Yes, you do need to clean your tongue. Here’s how and why
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Has your doctor asked you to stick out your tongue and say “aaah”? While the GP assesses your throat, they’re also checking out your tongue, which can reveal a lot about your health.
The doctor will look for any changes in the tongue’s surface or how it moves. This can indicate issues in the mouth itself, as well as the state of your overall health and immunity.
But there’s no need to wait for a trip to the doctor. Cleaning your tongue twice a day can help you check how your tongue looks and feels – and improve your breath.
What does a healthy tongue look like?
Our tongue plays a crucial role in eating, talking and other vital functions. It is not a single muscle but rather a muscular organ, made up of eight muscle pairs that help it move.
The surface of the tongue is covered by tiny bumps that can be seen and felt, called papillae, giving it a rough surface.
These are sometimes mistaken for taste buds – they’re not. Of your 200,000-300,000 papillae, only a small fraction contain taste buds. Adults have up to 10,000 taste buds and they are invisible to the naked eye, concentrated mainly on the tip, sides and back of the tongue. https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYvpUl7li9Y?wmode=transparent&start=0
A healthy tongue is pink although the shade may vary from person to person, ranging from dark to light pink.
A small amount of white coating can be normal. But significant changes or discolouration may indicate a disease or other issues.
How should I clean my tongue?
Cleaning your tongue only takes around 10-15 seconds, but it’s is a good way to check in with your health and can easily be incorporated into your teeth brushing routine.
You can clean your tongue by gently scrubbing it with a regular toothbrush. This dislodges any food debris and helps prevent microbes building up on its rough textured surface.
Or you can use a special tongue scraper. These curved instruments are made of metal or plastic, and can be used alone or accompanied by scrubbing with your toothbrush.
Your co-workers will thank you as well – cleaning your tongue can help combat stinky breath. Tongue scrapers are particularly effective at removing the bacteria that commonly causes bad breath, hidden in the tongue’s surface.
What’s that stuff on my tongue?
So, you’re checking your tongue during your twice-daily clean, and you notice something different. Noting these signs is the first step. If you observe any changes and they worry you, you should talk to your GP.
Here’s what your tongue might be telling you.
White coating
Developing a white coating on the tongue’s surface is one of the most common changes in healthy people. This can happen if you stop brushing or scraping the tongue, even for a few days.
In this case, food debris and microbes have accumulated and caused plaque. Gentle scrubbing or scraping will remove this coating. Removing microbes reduces the risk of chronic infections, which can be transferred to other organs and cause serious illnesses.
Yellow coating
This may indicate oral thrush, a fungal infection that leaves a raw surface when scrubbed.
Oral thrush is common in elderly people who take multiple medications or have diabetes. It can also affect children and young adults after an illness, due to the temporary suppression of the immune system or antibiotic use.
If you have oral thrush, a doctor will usually prescribe a course of anti-fungal medication for at least a month.
Black coating
Smoking or consuming a lot of strong-coloured food and drink – such as tea and coffee, or dishes with tumeric – can cause a furry appearance. This is known as a black hairy tongue. It’s not hair, but an overgrowth of bacteria which may indicate poor oral hygiene.
Pink patches
Pink patches surrounded by a white border can make your tongue look like a map – this is called “geographic tongue”. It’s not known what causes this condition, which usually doesn’t require treatment.
Pain and inflammation
A red, sore tongue can indicate a range of issues, including:
- nutritional deficiencies such as folic acid or vitamin B12
- diseases including pernicious anaemia, Kawasaki disease and scarlet fever
- inflammation known as glossitis
- injury from hot beverages or food
- ulcers, including cold sores and canker sores
- burning mouth syndrome.
Dryness
Many medications can cause dry mouth, also called xerostomia. These include antidepressants, anti-psychotics, muscle relaxants, pain killers, antihistamines and diuretics. If your mouth is very dry, it may hurt.
What about cancer?
White or red patches on the tongue that can’t be scraped off, are long-standing or growing need to checked out by a dental professional as soon as possible, as do painless ulcers. These are at a higher risk of turning into cancer, compared to other parts of the mouth.
Oral cancers have low survival rates due to delayed detection – and they are on the rise. So checking your tongue for changes in colour, texture, sore spots or ulcers is critical.
Dileep Sharma, Professor and Head of Discipline – Oral Health, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Lifestyle vs Multiple Sclerosis & More
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This is Dr. Saray Stancic. She’s another from the ranks of “doctors who got a serious illness and it completely changed how they view the treatment of serious illness”.
