Most of us make a point of brushing our teeth when we get bad breath.
Many of us make a point of flossing more or maybe using an oral irrigation device to get plaque off the parts of our teeth below the gum line when we get bad breath.
Almost none of us clean our tongues when we get bad breath.
If you have ever noticed a sticky and foul-tasting substance on your tongue, bad breath is probably also present. The sticky film that can cover the tongue can glue billions of bad breath bacteria to the surfaces of our tongues.
It’s not hard to identify the biofilm of bad breath bacteria on our tongues. Just look in a mirror and stick out your tongue as you say “Ah.” If there is a white or gray or yellowish coating on your tongue, or it it looks “furry,” there is close to a 100% chance that you also have bad breath.
It is even possible to taste this nasty bad breath film. It usually takes sour but sulfurous, a little like overly aged pickled eggs or yogurt that has gone bad. Almost no one likes it, but chances are that you would be surprised at the number of people who view this film on the tongue as an ordinary thing.
Believe it or not, a tongue that tastes bad will make your breath smell horrible – and can even be a symptom of something more serious. It is in your best interest to keep your tongue as clean as possible, as I will show in this article.
The Anatomy of Your Tongue
Let us first look at the tongue itself. Did you know that the tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end? It’s true, as is the fact that your tongue collects more bacteria than any other structure in your mouth. The tongue collects about 2/3 as many bacteria as your teeth and gums combined.
Covered in dozens of taste buds, your tongue is used not only in tasting but to help move saliva around in your mouth, which helps your mouth stay clean. Due to its size and central location, as well as its moist surface, your tongue collects an enormous amount of debris, bacteria, and mucus throughout the day. And due to its size and central location, your tongue is sensitive to changes in the physiology of your mouth.
The Physiology of Your Tongue
We tend to think of digestion as something that happens in the stomach and intestines and liver, but the fact is, digestion begins just as soon as food touches your tongue.
Your tongue rolls chewed food into a bolus for easy passage down your throat, missing your airways. It mixes saliva with your food to moisten it so it easier to swallow, but also so enzymes can begin breaking down carbohydrates while food is still in your mouth.
Lots of things can go wrong with your tongue:
Women who have particularly high levels of progesterone during the second half of their periods sometimes develop bumps on the front and sides of their tongue. These bumps accumulate the bacteria that cause morning breath.
Various species of yeast normally grow throughout the digestive tract, including the tongue. Sometimes antibiotic treatment or overuse of mouthwash can kill of the microorganisms that compete with yeast and cause a film of yeast to accumulate in the mouth and on the tongue. This film is usually white.
“Lie spots” (so called because ancient myth taught they were triggered by telling lies) can break out on the tongue when it is bitten or scratched. These lie spots can host bad breath bacteria.
White spots known as leukoplakia are common in smokers. They are sometimes pre-cancerous. And if they cause the breakdown of tissue, bad breath can result.
All of these kinds of inflammation and irritation break down tissue that can feed bad breath bacteria. If you have noticed a white substance on your tongue, then you have seen what is causing your chronic bad breath: bacteria. Specifically, the bacteria live in the substance that coats your tongue and produce volatile sulfur compounds, or VSCs. These compounds put off a pungent odor that definitely is not pleasing to you (or your spouse, significant other, or best friend, for that matter). To find a truly effective bad breath cure, you will have to neutralize or eliminate these compounds.
Tongue Cleaning 101
How do you accomplish this?
It’s really very simple. You scrape or brush the bacterial film off your tongue.
Please note that the purpose of tongue cleaning is not to scrape the tongue itself. It is only to scrape the bacterial film lying on your tongue. People can and do get serious infections by scraping the tongue raw. Bacteria that get into the tongue can even pass in the general circulation and cause bacterial infections in the heart.
To scrape your tongue, use a plastic tongue scraper (like an ice scraper, but don’t use an actual ice scraper to scrape your tongue) or your toothbrush. You want to scrape enough that it’s obvious that you have gotten rid of film on your tongue but you do not want even the slightest trace of bleeding from your tongue. If your tongue bleeds, or it hurts, stop. Injury to your tongue is counterproductive for controlling bad breath.
After you have finished getting as much of the sticky film as you can off your tongue, rinse your brush or scraper and set them aside to dry. You don’t want to put more bacteria back on your tongue after you have scraped them off.
