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Action 5: Spend 120 Seconds at the Sink
You already know to brush your teeth with fluoride which help kill bacteria, but you also can live a lot healthier by hanging out just a little longer in front of the mirror.
FLOSS Do it every day. It breaks up the more than five hundred kinds of bacteria that live in plaque between your teeth and helps reduce the inflammation associated with gum disease. (One
note: It’s normal to bleed when you floss after a long layoff, but if you still bleed following each floss after a week, it’s probably a sign you have some level of gingivitis.) This is important. Brushing and flossing every day combined with seeing a dental professional every six months or so can have an effect of making you up to 6.4 years younger. Because of its ability to decrease inflammation in your gums and subsequently in your arteries, flossing will help you keep your heart pumping and your sex life thriving—not to mention your teeth intact. Pressed for time? Then follow this rule: Floss only the teeth you want to keep.
Another way to thwart inflamed gums: Eat fibrous foods like apples, or chew sugarless gum, which helps build up saliva. That helps you avoid dry mouth, which is a common cause of gingivitis.
SCRAPE BY Many bacteria don’t just hang out between your teeth; they lounge around on your tongue, too. Use a tongue scraper or brush your tongue while brushing your teeth to help remove some of the bacteria that causes bad breath.
SMILE Look at the front of your teeth. If they’re flat (teeth should be like your nails—higher in the middle than the sides), it’s an indication that you’re clenching your teeth at night, which makes you more prone to TMJ disorders. Why? Think of your jaw as a three-legged stool with one of the legs being your front teeth and the TMJ on either sides being the other two. If you grind down your teeth, you shorten a leg and throw off the balance of the stool—and that causes jaw pain and headaches. To help ease the stress of the joints, take a cork from a wine bottle and hold it lengthwise between your front top and bottom teeth (without the bottle, Slugger). Now relax your jaw and mouth muscles around it for at least a few seconds (or forever is good). This helps ease some of the tension that’s built up from clenching and misalignment.

Action 6: Clean Up
Dirt is good on construction sites and baseball uniforms, but it’s generally not so great for your health. These two methods will help your bottom line.
STAY CLEAR OF TOXINS Anybody who’s had a bad piece of meat or fish that led to a one-night stand with a toilet knows all too well the typhoon that swirls in your digestive system from a bad case of food poisoning. Responsible for twenty-five hundred deaths every year in the United States, food poisoning—caused by the invasion of foreign bacteria in your system—usually manifests itself with vomiting, diarrhea, and your promise to swear off the culprit forever. One way to avoid it is to make sure your food reaches the temperature of 165 degrees on the inside for at least fifteen seconds. (You’ll need a food thermometer to confirm, since oven temperature doesn’t correlate to the inside temperature of meat or fish.) Just because food isn’t red or pink on the inside doesn’t mean it reached the temperature, either.
Also throw away your sponges. A sponge is like the back row in study hall—it attracts all the bad elements. In fact, bacteria grows on sponges, so every time you use one, you have the potential of passing bacteria from sponge to dish to food to mouth to one nasty day in the restroom. Instead, buy ten cheap dishcloths and get two buckets. Put clean cloths in a clean bucket. When you need one, take one from that bucket, then toss it into the second bucket, which should contain diluted bleach, after use. That bleach will kill anything that tries to grow. Then wash all of them once a week. (Though throwing them away is the best solution, you can also wash sponges in the dishwasher or nuke them in the microwave to kill bacteria.) And, of course, you already know not to leave Aunt Mae’s macaroni out in the sun, because sun grows cultures of bacteria that secrete toxins. And that won’t taste good, no matter how much relish she uses.

WIPE WET In Western culture, the theory goes, a man shakes with his right hand so he can’t use it to grab his sword. You know what Eastern culture says? We shake with the right because we know darn well you just wiped yourself with your left. Besides Pilates, the best thing you can do for your bottom is to buy wet wipes. Why? If you accidentally got feces all over your hand, would you wash it off or wipe it off with dry toilet paper? Exactly. You’d run over to the sink faster than a sprinter in an Olympic qualifier. So why do we wipe ourselves with dry, sandpaper-like toilet paper after we go the bathroom? It’s also not the right cleaning system because it’s irritating and increases the likelihood of getting hemorrhoids. While we’re not recommending you install a bidet, you can get the same effect by simply wetting toilet paper in the sink before using it, or using disposable wet wipes that are small versions of the ones you use on babies.

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