In her case, Stancic was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and wasn’t impressed with the results from the treatments offered, so (after 8 years of pain, suffering, and many medications, only for her condition to worsen) she set about doing better with an evidence-based lifestyle medicine approach.
After 7 years of her new approach, she would go on to successfully run a marathon and live symptom-free.
All this to say: her approach isn’t a magic quick fix, but it is a serious method for serious results, and after all, while it’d be nice to be magically in perfect health tomorrow, what’s important is being in good health for life, right?
If you’re interested in her impressive story, check out:
Doctor With Multiple Sclerosis On The Collapse Of US Healthcare
If you want to know what she did, then read on…
Six key lifestyle changes
Dr. Stancic credits her recovery to focus on the following evidence-based approaches:
The plant-centered plate
This is critical, and is the one she places most emphasis on. Most chronic diseases are exacerbated, if not outright caused, by chronic inflammation, and one cannot fix that without an anti-inflammatory diet.
An anti-inflammatory diet doesn’t have to be 100% plant-based, but broadly speaking, plants are almost always anti-inflammatory to a greater or lesser degree, while animal products are often pro-inflammatory—especially red meat and unfermented dairy.
For more details, see:
Anti-Inflammatory Diet 101 (What to Eat to Fight Inflammation)
Movement every day
While “exercise is good for you” is in principle not a shocker, remember that her starting point was being in terrible condition with badly flared-up MS.
Important to understand here is that excessive exercise can weaken the immune system and sometimes cause flare-ups of various chronic diseases.
Moving thoroughly and moving often, however, is best. So walking yes, absolutely, but also don’t neglect the rest of your body, do some gentle bodyweight squats (if you can; if you can’t, work up to them), stretch your arms as well as your legs, take all your joints through a full range of motion.
See also:
The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
Mindful stress management
Stress in life is unavoidable, but how we manage it is up to us. Bad things will continue to happen, great and small, but we can take a deep breath, remember that those things aren’t the boss of us, and deal with it calmly and conscientiously.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is of course the evidence-based “gold standard” for this, but whatever (not substance-based) method works for you, works for you!
About MBSR:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
Good sleeping habits
Getting good sleep can be hard for anyone, let alone if you have chronic pain. However, Dr. Stancic advocates for doing whatever we can to get good sleep—which means not just duration (the famous “7–9 hours”), but also quality.
Learn more:
The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
Substance intake awareness
This one’s not so much of a “don’t do drugs, kids” as the heading makes it look. Dr. Stancic assumes we already know, for example, that smoking is bad for us in a long list of ways, and alcohol isn’t much better.
However, she also advises us that in our eagerness to do that plant-based diet, we would do better to go for whole foods plant-based, rather than the latest processed meat substitutes, for example.
And supplements? She bids us exercise caution, and to make sure to get good quality, as poor quality supplements can be worse than taking nothing (looking at you, cheap turmeric supplements that contain heavy metals).
And of course, that nutrients gained from diet will almost always be better than nutrients gained from supplements, as our body can usually use them better.
And see also, some commonly-made supplements mistakes:
Do You Know Which Supplements You Shouldn’t Take Together? (10 Pairs!)
Human connection
Lastly, we humans are a social species by evolution; as individuals, we may enjoy relatively more or less social contact, but having access to such is important not just for our mental health, but our physical health too—we will tend to deteriorate much more quickly when we have to deal with everything alone, all other things being equal.
It doesn’t mean you need a busy social life if that’s not in your nature, but it does mean it’s incredibly beneficial to have at least a small number of people that you trust and whose company you enjoy, at least relatively accessible to you (i.e., their life need not revolve around you, but they are the kind of people who will generally happily spend time with you and provide support when needed if they can).
As for how:
How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
Want to know more from Dr. Stancic?
We recently reviewed this very good book of hers, which goes over each of these six things in much more detail than we have room for here:
What’s Missing from Medicine – by Dr. Saray Stancic
Enjoy!
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An Unexpected Extra Threat Of Alcohol
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If You Could Use Some Exotic Booze…
…then for health reasons, we’re going to have to say “nay”.
