Scrape it off!

When you look at my bathroom sink, it looks pretty standard: toothbrushes, my Arbonne toothpaste, hand wash and lotion. And then, you’ll see next to my tooth brushes this weird, albeit pretty, copper U looking thing: 

It’s my tongue scraper.

WHAT?

There are so many wild wellness practices out there, it can be overwhelming and off-putting trying to figure out which ones are totally woo-woo, versus which ones work. I have fun trying things out and seeing what works for me, and one of the things I gave a go after listening to a dentist speak on a podcast (That’s So Retrograde) a few years back, was tongue scraping.

Her interview was really informative and at one point she said that when we brush our teeth in the morning without scraping our tongue first: we are just pushing bacteria around in our mouths.  I am pretty sure I had an audible response of disgust, and drove straight to my local grocery store to grab some random Oral-B tongue scraper.  She also talked about oil pulling: and guys, I just can’t. 

What even IS tongue scraping? 

It is exactly what it sounds like: you take a scraper, and gently scrape from the back of your tongue to the front, and then out of your mouth. It removes bacteria, toxins, and dead cells from the surface of the tongue.  At night, while YOU are asleep: your body is still doing everything it does when it’s awake: it’s breathing, it’s pumping blood, and it’s digesting.  The digestive system deposits the toxins from our bodies onto the surface of our tongue while we sleep: gross, I know, but true.  So when you wake up, if you don’t scrape them off, they get REABSORBED.  Which is pretty nasty. 

I wake up often now in the middle of the night because of the baby, and I’ll even find that sometimes I can’t go back to sleep until I’ve scraped my tongue because I can literally FEEL all the bacteria in my mouth. 

After a bit of time, the cheap little plastic scraper just started looking really gross and I also realized, I’m rubbing some sort of plastic on my tongue: which cannot be good. So I did some research and found that copper is probably the best material to be used for tongue scraping because copper is toxic to bad bacteria, and provides important enzymes that are needed for the healthy microbes in the mouth to survive.  It’s been used for centuries! 

I found the most gorgeous copper tongue scraper at Sweatheory in Hollywood, and have been using it every day ever since. I love it because it’s beautiful, because it’s good for me, and because it will last my entire lifetime: so I’m not using a product that needs to be replaced (Yaaas zero waste).

And if the whole removing bacteria and toxins from your body thing didn’t sway you: tongue scraping also eliminates bad breath, makes food taste better, promotes good dental hygiene: both for your teeth and gums, and let me geek out for a second on the fact that SCRAPING YOUR TONGUE IMPROVES YOUR DIGESTIVE HEALTH!

You all know what a nerd I am about gut health! So this was very exciting for me to learn! Tongue scraping is an Ayurvedic practice, and in Ayurveda as well as Eastern Medicine(and now Western Medicine is catching up): GUT HEALTH IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL HEALTH! So when we have these digestive toxins on our tongue that we continue to reabsorb by not scraping off, we affect and inhibit our immune system because your body is continuously reabsorbing that bad stuff.

To put it simply, by NOT scraping your tongue and letting your body continuously reabsorb all that bad bacteria, you’re basically distracting your body’s security guard so the underage kids can get into the club.

And we all know what happens when underage kids get into a club…

It’s not good.

So! If you want something that isn’t too woo-woo, is not time consuming, and that you’ll feel the difference of right away: that will truly help to benefit more than you even realize with regards to your amazing bodily functions: grab a copper tongue scraper and every morning, gently scrape away all the gunk from the night before.

ALSO! You’ll notice, as copper is a metal it will start to look a little tarnished. That’s not at all an issue with it’s effectiveness and I believe Chip and Joanna Gaines may even have strong opinions on how beautiful weathered copper looks. BUT if you wanna keep it shiny, every once in a while, grab some pink Himalayan salt, apple cider vinegar, and water. Soak the scraper in that little concoction for a few min. Then add a little baking soda because it’s the best thing ever: it’ll fizz a bit. After a few min you’ll just rub the scraper and rinse with water. Then Wa la! It’s sparkling and brand new!

You can either pop into the Sweatheory location to grab yours, or thankfully they have an amazing online store, and you can order it right here:

https://sweatheory.com/product/copper-tongue-scraper/