The appearance of the tongue can reflect a person’s overall health condition. For example, many children show symptoms like a thick tongue coating when they are ill. Today, let’s take a look at several common tongue appearances and the corresponding dietary regulation methods.
1. Normal Tongue Appearance
There is a thin, white, and moist coating on the back of the tongue. The tongue body is light red and moves freely.
2. Thick White Tongue Coating
When some people are ill, they may reduce their food intake or only eat soft foods (such as bread cooked or soaked in water) due to loss of appetite. This leads to less movement of the tongue and reduced saliva secretion, causing the tongue coating to become thick. In addition, improper diet (overeating, undereating, or irregular eating), excessive consumption of cold drinks, and long – term intake of yin – natured foods (such as milk, eggs, soy milk, and seafood) can also thicken the tongue coating.
Dietary Regulation: Eat less sweet, greasy, rich – flavored, and cold – natured foods. Appropriately increase the intake of warm – natured soft foods and thick soups, such as red date and glutinous rice porridge, beef soup, mutton soup, and fruits like apples and tangerines.
3. Thick Yellow Tongue Coating
In TCM, the color yellow indicates heat. When there is a thick yellow tongue coating, symptoms such as bad breath, sore throat, swollen tonsils, dryness in the intestines with constipation, red and painful anus, and hard stools usually accompany it.
Dietary Regulation: Consume more foods that clear heat and promote diuresis, such as white radishes, tomatoes, loofahs, lotus root starch, hawthorns, and pears.
4. Mirror – like Tongue
Some children who often have fevers, recurrent colds, poor appetite, or chronic diarrhea may present with a deep red tongue like fresh meat, complete loss of the tongue coating, and a smooth tongue surface like a mirror. This indicates that there is yin deficiency and excessive fire in the stomach, and there may also be symptoms such as swollen throat, sores in the mouth and tongue, oral ulcers, restlessness, poor sleep, and hard stools.
Dietary Regulation: Eat more fresh and easily – digestible vegetables, such as cucumbers, tomatoes, and white radishes. You can also drink the juice of watermelons, apples, pears, etc., or cook porridge with Chinese yams, lotus seeds, lilies, etc.
5. Geographic Tongue
People with yin deficiency in the spleen and stomach may show a tongue with a coating that peels off like a map, with a raised edge and a red peeled area. They often also have symptoms like a thirst for cold drinks, a feeling of hunger but no desire to eat, and hard stools.
Dietary Regulation: Consume more foods such as millet, wheat flour, milk, eggs, lean meat, and fish. At the same time, eat more fruits and vegetables, especially those with high vitamin content like apples, sugar canes, bananas, hawthorns, Chinese plums, and watermelons.
6. Strawberry Tongue
After suffering from certain congestive diseases, such as Kawasaki disease, scarlet fever, typhoid myocarditis, paratyphoid fever, etc., the tongue papillae become congested, swollen, protruded, thickened, and red, with a white tongue coating, resembling a strawberry.
Regulation Method: Treat the primary disease.
Author: Yuan Fang, Pediatric Attending Physician at Shanghai Ward Medical Center
This article was scientifically reviewed by Fang Hong, the vice – president of the Febrile Diseases Branch of the China Association of Ethnomedicine and the chief physician of the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine Prevention and Health Care at Longhua Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.