Help with Halitosis: The Best Bad Breath Advice Available
If you are looking for the best bad breath advice on the Internet, you have come to the right site. Bad breath is one of those things that plagues us from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed, and that can even plague our bed partners while we are asleep. If you have bad breath, you might wake up with an icky, disgusting morning breath that you just don’t know how to treat. You reach for a toothbrush and get to work—but maybe just brushing your teeth won’t do you any good.
Some of us have bad breath 24/7. Some of us don’t have anyone in our lives who will let us know our breath smells bad. Some of us have family, friends, coworkers, or life partners who finally confront us with the fact that our breath smells. Getting rid of bad breath, unfortunately, isn’t always as easy as 1-2-3.
You Are Not Alone
You’re not helpless just because you have halitosis, and you are certainly not alone. The Center For Breath Treatment in northern California in the USA estimates that between 50 and 80 million people in the United States alone have untreated bad breath. If getting rid of bad breath were as easy as brushing your teeth and taking a swig of mouthwash, then it probably would not be one of the USA’s most frequently untreated health issues. But you have come to the place for solid information about what works—and what doesn’t—for treating bad breath.
Make Sure the Problem Isn’t Medical
Most cases of bad breath actually are not caused by medical issues. Usually there is a unique feature of the anatomy of the head or throat that causes unique challenges in oral hygiene. But if your halitosis really is caused by a medical problem, treating the medical problem can give you immediate relief from bad breath.
What kinds of medical problems cause bad breath? There are some conditions that absolutely, positively always require a doctor’s care that can cause bad breath as one of many symptoms. These conditions include untreated type 2 diabetes, kidney failure, and liver failure. It’s highly unlikely that one of these conditions is causing your bad breath if bad breath is your primary concern.
There are also other chronic conditions that cause bad breath, such as allergies, sleep apnea, lupus, Sjögren’s syndrome, chronic sinusitis, chronic tonsillitis, or polyps in the nose. The common denominator of these also-serious health concerns is that they cause dryness in the mouth. Tiny cracks and crevices open in the gums and on the tongue, creating a home for bad breath bacteria. These bacteria break down dead tissues and the volatile sulfur compounds in the gases they emit can even kill healthy tissues in the mouth, causing a downward spiral of halitosis as tissue decay causes halitosis and halitosis causes tissue decay.
If you have one of these problems, you can’t solve it on your own. If you aren’t a doctor, you will need to consult a doctor. But there are also people who have bad breath that just requires extra oral care.
Trying to Get Rid of Bad Breath 1-2-3
Bad breath bacteria lurk in three locations in the mouth. They are found on the surfaces of the teeth. They can grow in the gap between the gums and the base of a tooth known as the sulcus. And they can grow on the tongue.
About 30% of bad breath bacteria grow on the surfaces of the teeth. About 30% of bad breath bacteria grow in the sulci (or sulcuses) between the gums and the teeth. And the remaining 40% of bad breath bacteria grow as a slimy film on the tongue.
Can you guess how you may be able to get rid of halitosis 1-2-3?
1. First, brush your teeth several times a day. Brushing your teeth at an angle (we make this recommendation over and over on this site, because it is so important for bad breath care) instead of up and down gets food particles and bacteria off your teeth without ramming them into your gums. Brushing your teeth only removes about 30% of the potential bad breath bacteria in your mouth, but sometimes this is all you need to make any stinkiness unnoticeable.
2. Second, get rid of the gunk between your teeth and your gums. Getting your teeth cleaned at the dentists at least twice a year is important for removing plaque off the surface of your teeth. This leaves more room in the sulcus and makes cleaning easier. It also helps to spray warm or, even better, “magnetized” water into the sulcus to remove food particles, cellular debris, plaque, and bacteria. This is not a substitute for dental care, but using a device like Hydrofloss once a day for 30 days can get rid of about 40% of the tartar on your teeth as well as most of the bad breath bacteria on your gums.
Just be sure you don’t try to remove bad breath bacteria or food particles or plaque with a toothpick. You can bruise your gums, or force food particles even further into the crack.
3. Learn how to clean your tongue.
The idea behind cleaning your tongue is getting rid of the gray or yellow slime-like biofilm that usually covers the tongue. When you “scrape” your tongue, you are not really removing part of your tongue. You just want to remove the film that lies over it.
Cleaning the tongue can be accomplished with a plastic scraper (with a dull edge that won’t cut your tongue) or with your toothbrush itself. The more of the film you remove from the back of your tongue, the greater effect you will have on your breath. Do not cut or scrape into your tongue.
These three techniques can remove essentially all of the bad breath bacteria in your mouth, and they usually are enough to get bad breath under control—in about a month. In the meantime, you can use mouthwash to cover up bad breath, but not all mouthwashes are created equal.
Mouthwash for Bad Breath
Listerine is the world’s most commonly used mouthwash for treating bad breath. That doesn’t mean it’s the best.
Listerine was invented in the 1870′s as antiseptic for scrubbing surgical theaters. Then it was promoted as way of stripping paint or wax off floors without damaging the wood underneath. Only in the 1920′s did an enterprising marketer start promoting it as a mouthwash.
The problem with Listerine is that it contains enough alcohol to dry out your mouth (and create new homes for bad breath bacteria) but not enough alcohol really to kill bad breath germs on contact. The result, however, is a marketer’s dream. The product masks breath for a few hours, until it dries out the mouth to ensure the user will continue to have bad breath.
If you need to use a mouthwash, invest a little more money and try Dr. Katz’s, Dioxirinse, or Oxycare. You’ll be able to mask bad breath smells—and you won’t damage you mouth so that bad breath is perpetuated.