We’ve written about alcohol before, and needless to say, it’s not good:
(the answer is “no, we cannot”)
In fact, the WHO (which unlike government regulatory bodies setting “safe” limits on drinking, makes no profit from taxes on alcohol sales) has declared that “the only safe amount of alcohol is zero”:
WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
Up there, where the air is rarefied…
If you’re flying somewhere this summer (Sinatra-style flying honeymoon or otherwise), you might want to skip the alcohol even if you normally do imbibe, because:
❝…even in young and healthy individuals, the combination of alcohol intake with sleeping under hypobaric conditions poses a considerable strain on the cardiac system and might lead to exacerbation of symptoms in patients with cardiac or pulmonary diseases.
These effects might be even greater in older people; cardiovascular symptoms have a prevalence of 7% of inflight medical emergencies, with cardiac arrest causing 58% of aircraft diversions.❞
Source: Alcohol plus cabin pressure at higher altitude may threaten sleeping plane passengers’ heart health
The experiment divided subjects into a control group and a study group; the study group were placed in simulated cabin pressure as though at altitude, which found, when giving some of them two small(we’re talking the kind given on flights) alcoholic drinks:
❝The combination of alcohol and simulated cabin pressure at cruising altitude prompted a fall in SpO2 to an average of just over 85% and a compensatory increase in heart rate to an average of nearly 88 beats/minute during sleep.❞
In contrast, that was 77 beats/minute for those who had alcohol but weren’t at altitude pressure, or 64 beats/minute for those who neither drank nor were at altitude pressure.
Lots more metrics were recorded and the study is interesting to read; if you’ve ever slept on a plane and thought “that sleep was not restful at all”, then know: it wasn’t just the seat’s fault, nor the engine, nor the recycled nature of the air—it was the reduced pressure causing hypoxia (defined as having oxygen levels lower than the healthy clinical norm of 90%) and almost halving your sleep’s effectiveness for a less than 10% drop in available oxygen in the blood (the sleepers not at altitude pressure averaged 96% SpO2, compared to the 85% at altitude).
We say “almost halving” because the deep sleep phase of sleep was reduced from 84 minutes (control) to 67.5 minutes at altitude without alcohol, or 46.5 minutes at altitude with alcohol.
Again, this was a pressure cabin in a lab—so this wasn’t about the other conditions of an airplane (seats, engine hundreds of other people, etc).
Which means: in an actual airplane it’s probably even worse.
Oh, and the study participants? All healthy individuals aged 18–40, so again probably worse for those older (or younger) than that range, or with existing health conditions!
Want to know more?
You can read the study in full here:
Want to drop the drink at any altitude? Check out:
Want to get that vacation feel without alcohol? You’re going to love:
Mocktails – by Moira Clark (book)
Enjoy!
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The Magic of L-theanine
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All The Benefits Of Caffeine And More, Without The Drawbacks? What’s The Catch?
It just takes one extra supplement.
For many of us, our morning brew is practically a ritual, but caffeine can also cause all kinds of problems ranging from caffeine jitters to caffeine crashes to caffeine addiction and withdrawal. Surely, something could be better?
Well, yes it could! You doubtlessly know about green tea’s antioxidant properties, but its amino acid, l-theanine (which can be taken as a supplement with coffee, if you don’t enjoy green tea) has so much more to offer:
- L-theanine has been found to reduce stress responses—and let’s face it, when we most want/need a coffee is often when facing stress
- It also reduces anxiety, making it a very safe “downer” without the problems of, for example, alcohol—or other potentially addictive substances
- It’s far more than just that, though! Paradoxically, l-theanine also improves alertness (what other calming things promote alertness? Not so many)
- Part of its trick is that it also improves accuracy—whereas stimulants like caffeine may produce a twitchy, jumpy, responsiveness, l-theanine’s signature effect is a calm state of sharp readiness. Caffeine works by stimulating the adrenal gland and increasing blood pressure, while simultaneously blocking adenosine receptors so that your body doesn’t notice its own tiredness—which is why you’re likely to crash later, when the tiredness that had been masked, all hits at once. Instead, l-theanine taken with caffeine acts as a moderator of that, making for a longer, gentler curve. In terms of subjective experience, what this can mean for many people is: no more caffeine jitters!
- All this means that while l-theanine can boost all kinds of cognitive function, including alertness and accuracy, many like to take in the evening as it can also promote a good night’s sleep, ready to be at your best the next day.
- How much to take? 200mg is a commonly used dosage, which in supplement terms is usually a single capsule. A lot easier to take than the 40 cups of green tea that this dosage would otherwise be!
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Galveston Diet Cookbook for Beginners – by Martha McGrew
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We recently reviewed “The Galveston Diet”, and here’s a cookbook (by a nutritionist) to support that.
