Tongue cleaning is essential to having good oral health and has a big impact on your dental hygiene overall. It’s an important habit to develop, though an underrated one. Many people focus on teeth care, making sure to brush and floss to help prevent tooth decay and gum disease, but the tongue plays a big role in oral health.
Read below and discover how the tongue is an important part of oral hygiene and the benefits it brings to your overall health.
How Tongue Cleaning Impacts Dental Care
Cleaning your tongue is an important part of keeping your teeth and overall oral hygiene top-notch. While brushing your teeth and flossing help get rid of plaque and bacteria, rinsing out your mouth doesn’t wash all the bacteria off the tongue. Think of what your tongue does throughout the day with eating and drinking, licking around your mouth or lips, not only does it share in everything that sticks to your teeth but the taste buds also get coated by it all.
The surface of the tongue is textured to allow it to hold small particles, which accumulate and can form a multilayered biofilm, water and mouthwash aren’t enough to wash it away. This is why cleaning your tongue is essential to caring for your mouth.
Important Tongue Cleaning Habits
To properly clean your tongue, there are a few techniques you can use to ensure you’re clearing away bacteria and the film that builds on it:
- After brushing your teeth and flossing, stick out your tongue as far out as you can
- Use your toothbrush or a tongue scrapper
- Start at the back of your tongue and move it toward the front with slight pressure
- If using your toothbrush, you can move in forward and backward motion in small circles
- Spit out any saliva between brushing
- Rise your mouth and repeat as needed
Remember to brush your tongue gently, doing it harder won’t help improve the cleaning and would only damage your tongue if scrubbing too hard.
Benefits To Your Teeth and Mouth
By adding tongue brushing and cleaning to your dental habits you gain many benefits for your oral health, from preventing bad breath to a healthier-looking tongue:
- Reducing bacterial growth that can cause dental caries, oral infections, and other oral diseases.
- Controlling bad breath by scrubbing out bacteria, dead skin cells, and food particles that have been collected on the tongue.
- Reduces sulfur compounds and plaque that accumulates on the tongue
- Improves your sense of taste and smell
Another top benefit of regularly cleaning your tongue is to enjoy a fresher mouth by helping the tongue stay smooth and fresh feeling. The feeling of a slimy tongue and tasting what you’ve eaten throughout the day isn’t particularly enjoyable. Whether you clean your tongue by using a soft-bristled toothbrush or a tongue scraper is a personal choice, but you can always ask your dentist about which one is best for you.
Now that you understand how important cleaning your tongue is to oral hygiene, be sure to have regular dental appointments so you can catch any oral health issues early, including those that affect or originate from the tongue. Talk with your dentist about good tongue hygiene and the tools you can use to keep it healthy.
If you are looking for a dentist, we have numerous payment options available and if you have dental benefits, we will submit your claims on your behalf. We also welcome cash, Visa, MasterCard, and e-Transfer payment methods to help make the dentist visit as pain-free as possible.
If you have any questions or concerns about our dental services or would like to schedule an appointment, you can call us at 587-801-1939 or contact us here.
