the patients reported no changes in their taste or breath odor; however, they did feel that their tongue was cleaner at the end of the trial than it was at the beginning.

Naturally, most people are unable to detect if their taste experience is "off" or even smell their own breath.

Studies that use more objective measures discovered that brushing your tongue can really help with foul breath.

It seems sense that having a coated tongue could make your breath foul, even though it's not the only reason. After all, bacteria and their waste products make up that coat, which may also contain food particles that are decaying.

Let's just say that, even if your teeth are spotless, that will eventually start to smell a little.

Furthermore, a thickly coated tongue may indicate digestive problems or even compromised immunological function, many of which are now understood to be regulated by the stomach. An overabundance of the fungus Candida albicans may be the cause if the coating is white and delicate to cleaning. Notably, studies have demonstrated that Candida and S. mutans collaborate to form more strong and resistant biofilms on your teeth, increasing your risk of dental decay.

In addition to the previously listed immunological and digestive problems, the overgrowth itself can cause symptoms like joint pain, food allergies, sinus infections, and chronic weariness and cognitive fog.

The good news is that a combination of detox, stress reduction, and diet may often control Candida. Some helpful advice can be found here and here. (In addition, mercury fillings can increase your risk of Candida overgrowth, which is another reason to get rid of them.)