How to Start a Bad Breath Diet
If you have bad breath that just won’t go away, what you need may be a bad breath diet. No, this is not a diet that is intended to give you bad breath. On the contrary, this is a diet that can help you fight acute bad breath or chronic halitosis and help you gain lasting relief over bad breath odor.
Oral hygiene depends not on just what you eat but also on what you don’t eat. By modifying your diet, you can actually help treat your bad breath and develop good oral health at the same time. And most people think diets are just for losing weight! To prove that point, let’s start with you need to eat to fight bad breath.
Encouraging the Production of Collagen
When it comes to fighting bad breath, the most important thing you have to do to with your diet is to include the foods that enable your body to make collagen.
Collagen is the connective protein that reinforces the outer lining of your gums, tongue, tonsils, and the mucous membranes surrounding the rest of your mouth. Strong collagen forms a net that holds healthy cells in place. It keeps them from flaking away when you drink hot liquids or alcohol or you use chemical mouthwashes or sudsing, SLS-laden toothpastes. Keeping healthy cells in place in the lining of your mouth deprives bad breath bacteria of one of their two major food sources (the other one being food particles remaining in your mouth after you eat) and reduces the formation of bad breath odors.
What do you need to eat to help your body make collagen?
Well, you could stoke up on gelatin or Jell-O (jelly), since, after all, gelatin is is rich in the amino acid hydroxyproline, which the body uses to make collagen. But you don’t have to go overboard on good old J-E-L-L-O, as the TV commercials would have you do.
The other amino acids your body needs to make collage are glycine and proline. Neither amino acid is deficient in most diets. Just about the only way you could become deficient in these amino acids would be to eat nothing at all—which does give you bad breath.
More important than the amino acids in your diet is the vitamin C in your diet. Your body can still make collagen even if you don’t have enough vitamin C. What it can’t do is to stretch out the collagen into the spiral form that makes it strong.
One of the most prominent symptoms of the vitamin C deficiency disease known as scurvy is the failure of collagen in the gums. The gums bleed and teeth fall out. It only takes a tiny amount of vitamin C every day, less than 60 mg for most people, to prevent this potentially dire condition that also causes bad breath.
You would think getting 60 mg of vitamin C a day would not be a challenge, although many people don’t. It just takes a single piece of fruit or two servings of vegetables a day to provide enough natural vitamin C for healthy gums and healthy breath. Many people don’t get this. If you don’t, take at least 100 mg of supplemental vitamin C a day—and see if it doesn’t help freshen your breath.
Other Helpful Foods and Beverages
Vitamin C, it turns out, needs co-factors to work optimally well. The discoverer of vitamin C, Hungarian scientist and Nobel Laureate Albrecht Szent-Györgyi, at first thought these co-factors were a vitamin, too. Since he found them in the paprika his cook used to make goulash, he called them vitamin P (for paprika, rather than vitamin G, for goulash). Even now, nutrition publications in Eastern Europe refer to vitamin P.
You don’t have to start cooking goulash to get your vitamin P. These antioxidant plant compounds are found in almost all fruits and vegetables, although they are especially abundant in certain wild greens like lamb’s quarters (which are in oxalate, so don’t eat them if you have kidney stones), spinach (also high in oxalate), onions (not high in oxalate), grapefruit, green tea, and apples. You need at least a little fruit or vegetables to provide the plant compounds needed as co-factors for vitamin C.
Now let’s take a look at the foods you should avoid.
Cheese, Garlic, Onions, and Bad Breath
Do we have to tell you that onions, garlic, bleu cheese, Roquefort, Limburg, and other stinky cheeses can give you bad breath? These are the foods most people associate with bad breath, but it is not especially hard to avoid bad breath problems from heavily scented foods such as these.
All you have to do is to remove any food particles from meals including these foods from your mouth. As soon as you get rid of the food particles, bad breath goes away (although you may still have the odor on your face, in your hair, on your clothes, and on your fingers).
Sip water or white wine while eating meals with onions, garlic, smelly cheeses, or curry. Or drink peppermint tea at the end of your meal. Coffee with cream also works, since the cream coats the food particles that release the bad breath odors (for a while, you still need to brush later).
Rinse your mouth with water at the first possible occasion. Or even better, brush and floss. Brushing and flossing only get rid of about 30% of bad breath bacteria, but they get rid of 90% of odor-causing food particles.
Other Foods That Can Cause Bad Breath
What other foods cause bad breath? Some of the answers will surprise you.
- Any kind of food that has sharp edges, such as crusty bread or crackers, can damage the lining of the gums or tongue and provide dead tissue that can feed bad breath bacteria. Chew crusty bread and crackers with your front teeth to avoid damage to soft tissues in your mouth.
- Sugar feeds bad breath bacteria, but the real problem is sticky sugar, such as caramel, taffy, honey, or dried fruit. These foods can feed bad breath bacteria if you do not brush after eating them.
Fermented fish and shellfish can cause extremely bad breath. These products include fish sauce, oyster sauce, pickled herring, and lox. - Whole-milk products both hide bad breath odors and concentrate them. Eating cream cheese with lox or drinking milk when you eat garlic toast will temporarily mask food odors, but if you don’t brush within 2 or 3 hours you will have especially unpleasant bad breath.
- Yogurt can make bad breath better or worse. The Bifidus and Lactobacillus bacteria in yogurt fight the bacteria that cause bad breath, but if the yogurt smells pungent in the container, it will also smell pungent on your breath.
There are also some simple maneuvers that can help anyone minimize bad breath.
- Eat in ways that maximize taste perception. Eat sweet foods with the tip of your tongue. Eat salty food with the back of your tongue. The flavors will be more intense, and there will be less food on your tongue to cause bad breath.
- Sprinkle food with lemon juice. It brightens heavy foods, and stimulates salivation. This helps keep your breath fresh.
- Avoid scalding hot beverages and hard liquor. They can kill cells in the lining of your mouth and cause bad breath.
- Chew, chew, chew. Fine particles of food are less likely to stick to your palate or tongue and therefore are less likely to cause bad breath.