Then you need to be patient. You want get rid of all the bacteria on your tongue in one scraping, and new bacteria are constantly arriving from your gums and teeth. It can take up to a month of scraping two or three times a week to get bad breath under control—but when you do, you can keep bad breath under control as long as you continue your routine of brushing three times a day, flossing once a day, and scraping two or three times a week.
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Did your mother ever tell you to wash out your mouth with soap? It’s an American thing, but for generations American mothers instructed their children—without actually meaning it—when they said naughty word or made unacceptable comments to wash out their mouths with soap. (It’s considered a form of child abuse, that can get parents put in jail, actually to do such a thing. But it’s an acceptable turn of phrase.)
If your mother ever told you that washing out your mouth with soap would cure bad breath, with all respect, she would be wrong. Nonetheless many of us try to do that every single day.
SLS and Bad Breath
No mentally competent person actually take care of oral hygiene with a bar of soap. Millions of us, however, use products that contain a sudsing agent known as sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS. If you live in the UK, you may see this chemical labeled as sodium dodecyl sulphate.
SLS is a surfactant. The best way to describe what it does is that it makes debris simply float away. The SLS in your toothpaste or mouthwash helps take tiny particles off your teeth and tongue, and leaves your mouth feeling fresher. The problem is that cleaning is not all SLS can do.
In the medical lab, SLS is used to break up tissues into individual cells. The concentration of SLS in most oral hygiene products is not so high that you will get bleeding ulcers inside your mouth (although SLS-sensitive people, usually women, actually experience this), but it is high enough that it can dry out the lining of your mouth. And that is what makes SLS a mouthwash marketer’s dream.
SLS dries out your mouth and tongue. It also loosens cells on the outermost lining of your mouth and tongue. The drying of membranes in your mouth creates tiny cracks and crevices in which bad breath bacteria can establish a home. The loosening of cells in your mouth cuts them off from oxygen and nutrition so that they quickly die. These dead cells become food for bad breath bacteria.
When your mouthwash contains SLS, the more mouthwash you use, the more mouthwash you need. That’s why you will never get your bad breath under control as long as you continue to use oral care products of any kind that contain this ingredient.
So, what should you use instead? Especially if you have chapped lips or you get acne on your chin, which are also side effects of SLS, try SLS-free products made by JASON’s Natural Cosmetics, Organix South, Theraveda, and Tom’s of Maine. But keeping your mouth irritation-free is only part of the battle.
Beyond Brushing
Brushing your teeth unquestionably helps keep your breath fresh. About 30% of all the bacteria in your mouth that can cause bad breath live on the surfaces of your teeth. Brushing removes them and sweetens your breath. Brushing your teeth, however, does not get rid of the 70% of bad breath bacteria that live on your gums and on your tongue.
The place bad breath bacteria accumulate on your gums is in the pocket at the base of each tooth known as the sulcus. Between 2 and 10 mm (1/10″ to 1/3″) deep, this gap between the teeth and gums can accumulate both bad breath bacteria and cellular debris from the gum itself. It can be crowded with plaque growing on the surface of the teeth if you don’t get regular dental care. And the bad breath bacteria that grow in each sulcus in your mouth release volatile sulfur compounds that don’t just smell bad, they also can break down proteins in the lining of your gums, killing gum tissue and making your breath smell even worse.
Some people try to clean their gums with methods that either don’t work or make the problem worse. Oral irrigation devices are great for removing plaque (although they won’t get all or even most of it) on the surfaces of the teeth your brush can’t reach. Removing plaque makes it easier for bad breath bacteria to flow out of the sulci (plural of sulcus, gaps) to places in your mouth where you can remove them. If you point the tip of your oral irrigation device at your teeth rather than placing at the base of your teeth, however, the offending bacteria will not be removed. And toothpicks actually compact the material that causes bad breath, as well as bruising your gums.
The best way to deal with the bad breath bacteria that live on your gums is to buy an oral irrigation device like the Hydrofloss or the Oxycare 3000. (The Oxycare 3000 is made by the Oxyfresh Company and is often mislabeled as the “Oxyfresh 3000.”) These machines help your gums and teeth stay healthier while getting rid of the bacteria and “gunk” that can cause bad breath.
Not everyone can afford oral irrigators, however, to get rid of the 30% of all bad breath bacteria that live under the gums. Fortunately, nearly anyone can afford a plastic tongue scraper that will get rid of the 40% of bad breath bacteria that live on the tongue.