For the most part, it’s essentially keto-leaning, with an emphasis on protein and fats, but without quite the carb-cut that keto tends to have. It’s also quite plant-centric, but it’s not by default vegan or even vegetarian; you will find meat and fish in here. As you might expect from an anti-inflammatory cookbook, it’s light on the dairy too, though fermented dairy products such as yogurt do feature as well.
The recipes are quite simple and easy to follow, with suggestions of alternative ingredients along the way, making for extra variety as well as convenience.
If you are going to buy this book, you might want to take a look at the buying options, to ensure you get a full-color version, as recent reprints have photos in black and white, whereas older runs have color throughout.
Bottom line: if you’d like to cook the Galveston Diet way, this is as good a way to start as any.
Click here to check out the Galveston Diet Cookbook for Beginners, and get cooking!
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From Lupus To Arthritis: New Developments
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This week’s health news round-up highlights some things that are getting better, and some things that are getting worse, and how to be on the right side of both:
New hope for lupus sufferers
Lupus is currently treated mostly with lifelong medications to suppress the immune system, which is not only inconvenient, but also can leave people more open to infectious diseases. The latest development uses CAR T-cell technology (as has been used in cancer treatment for a while) to genetically modify cells to enable the body’s own immune system to behave properly:
Read in full: Exciting new lupus treatment could end need for lifelong medication
Related: How to Prevent (Or Reduce The Severity Of) Inflammatory Diseases
It’s in the hips
There are a lot of different kinds of hip replacements, and those with either delta ceramic or oxidised zirconium head with a highly cross-linked polyethylene liner/cup have the lowest risk of need for revision in the 15 years after surgery. This is important, because obviously, once it’s in there, you want it to be able to stay in there and not have to be touched again any time soon:
Read in full: Study identifies hip implant materials with the lowest risk of needing revision
Related: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad
Sooner is better than later
Often, people won’t know about an unwanted pregnancy in the first six weeks, but for those who are able to catch it early, Very Early Medical Abortion (VEMA) offers a safe an effective way of doing so, with success rate being linked to earliness of intervention:
Read in full: Very early medication abortion is effective and safe, study finds
Related: What Might A Second Trump Presidency Look Like for Health Care?
Increased infectious disease risks from cattle farms
Many serious-to-humans infectious diseases enter the human population via the animal food chain, and in this case, bird flu becoming more rampant amongst cows is starting to pose a clear threat to humans, so this is definitely something to be aware of:
Read in full: Bird flu infects 1 in 14 dairy workers exposed; CDC urges better protections
Related: With Only Gloves To Protect Them, Farmworkers Say They Tend Sick Cows Amid Bird Flu
Herald of woe
Gut health affects most of the rest of health, and there are a lot of links between gut and bone health. In this case, an association has been found between certain changes in the gut microbiome, and subsequent onset of rheumatoid arthritis:
Read in full: Changes in gut microbiome could signal onset of rheumatoid arthritis
Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
Take care!
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The Best 4 Pool Exercises to Strengthen Your Core & Tone Up
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A lot of people don’t love working on their core strength, but exercising in the pool can make it a lot more enjoyable, as well as minimizing risk of injury.
Dr Alyssa Kuhn, arthritis specialist, also advises “being in the water also helps to control for balance and can offload the joints so they aren’t as painful”:
The gentlest exercise
The specific exercises she recommends are:
Wood Chops
Stagger your feet, clasp your hands, and submerge them in the water. Now, move your hands diagonally from one side to the other. This engages your core and balance using water resistance. Perform 10–20 reps per side, exhaling on the hardest part.
Front Kick with Opposite Arm Press
Kick one leg forward while pushing the opposite arm out or overhead—higher kicks increase difficulty by requiring more balance. If balance isn’t sufficient for you yet, hold onto the pool wall if needed. Either way, engage the core to lift the leg. Do 20–30 reps alternating sides.
Wall Push-Ups
Place your hands on the pool wall, shoulder-width apart. Keep feet together and hips slightly tucked for core engagement. Next, move your chest toward the wall and push back while maintaining a straight body—avoid arching your back. Do 10–20 reps.
Arm Circles
Stand with your feet wider than shoulder-width. Clasp your hands, extend your arms, and submerge them in the water. Make large circular motions for resistance training. This can be done with straight or bent arms for different difficulty levels. Do 10–20 circles in each direction.
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid)
Take care!
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