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There are a lot of gross “cleansing” fads out there. Most recently, there’s oil pulling: a mouthwash substitute that requires you to swish oil around in your mouth for twenty minutes in order to pull all of the gross stuff out of your mouth. Sure, it works, but no one can say it's pleasant.
But there’s another practice that deserves a little more love even than oil pulling. It's really effective, AND it's not half as gross.
Tongue scraping is something that dentists and dental hygienists have been doing for ages, but for some reason hasn’t gained that much popularity.
All you need is a cheap tongue scraper (the cost of one is somewhere around $7), and you’re ready to go! You just scrape your tongue from back to front, up to five times until you get all the gunk out, in the morning and the evening.
But what does it do?
Tongue scraping is one of your most effective weapons against morning breath and halitosis (chronic bad breath).
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Your tongue builds up tons of bacteria and plaque, and scraping it away means you’re much less likely to build up any gross smells!
Not only that, but removing the plaque from your tongue doesn’t just clear your mouth of smells, it also makes your teeth less likely to build up hard plaque.
Scraping your tongue of all of its waste will help your sense of taste AND your digestion, too.
If that’s STILL not enough, bad oral hygiene is linked to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so tongue scraping is just another step towards disease prevention.
Not only that, but you don’t have to swig oil for twenty minutes to get the benefits! If you can think of a better or easier way to improve oral hygiene, let us know, because I can’t.
Would you give tongue scraping a try? Let us know!
Photo Copyright © 2013 macrj/Flickr