Scraping Bad Breath Away
The next time you look in the mirror, stick out your tongue. Chances are that it is covered with a white or yellowish mossy film. That’s where bad breath bacteria live. If you scrape away the film, you scrape away the bacteria, and you control a major source of bad breath.
Do not use any sharp, metallic, glass, or porcelain scrapers on your tongue. The idea is to scrape away bacteria, not to scrape away tongue tissue. Use either a plastic tongue scraper that you can buy at almost any drugstore, or scrape your tongue with your toothbrush, several times a week.
Don’t forget to clean your brush or toothbrush after you scrape your tongue. You don’t want to replace the bacteria you removed the next time you do the procedure. But even if you cannot afford Hydrofloss or Oxycare oral irrigation machines, brushing and scraping will remove 70% of the bacteria that cause bad breath.
What about other methods of controlling bad breath? Mints and mouthwashes usually just mask bad breath odors. They don’t get rid of the cause of bad breath (or they make the problem worse). Flossing is helpful if you do it the right way, around each tooth, not digging into your gums between each tooth. And bad breath caused by chronic health conditions is best treated by treating the chronic health condition.
Brushing, scraping, and oral irrigation are by far the best ways of getting rid of most cases of bad breath for good. You may have a significant up-front cost to get the right equipment, but after the initial expense it’s possible you won’t need other products to keep your breath clean.
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Probably you’ve seen the bad breath commercial in which the happy couple wake up at the same time and start to kiss, only to draw back in disgust, simultaneously saying “Ewww! Morning breath!”
Morning bad breath really is not inevitable, but it is nearly universal. The epidemiologists tell us that there’s a 1 in 2 chance that anyone reading this article woke up with morning breath this very morning. And brushing your teeth before you went bed last night probably did not help.
What Is Morning Breath?
What is morning breath? Assuming we don’t sleepwalk and make onion and Limburger sandwiches, why should we wake up with bad breath if we smelled nice when we went to bed.
There is a two-part answer. One part of the answer is that the smell you experience comes from the presence of bacteria in your mouth. Bacteria feed off things, just like we do. They take dead tissue and mucus and other “oral debris” in your mouth and consume them.
The waste product from this consumption is something called volatile sulfur compounds – or VSCs. These VSCs produce that foul odor that is so common in the mornings.
The other part of the answer concerns where bad breath bacteria are active when they cause morning breath. Morning breath is not caused by bacteria on the surfaces of the teeth. It is not caused by bacteria that are active on the gums.
Morning breath is caused by bacteria on the tongue. And since we don’t always have the same number of bacteria on our tongues, we don’t always have morning breath.
Why Does the Tongue Accumulate Bacteria Some Times and Not Others?
The bad breath bacteria always releases the gases that cause morning breath, but they do not always release enough of these gases for bad breath to be noticeable. When there are fewer bacteria on the tongue, there is less morning breath. But when are there fewer bacteria on the tongue?
Let’s suppose your last meal of the day was soup, mashed potatoes, and pudding. These foods slide right over the tongue and into your stomach, without removing many bacteria as they pass.
Now let’s suppose your last meal of the day was crusty bread used to make a sandwich followed by some kind of fiber-rich fruit, like apples or pineapple. These foods pick up part of the film of bacteria on the tongue as they slide over it on their way to the stomach. They reduce morning breath.
While your choices in food do make a difference in whether you will have morning breath the next day, that doesn’t mean you need to start living on crackers and chips and unpeeled crustaceans. There are other things you can do to get bacteria off your tongue.
Stop Morning Breath By Scraping (or Brushing) Your Tongue
The best way to stop morning breath is by scraping your tongue. It’s really critical that you don’t scrape your tongue too vigorously.
Just as bacteria on your gums can get into your bloodstream and cause cardiovascular infections, bacteria on your tongue can get into your bloodstream and cause cardiovascular infections, if you scrape your tongue raw. The objective in tongue scraping is not to remove tongue tissue. It is to remove the gray or yellow film on the tongue that holds the bacteria in place.
That’s why we don’t recommend you use a stainless steel tongue scraper any more. Too many people start scraping too hard. It’s better to use a plastic tongue scraper or even a toothbrush to remove film from the tongue to stop bad breath
How Fast Can You Expect Results from Tongue Scraping?
You won’t get rid of the film of bacteria that coats your tongue in one day, or even in one week. It usually takes about a month of scraping the tongue two or three times a week to make a sniffable difference.
