 Previously, I've explored how tongue cleaning may be the best way to cut down on bad breath and have the remarkable side benefit of potentially helping with blood pressure regulation as daily tongue cleaning appears to favor the increased abundance and metabolic activity of the good bacteria on your tongue that help you make your body's natural artery dilator, nitric oxide. But there's another way tongue cleaning may improve your blood pressure. After two weeks of tongue cleaning, you can improve your sensitivity to tasting salt. And a follow-up study found that just as single cleaning can do it, they applied a drop of tomato soup to people's tongues before and after they cleaned their tongues with a plastic tongue scraper with the adorable name Scrapey. And they experienced a significant increase in salt taste intensity. Why is that good? Because if a simple tongue cleaning could change the perceived intensity of salt, it could be used to rapidly make lower-salt concentrations more acceptable to people without changing the palatability of the food. They therefore recommend that people scrape their tongue every day in order to adapt to foods with lower-salt concentrations to effectively decrease their taste for death. After all, excess sodium takes the deadliest thing about the human diet, responsible for millions of deaths every year. So that benefit alone could justify tongue cleaning. OK, so what's the best way to do it? A systematic review of meta-analysis concludes that tongue cleaning offers benefits. However, there's insufficient evidence to recommend a specific frequency, duration, or method of tongue cleaning. But let's see what data are out there. Tongue scraping was found to be slightly more effective than tongue brushing and treating bad breath, perhaps due to the fact that the width of a toothbrush is smaller than the width of a tongue scraper. But there are now toothbrushes on the market with a tongue scraper on the back of their head, here's what they look like, and they seem to have a similar performance in terms of breath improvement. Some people feel that tongue brushing is more gag-inducing than tongue scraping, so appear to prefer scrapers, other than if you just brush your tongue, you don't have to buy an extra gizmo. Technique-wise, you want to make sure you include the back of your tongue, and importantly, the cleaning should be gentle to prevent damaging your tongue. Cleaning too hard with a tongue scraper can risk tongue injury, and you should just clean the top surface of your tongue, not the sides of your tongue. How often should you do it? Tooth brushing should be twice a day, but the tongue cleaning recommendations seem to be more uncertain, so researchers decided to study the rate of reformation of tongue coatings after scraping. They took folks who had at least 20% of their tongue covered, with a coating thick enough to conceal the pink color of their tongue. They started out with about a third of their tongue covered and scraping reduced it to under 10%. The question is how long would it take to regrow? On average, tongue coating scores had returned to baseline levels on day 2, so if tongue cleaning is to be recommended, it should probably be performed on a daily basis. What kind of scraper is best? Researchers had people try 9 different tongue scrapers, here are the brand names, rated using 6 different criteria, and these two were most preferred out of the available options. What's the best way to disinfect tongue scrapers and toothbrushes? In my video on the best water purifier, I ended up speaking about disinfecting your toothbrush by soaking it in a 50-50 white vinegar water solution for 10 minutes, but this is even easier. Just microwaving your toothbrush or tongue scraper for 1 minute, then you don't have to keep buying new toothbrushes. It's interesting, we don't even know exactly why it works. Like you'd think it's just heat sterilization, but there must be other factors, since I nuked my toothbrush for a minute and hardly even got warm, but it kills off the bacteria nonetheless. What about all the fancy new tongue cleaners on the market? Throughout the last century, there have been many U.S. patents on various ingenious tongue cleaning devices. I mean, how much money can he make selling plain little cheap plastic ones? So how about an ultrasound tongue cleaner? Or tongue cleaning using a high-speed vacuum ejector? Or a suction tongue cleaning device like a tongue rumba? But alas, a consensus group of dental professionals say there's no evidence that substantiates the benefits of using any kind of electrical device to clean your tongue. In fact, the lowest tech option is in everyone's home right now without buying a thing. You can just use a simple spoon.