3 Ways To Avoid Thinking You Have The Black Lung this Cold-Season




It's that time of the year. You wake up and your throat feels like you just spent 8 hours screaming at the top of your lungs. You try coughing it out for a few minutes - it helps, but the pain and sourness is still there. Throughout the day you stop thinking about it, drink some tea, take some Emergen-C, but when you wake up the next morning it's still there. Welcome to 'F*ck This Sh*t Season'. 

Here are 3 keys to staying healthy and making sure you're good to get black-out during Thanksgiving.

1) Scrape Your Tongue - no surprise here. You gotta scrape that nasty bacteria off of your tongue. It comes from all the things you put in your mouth and from the toxins in your body that are rising up. Scrape that sh*t out of your system.



2) Drink Mo Water - When you drink water you pee more and you get to pee those nasty toxins out of your system. If your pee is super dark yellow then you're not doing it right. There are water fountains almost everywhere. Fill up an empty bottle of VOSS and walk around like a boss.




3) Smile More - Your body reacts to your mood. It's all about the endorphins that you produce. Endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that reduce your perception of pain and also trigger a positive feeling in the body. Smile more and your body will follow suit and keep you healthy.



Things To Eat and Avoid Eating Based On Your Tongue



Your tongue is the mirror to all the organs of the body, and thus, a daily look at the tongue prior to scraping gives you a clue to your general health. We all have different shape, sizes, colors, and coatings to our tongues. Listed below are a few of the common tongues out there and how you should be treating them in regards to your diet.


Thick, Pale, Scalloped Edges

A pale tongue that is swollen with scalloped edges indicates dampness within the body.
This tongue is often associated with symptoms like loose stools, bloating, fatigue, cold, and excess worry.

What to eat: If this is what your tongue looks like, you should emphasize warming foods and herbs (such as soup, lamb, beef, leeks, nuts, fresh ginger, rosemary, and cinnamon.)
You can also incorporate moderate amounts of wild and basmati rice, corn, buckwheat, rye, and amaranth to drain dampness from your system.
What to avoid:  Foods that enhance cold in the body.
These are foods that are eaten straight from the refrigerator, greasy/fried/creamy foods, crunchy foods, cucumbers, ice-cream, bananas, cold drinks, clams, crab, grapefruit, watermelon, radishes, green tea, sour food, and raw vegetables.


Thin, Red, Pointy, Dry

This tongue presentation is often associated with what we call “deficiency heat” in Chinese medicine.
Symptoms associated with this tongue often resemble  menopause, including hot-flashes, night-sweats, insomnia, ringing in the ears, and dry skin and lips.

What to eat: To nourish yourself, incorporate berries and seeds, naturally sweet foods (like honey, yams, and squash,) congee, spelt, quinoa, rice, sour foods, parsley, and sea vegetables.
What to avoid: If this is what your tongue looks like, and you’re experiencing similar symptoms, you’re going to want to avoid salty foods, as well as overly pungent or spicy foods, fried foods, sugar, and alcohol.


Red Tongue-Body, Yellow Greasy Coating

This kind of tongue indicates heat, and is associated with symptoms such as irritability, rashes or pimples, easy sweating, thirst, and dry constipation.

What to eat: Instead of foods that add heat to the body, incorporate more fish, steamed vegetables, salads, seaweed, millet, wild rice, and fruit into your diet.
Also, it might be wise to bitter foods and herbs like dandelion, burdock root, and lettuce to drain the heat in your system.
What to avoid: If this is what your tongue looks like you should avoid spicy, rich, and greasy foods, alcohol, sugar, and limit your meat consumption.


Quivery Tongue with a Red Tip

Both a quivery tongue as well as a red-tipped tongue are symptoms associated with stress, adrenal fatigue, depression, and insomnia.

What to do: If this is what your tongue looks like you need to take extra time to take care of yourself. It would be wise to begin some sort of practice into your before-bed-routine, such as qigong, gentle yoga, or meditation. You might also find herbal teas with passionflower, chamomile, lemon-balm, or California poppy to be beneficial.



The 15 things You Didn't Know About Your Tongue




1) The longest tongue on record is 3.86 inches

2) The widest tongue was 3.1 inches at it's widest point

3) Women have shorter tongues than men. The longest female tongue was 2.76 inches

4) Thomas Blackstone holds the world record for the strongest tongue. He lifted a 24 lb 3oz. weight that was hooked through his tongue.

