How to Cure Bad Breath: Natural Remedies
There are many good reasons many people prefer natural remedies for bad breath. Natural remedies don’t require industrial processes that can contaminate the environment. Natural remedies are usually less expensive, and sometimes more effective. Natural remedies are less likely to have side effects that they are to have side benefits, secondary benefits of treatment that treat more than the target illness.
Here’s an A to Z listing of the most important natural remedies for occasional bad breath and for chronic halitosis. Some of the entries on this list are so obvious yet so seldom used you may wonder why you never thought of them before.
Baking Soda
Lots of us keep a box of baking soda in the refrigerator to absorb bad food odors. It can do the same thing in your mouth, diluted in water and gargled, or used as a dentifrice (dry toothpaste) on your teeth.
Some people suggest flavoring baking soda with a little citrus juice, but that’s not a good idea, since that acid in the citrus juice will neutralize the bicarbonate in the baking soda.
Use 1 teaspoon (5 g) of baking soda in 1 cup (240 ml) of warm water as a gargle, or sprinkle dry baking soda on a soft-bristled toothbrush and brush your teeth. If you can’t stand the taste of baking soda, then brush with baking soda toothpaste (available everywhere toothpaste is sold, usually for just a few pennies more than other brands).
Chlorophyll
The bestselling gum for emergency treatment of bad breath in the USA for generations was a little green square called a Cloret. The Clorets brand of gum contained green dye, mint flavoring, and chlorophyll, the green pigment found in green foods, such as salad greens.
Chlorophyll certainly won’t make your breath worse. The benefit of Clorets or eating a nice green salad for your breath, however, is primarily in making you chew and salivate so that odor-causing particles and films on your teeth and tongue are rinsed away by your own saliva. Chlorophyll can trap the volatile sulfur compounds that cause bad breath in a test tube, but you would have to chew very thoroughly (about 100 times per bite) to release enough chlorophyll to capture volatile sulfur compounds in your mouth. Fortunately, you don’t have to. The release of saliva also works.
Echinacea purpurea
Echinacea purpurea extracts stimulate the immune system to produce a group of white blood cells known as the macrophages This can be a good thing or a bad thing in the case of bad breath.
The neutrophils fight infection by consuming germs and infected tissues. This is helpful for fighting bad breath caused by colds and flu. If you take echinacea, you’ll feel a little better and get well a little faster (echinacea is not a cure-all) and you’ll get over colds-related bad breath, too. If you are treating a condition of chronic inflammation, however, echinacea could aggravate the underlying problem. Macrophages can accumulate in infected tonsils and actually make them larger. The only time to use echinacea is for treating acute infections, not chronic.
Elderberry
Many strains of flu, whether A, B, or in the family that includes H1N1, enter the body by projecting proteins that fit into receptors on the surfaces of cells in the nose and throat like putting a key into a lock. Elderberry extracts (and probably elderberry jam and elderberry wine) contain complex carbohydrates that have a molecular shape so similar to viruses that they can lock flu viruses out.
Elderberry is something best taken from the beginning of colds and flu season. It also works after you come down with a cold or flu, but not as well. It will reduce bad breath caused by colds and flu taken as late as 3 days after the onset of symptoms.
Water
If you want to get rid of onion or garlic breath, the best thing you can do is to brush and floss as soon as possible after your meal to remove onion and garlic particles from your teeth and gums. When brushing and flossing are not possible, however, rinsing your mouth out with water, or just sipping water with your meal, can help keep onion and garlic breath under control.
Whole Milk
Whole milk—but not low fat or skim—drunk with a meal reduces the bad breath caused by cheese, pickled fish, curries, onions, and garlic. The fat in milk coats the particles of food that would otherwise release sulfur-bearing compounds into the mouth, essentially helping you trade a bad case of stinky food bad breath for a milder case of stinky food bad breath. Whole milk just buys you time to take care of your breath—if you don’t brush within 3 or 4 hours, your breath will actually be worse.
Zinc Lozenges
We usually think of zinc lozenges as something you take to prevent a cold. But the act of preventing a cold also helps prevent the bad breath that follows thereafter, bad breath that you may not know you have because your nose is stopped up.
The way zinc works is by locking the virus that causes a cold out of the cells it would infect in the ling of the nose or throat. Zinc gluconate is the mostly commonly used form of zinc for this purpose, although zinc carbonate and zinc sulfate also work.
The zinc has to come in contact with the surfaces of the nasal passages and throat to have any beneficial effect. This means you have to use a zinc spray (in which zinc tends to settle to the bottom) or you have to suck on a zinc lozenge until it disappears in your mouth—slowly. Saliva is dispersed to the back of your throat and up into your nose.
The time to take zinc is just as soon as you think you have been exposed to a cold. Protecting the lining of your nose and throat prevents the formation of smelly phlegm by preventing the infection altogether, or making your recovery time much shorter.
