Simple Yet Effective Bad Breath Cures
If you have bad breath now, or if you have had bad breath in the fast, you don’t need us to tell you about the social trauma that can result from this obnoxious and embarrassing condition.
It’s not enough that you have to deal with friends and family members wrinkling their noses and pulling back from you. It’s not enough that you can lie up at night tossing and turning, wondering whether bad breath cost you a new job or a great date. Bad breath can perpetuate itself, the volatile sulfur gases created by bad breath bacteria so pungent that they literally eat away the lining of your gums and tongue and provide still more raw material for bacteria to transform into odor-causing volatile sulfur gases!
Bad Breath Happens to Everybody
Whether you are concerned with acute bad breath, the kind that comes and goes, or chronic bad breath, also known as halitosis, it is helpful to know that bad breath happens to everyone. Even people with perfect oral hygiene can sometimes have a problem with the condition known as morning breath.
People who have morning breath typically brush their teeth after every meal, floss every day, use mouthwash before they go out, and brush their teeth before they go to bed. They work up with morning breath regardless. Morning breath is caused by bad breath bacteria that accumulate on the tongue overnight. They may feed on tongue tissues, or the may feed on the proteins in post-nasal drip. Men and women who have a condition known as sleep apnea, or who have other conditions that cause mouth breathing at night, suffer drying of the tongue at night. This creates tiny cracks that can be colonized by bad breath bacteria during the day that grow under dry mucus at night. The result is bad breath that can powerfully unpleasant first thing in the morning—despite careful attention to oral care.
And even if you don’t have morning breath, chances are that bad breath is not your fault. People who have bad breath typically do the right thing, and when it doesn’t work, they do the right thing even more often. What people who have trouble overcoming bad breath don’t know is that bad breath usually takes a combination of oral care techniques.
Getting Rid of Bad Breath 1-2-3
It doesn’t have to be hard to get bad breath under control. No product and no method works 100% of the time—but these three steps work about 90% of the time.
1. Brush and floss the right way.
You need to brush and floss to keep bad breath under control, but you need to brush and floss the right way. It is essential to avoid injuring tooth enamel or delicate gum tissue while you do your oral hygiene. This means you need to use a brush with soft (not hard, and not medium) bristles. This keeps you from wearing grooves into the enamel of your teeth (which would house bad breath bacteria) and it keeps you from bruising your teeth. Brush you teeth, not your gums, at a 45-degree angle to your gum line. Go around your mouth and make sure your brush every tooth.
Floss is something you use to remove particles from your teeth, not from your gums. Wrap floss around a tooth and pull right and left to remove food particles that may be stuck between teeth. Don’t pull floss up and down into your gums, since this can cement food debris to your gums and also cause bleeding. Food particles and blood feed bad breath bacteria.
2. Keep your tongue clean.
About half of the bad breath bacteria that live in your mouth live on your tongue. You can see the film that glues them in place. That white or gray or yellow slime on your tongue is where a lot of your bad breath bacteria live.
The recommendation usually is to scrape your tongue, but that advice is often misunderstand. The idea is to remove bacteria, not to remove tongue tissue. Theoretically, you could wash out your mouth with soap (but don’t) and get rid of the bad breath bacteria on your tongue.
If you don’t have any other tongue care tools, you can use a soft brush on your tongue to get the film off the surface of your tongue. Be sure to rinse and dry your toothbrush after this procedure so you don’t put bacteria back in your mouth as quickly as you brush them away.
Even better, use a tongue scraper—but use a tongue scraper with a blunt edge. Plastic probably is better than the often-recommended stainless steel. Whatever you do, tongue scraping is not supposed to hurt or bleed. If you you experience bleeding or pain while scraping your tongue, stop, you are scraping too hard.
3. Keep your nose and throat clean, too.
Have you noticed that swimmers often have nice breath? People who spend hours each week in chlorinated water tend to have very few bacteria in their noses that can cause bad breath (although they have more problems with fungal infections in their ears).
You don’t have to keep your nose and throat clean with the help of a neti pot, but a neti pot gets the fastest and easiest results. The neti pot is a container with a long tip. The tip goes up to one of your nostrils, so water can circulate through your nose and remove the “snot” that keeps bad breath bacteria in place and that interferes with your breathing.
Not everybody can use a neti pot. It’s not a good idea if you have a deviated septum, or you have had a broken nose. But if you can’t use a neti pot and you can’t take a swim several times a week, you can make sure the air in your home or workplace is humidified so that the crusts in your nose fall out more readily.
Most of the time getting rid of bad breath is just that easy. And when it’s not, the problem often is tonsil stones.