Moreover, women sometimes experience growth in tongue tissue in sync with their menstrual cycles. During the second half of a woman’s period, tongue tissue hardens and flakes, first giving bad breath bacteria a chance to multiply without being rinsed or scraped away, and then releasing them so they can cause bad breath. Women of reproductive age are more likely to have morning breath just after ovulation, and need to pay special attention to oral care at this time.
It’s Still Necessary to Brush
Even though brushing is not enough to stop morning breath, you should also brush your teeth regularly, to maintain the integrity of your teeth – specifically the protective enamel that covers them. This is particularly important if you have a diet that is high in sugar.
Once cavities form, bacteria can gather and form in your teeth, causing odor and that annoying smell we all hate in the morning. Brushing your teeth at least twice or better three times a day, preferably after every meal, is important to hygiene and oral health.
Choices and food and drink also can make a difference in controlling morning breath—but it’s primarily choices that affect your tongue that make the most difference. Strong alcoholic beverages can damage the lining of the tongue and create morning breath. Banana daiquiris contain a unique combination of allergenic substances that can cause some drinkers to have morning breath. Hot coffee, hot tea, and hot food can damage the tongue and the lining of the mouth, killing tissues, and releasing proteins that feed bad breath bacteria.
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Have you ever wondered whether the products you buy to control bad breath can really get rid of it for good? In 2007, scientists at the Nippon Dental University in Japan and the University of British Columbia used high-tech gas chromatography to determine whether common remedies for this most common of all health conditions really work.
The two teams of scientists recruited volunteers who were asked not to eat any food or drink any beverages, floss, brush, scrape, or use oral irrigators or neti pots from midnight until they came in for their laboratory appointments the next morning. The objective of testing was to find out whether common bad breath treatments could take care of ordinary bad breath, the kind that can occur any day but doesn’t occur every day.
The volunteers were asked to blow into a collection vessel for the gas chromatograph. The machine was calibrated to measure hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan, two components of bad breath odor that are also identified with rotten eggs and sewer gas, respectively. The first breath test established a baseline measurement. Subsequent tests at one-hour intervals measured the effects of common breath treatments.
Testing revealed that:
- Breath mints reduced rotten egg odor or sewer gas odor, but never both at the same time.
- Chewing gum did not reduce concentration of gases in the mouth. (It’s reasonable to assume that chewing gum releases saliva that rinses food particles off the teeth and tongue and prevents future gas formation, but the test shows it does not reduce already existing gases.)
- “A very popular parsley oil product,” probably the Clorets brand of breath gum, not only did not reduce breath odor, after 2 hours bad breath bacteria started decaying the gum itself.
- Toothpaste reduced bad breath gases slightly for up to two hours. (Brushing removes food particles and stops the formation of bad breath odor in the future but does not get rid of bad breath odor already in the mouth.)
- Drinking green tea was a better breath deodorant than any of the other treatments tested. However, its effects only lasted 2 hours and only reduced the concentration of bad breath gases by about 50%.
What the science shows is that most of things we take for bad breath operate on the same principle as banging your head against the wall. It feels better when you stop.
Most bad breath products only cover up bad breath odors. Most of the things we do to treat bad breath, like brushing and flossing and tongue scraping, prevent future bad breath odors. But that does not mean that everything about breath mints and scented toothpaste and breath gums isn’t bad! Here are the key points you need to know:
- Breath mints don’t remove breath odor. They just mask it so it is less noticeable. Mint, peppermint, and wintergreen contain volatile oils that irritate the lining of your nasal passages. Your central nervous system pays more attention to the irritation caused by the mint than to the odor caused by bad breath. The downside of breath mints is that they smell better to you than they do to other people. The also reduce the likelihood you will burp up obnoxious gases released from the digestion of garlic, onions, smoked fish, and cheese.
- Chlorophyll chewing gum and other sugarless chewing gums don’t deodorize, but they do stimulate salivation. If you can keep your mouth and tongue from getting dry, there will be fewer tiny cracks to provide halitosis bacteria with a home. These products don’t get rid of bad breath right away, but they do keep it from developing later. And chewing gum flavored with xylitol can also prevent ear and sinus infections.
- Toothpaste (except for baking soda toothpaste) isn’t a deodorant, either. But a daily brush with baking soda or peroxide toothpaste really can help prevent gingivitis and other forms of gum and tooth decay capable of causing overwhelming odors. Be sure to rinse your toothbrush after you use it.
