Talk to any group of smokers, marijuana enthusiasts, or vapers, and they’ll tell you one thing they have in common – cotton mouth a.k.a. dry mouth.
Scientists have established that long-term smoking can disrupt the functions of your salivary glands, resulting in reduced saliva secretion and poor quality of saliva.
And your spit is more than just water in your mouth that prevents you from choking on your food. It’s hustling hard 24/7, washing away and killing harmful bacteria that can cause bad breath and other oral diseases.
So what happens when your mouth doesn’t produce enough saliva? Well, since you asked…
(We hope you didn’t eat before reading this. In case you did, we’ll give you some time to get ready. Just scroll down…)
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Gross.
If your tongue isn’t pink, it can be a sign of a health problem. For smokers, your tongue will likely develop a white coating – or yellow, brown, green, or black.
When you don’t produce enough saliva, nasty things can build up on your tongue, like nicotine (for smokers), bacteria, yeast, dead cells, disease-causing pathogens, toxins, and decaying food particles. And when food cells decay, your breath smells.
Maybe you’ve noticed people taking a step back away from you, just so they won’t have to smell your halitosis-laden breath. Can you blame them?
So what can you do? Two major things: 1) Drink more water, 2) practice better oral health maintenance in general and scrape your tongue. For just $1, you’ll have fresher breath, get rid of all the nastiness built up on your tongue, and improve your health.