“Open Wide and Say, ‘AAH'”
October 24, 2022
Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life;
he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin. – Proverbs 13:3
After seeing my dentist a couple of weeks ago and writing about that, I then had a wellness check-up with my Primary Care Physician. One of the first things my doctor asked me to do was to open my mouth wide and say, “AAH”. It never ceases to amaze me what a doctor can learn about our overall health by looking at our tongues. For example, a black tongue can signal diabetes while a strawberry red tongue could mean a deficiency in vitamin B12, or iron.
One thing I did not know was that a tongue full of red and white spots might indicate a wearing down of taste buds. If you ate a piece of pizza as soon as it came out of the oven, you could be a victim of red and white tongue. Fortunately, this is fairly common but take heart, taste buds do regenerate.
While my doctor did not say my tongue was black, red, or red and white, he got me thinking about taste buds, of which adults have 2,000-4,000! Just in case you were wondering, dogs have an average of 1,700 taste buds! But I digress, because what I found interesting is not so much the amount of taste buds we have, but the location of them.
I do recall learning about this in elementary school, but I haven’t really thought about it much. But now I am thinking about it and I found it interesting to be reminded that the salty and sweet taste buds are located near the front of our tongues (sweet on the very tips of our tongue), the sour taste buds are on the sides in the back, while the bitter taste buds are at the very back of our tongues. And that seemed like a good object lesson in that the sweet and salty words we speak to others should be on the tip of our tongues, while the sour and bitter words we are often tempted to speak, are best left to the back of our tongues, even swallowed, never to be offered to others.
Proverbs 13:3 reminds us that the person who guards his mouth preserves his life, while the person inclined to speak too much, or to open wide their lips, will find trouble leading to ruin. However, God has set a double guard of teeth and lips at the door of our mouths. Just as a guard keeps the gates in a siege, we need to wisely guard our tongues by not opening wide our lips and offering sour and bitter words to others.
6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. – Colossians 4:6
Now, after all of this talk about taste buds, I am hungry! And I just happen to have a leftover slice of pizza I can reheat in the oven. But I won’t eat it immediately, lest I get red and white tongue!