White Tongue Coating

When you open your mouth, does your tongue look healthy – or is it covered by a white tongue coating? What the heck does a normal tongue look like anyway? As a physician, I’ve asked lots of people to stick out their tongue and say ahh, so I can tell you what a normal, healthy tongue looks like.

A healthy tongue is typically pink or pale red in color, smooth and moist. A normal, healthy tongue may have a thin, translucent coating on its surface, but it shouldn’t have a thick coating – or be cracked, discolored or painful. Like your fingernails, the tongue says a lot about a person’s general state of health and your level of hygiene. Chinese medicine practitioners place particular importance on the tongue as a diagnostic tool. Here’s what a normal tongue should look like:

Notice how smooth, moist and pink it is? You can see the tiny raised bumps on the surface called papillae. Papillae provide a textured surface to push food around in your mouth, and they also house the taste buds, those sensory structures that make it such a pleasure to eat. Tiny microvilli within the papillae send messages to the brain, so you can distinguish the  four types of flavors – sweet, salty, sour and bitter.