5) The Blue Whale has the largest tongue in the Animal Kingdom. It is the size of an elephant and weighs 5,400 lbs.



6) The 5 known tastes detected by taste buds are: Bitter, Sour, Salty, Sweet, and Umami

7) Tongue cleaning with a tongue scraper is proven to help prevent heat attacks, pneumonia, premature births, diabetes, osteoporosis, and infertility in men.

8) The saying "cat got your tongue" originated 2,500 years ago in ancient Assyria where conquered soldiers and criminals had their tongues cut out and fed to the king's cat.

9) because it comes in different shapes and can have a variable number of taste buds, the human tongue imprint is as unique as a fingerprint.




10) The hardest tongue twister in the English language is "The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick."



11) It takes 25,000 more molecules to determine the taste of something than it does to smell it.

12) Taste buds only react to chemicals that dissolve in water. This is why we get salty tastes first because salt dissolves rapidly.

13) There are more than 600 different types of bacteria in the mouth and a milliliter of saliva contains 1,000,000 of them.

14) The average person has 10,000 taste buds, with 2,000 of those under the tongue, inside the cheeks, on the roof of the mouth, and on the lips.

15) A single taste bud contains 50-100 taste cells. While one cell can have multiple types of sensors for taste, no single cell can identify both sweet and biter.

16) Contrary to popular belief, tests on identical twins have proven that the ability to roll one's tongue into a tube shape is not a genetic trait.  


And now you know. So keep that tongue clean by scraping daily. Lean more at www.scrapeyourtongue.com 




Larry David's take on Tongue Scraping




Larry once said that the only thing he ultimately got out of his failed marriage was that Sheryl taught him about tongue scraping:


(Season 8 Episode 2) 


Larry also said. "The other thing was, I'm obsessed with oral hygiene. I floss constantly and she was really getting quite tired of it. I would floss in front of her and she'd be like, 'Don't floss in front of me anymore.' I was like, 'Oh, OK.' And I'm like, 'Tongue scraping, would that be OK?' Then we went out for dinner, she went to the bathroom and I tried to sneak a floss in. She caught me mid-floss. And that was it."

I have learned a surprising amount about Dental hygiene from Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Tongue scraping is awesome. 

Head to ScrapeYourTongue where you can find the best tongue scraper on the market. Add this important step to your daily hygiene efforts and you won't regret it!

How To Check For Bad Breath



93% of people don't even know they have Bad Breath. This means if you have to think about it - you probably have bad breath. Luckily there is an easy way to check if your breath is smelly:

Take a silver spoon and slide it on your tongue to the back of your mouth. Hold it there for a few seconds and then take it out and take a whiff. If it smells bad then you have been awkwardly smelling awful in front of everyone you know for a long time. 



Best way to solve this issue is to scrape the bacteria off of your tongue. Bad Breath is formed in the back of your tongue and travels out into the world through your mouth. Get to the source of the issues by getting a tongue scraper and getting that Bacteria off before it puts you into any more smelly awkward situations.




check out Dollar Fresh Squad to get the best tongue scraper delivered to your door each month for just a few bucks: www.dollarfreshsquad.com


If You Vape, Get A Tongue Scraper




Have you ever experienced "vaper's tongue"? Leo knows all about it... It's caused by some sort of film build up from the PG, VG & flavoring.

If you want your mouth to feel amazingly clean, as any former smoker would want, you need to use a tongue scraper daily (It should go without saying that flossing helps too, but the tongue scraper just brings it to another level.) Finish with a little mouthwash, and your mouth will never feel so clean.

I use this brand, because it's the best and you get to subscribe to receive a new one each month for just $1 (+$2 S+H)





Why Everyone Should Consider Tongue Scraping (Huffington Post)


Claire McCormick, a Beauty & wellness enthusiast, book nerd, proud mama, and writer for the Huffington post. Wrote this piece on Tongue Scraping on July 28, 2016...

"There’s been a flurry of articles recently about the ancient Ayurvedic practice of oil pulling. Everyone from fashion blogs to CNN have been extolling the benefits oil pulling and recommending the best oil types with which to swish. Perhaps it is our newfound collective obsession with holistic living (of which organic oils are an integral part) that had oil pulling become so on-trend. Not that I’m knocking it — I’ve tried it and found it beneficial... albeit gross.

An Alternative to Oil Pulling
There is, however, another Ayurvedic practice that has not received the same love and attention that oil pulling has, but that has proven benefits to which I can personally attest. I’m writing this to set that record straight and shed some light on... tongue scraping.

Tongue Scraping? Sounds Painful...
It’s not. It is a quick, simple and extremely inexpensive practice (all you need is a $7 tongue cleaner!) that reaps many benefits. I call tongue scraping the “unsung hero of oral health.” I have been enthusiastically tongue scraping for years now, and I don’t see how anyone could try tongue scraping once, see the gunk you remove from your tongue, and not become an enthusiast as well. I therefore urge you to go out and start scraping today.

How About a Professional Opinion?
Kim Shamoun, a veteran registered dental hygienist and fellow tongue scraping zealot, says, “I can’t live without tongue scraping. Without a doubt, it should be a part of our daily oral hygiene regimen. I stress to my patients, friends, family and strangers alike how important it really is. A tongue scraper is the one thing I would want with me on a deserted island... forget the lipstick!”

Why Else Would I Do Something that Sounds Like Medieval Torture?
We all know about, and to some extent suffer from, morning breath. (Am I the only one that performs a huge eye roll when movie lovebirds play kissy face immediately upon waking? No one is doing that IRL. Get a grip, directors.)

Well it just so happens that tongue scraping is one of the best defenses against halitosis, period! And if you scrape regularly, especially before bed, your morning breath will be drastically reduced. Why? Think about it: It’s called “oral hygiene.” So you brush your teeth, you floss your gums, but that big plush carpet that sits on the bottom of your mouth gets ignored. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Actually, the soft, spongy, bumpy texture of the tongue is the perfect little breeding ground for bacteria! What you scrape off your tongue is this bacteria along with various other toxins (ick). This bacteria is odor-causing, so the less bacteria, the less smell.

How Else Does a Dirty Mouth Affect Overall Health?
Taste. Housing our taste buds is the tongue’s best-known role. But when your tongue is coated in gunk, your taste buds have no chance to fully enjoy that wild mushroom risotto, molten chocolate cake or any other delicious morsel. And decreased taste actually leads to decreased...

Digestion. We all know that digestion begins in the mouth; saliva is filled with enzymes that start breaking down food. And, you know, there’s that chewing thing as well. The cleaner the mouth, the better you can taste your food (i.e., the more “mouth-watering” it is) the better your digestion is!

Plaque. The more soft plaque you have on your tongue, the more hard plaque will form on your teeth. This leads to — yup — bad breath, but also tooth decay! As an aside, every time I go for my biannual teeth cleaning, my dentist compliments me on my at-home oral care. She’s actually told me “There’s really no plaque here for me to clean.” Thank you, tongue scraping!

Overall health. According to the Mayo Clinic (just one of many sources on this subject), oral bacteria and poor oral hygiene are linked to several other diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even infertility. At less than a minute a day, tongue scraping is the ultimate ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure!

You Might Be Saying...
You may read this and say (perhaps a bit smugly), “I do clean my tongue, with my toothbrush!” Well, your heart’s in the right place, but you’ve got the wrong tool in your hand. “An ordinary toothbrush is not recommended; it does not remove the micro-organisms from the tongue properly” says Shamoun. Just as the malleable surface of your multi-bristled toothbrush is optimal for cleaning the hard surface of your teeth, you need a solid surface (like a stainless steel tongue scraper) to really clean the squishy surface of your tongue. A U-shaped tongue scraper is where it’s at. I really like super-stylish Amano metal tongue cleaners; Shamoun recommends Breath Rx.

A Tongue Scraping How-to Guide
As I said, it is quick and simple, though timing does matter. Ideally, you want to tongue scrape as soon upon waking as possible, before you’ve eaten anything, drank anything or brushed your teeth. Just open wide (you don’t want to hit your teeth with the scraper), stick your tongue out and, starting from the back, glide the scraper over your entire tongue. Rinse it after each scrape. Do this at least five times, and/or until your scrapes come up clean, meaning you’ve gotten all the gunk off! You may want to do it in the bathroom mirror over the sink at first, so you can make sure you are getting to the back of your tongue. Then, once you’re familiar with the feeling of that, you can do it sans mirror.

“The most posterior portion of the tongue collects the most buildup, so you really have to make sure you reach far back. The frequency should be a regular basis, morning and evening,” advises Shamoun."

Follow Claire McCormack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/clairemcmack