And what other research reveals is that all forms of green tea are not equal when it comes to halitosis care. Green tea you make the Asian way, by putting finely ground green tea directly in the cup and covering with hot water, is an excellent breath freshener and an important aid to oral hygiene. Green tea you make from tea bags, not so much. White tea has similar properties, but the bagged form is not best.
There are times, of course, that additional effort is necessary for controlling bad breath. Certain medications, like the drugs used to treat irritable bladder disease, depression, or Parkinson’s disease, are especially drying to the mouth. Any infection that causes bleeding or that makes the gums or tongue red is likely to cause bad breath, and getting a dentist to look at it should be a top priority. Person-to-person transmission of cold and flu germs will also result in halitosis about a week later, even if other symptoms are not all that rough.
Just be careful about the mouthwash you choose. Any product that contains alcohol, regular Listerine, for instance, can dry out the mouth and over the long run cause a bad breath problem as bad as the one it cures. At the top of your list of mouthwash selections should be alcohol-free herbal mouthwashes such as Sarakan and Astring-O-Sol, or non-drying non-herbal formulas like Oxyfresh with Zinc and Jason’s Powersmile.
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It can be a wonderful thing to be a kid, but when children have bad breath, their siblings and playmates are very likely to give them a hard time. If the children in your neighborhood have nicknamed your child “Stinky,” it is probably a good time to look into the causes of bad breath.
Baby Bottles and Bad Breath
Infants usually don’t have bad breath. By the time a child is 18 to 36 months old, however, many children have halitosis.
Most of the time the problem is falling asleep with a baby bottle in the mouth. Sleeping with a bottle in the mouth causes constant exposure to the sugars in milk or juice. Bacteria on the surface of baby teeth generate lactic acid that erodes the enamel and leaves brown or black spots. Parents usually notice discoloration on the upper teeth first.
Halitosis is not the worst problem that can be caused by baby bottle tooth decay. Adult teeth may not come in properly if baby teeth are not repaired, and the procedure usually involves putting the child under general anesthesia. It’s painless for the child but anxiety-inducing for the parents. It also costs about US $5000 and is not covered by insurance.
The solution to both problems, however, can be very simple: Don’t allow your child to sleep with a baby bottle in mouth. If your child insists on having the bottle, at least make sure it is filled with water rather than milk or juice.
This can be easier said than done. Some children insist on going to sleep with a bottle filled with milk, not water. For these toddlers with discerning palates, dilute the milk, adding more and more water to the mixture for the nighttime feeding until eventually the child is satisfied with just water in the bottle. It also helps to clean the child’s first teeth with gauze once a day until there are enough teeth to begin brushing.
It’s also important to avoid the use of teething biscuits—and never, ever give your child soft drinks by bottle.
Sippy Cups and Halitosis
Probably the most insidious cause of children’s bad breath is the ubiquitous use of sippy cups. A sippy cup, for the uninitiated, is a closed container with a small, raised, rectangular opening from which a child can drink without spilling the beverage. Sippy cups save a lot of spills and dirty clothes, but they can also be ruinous for oral hygiene.
The problem with sippy cups is that the child drinks the liquid not just through the mouth but between the teeth, coating the teeth and gums with sugar (or, worse, ice cream or gelatin/Jell-O). The constant bath of sugar on the teeth and gums causes the same problems encountered in infants who sleep with bottle in mouth.
The ideal way to handle this problem is to teach your child how to drink from a glass or cup at the earliest age possible. Or you could use the approach taken by billions of parents before the invention of sippy cups: Give your child liquids with a spoon. Just don’t be remiss in your hydration schedule any more than you would be with your feeding schedule. It’s essential to the child’s general health to get enough fluid as well as enough food.
Noses and Bad Breath
Most children go through what is sometimes impolitely called the “snotty-nosed kid” stage. Stuffed-up noses are common in kids between the ages of 1 and 6.
The problem sometimes is colds and congestion. Young immune systems have to build up resistance to the 150 or so strains of colds viruses they can encounter in the world around them. Once a child comes down with a cold caused by a particular strain of virus, he or she probably will be never have to worry about getting infected again, but the average person has to have 150 or so colds before enjoying some degree of immunity. If you are a parent, it may seem like your child gets all 150 strains of colds viruses in a row, and shares them with you.
Treating colds will treat kids’ bad breath. This kind of bad breath is temporary, and has the “benefit” of keeping other children away so they don’t get infected, too. Persistent bad breath, however, points to other issues.
Sometimes kids put various objects of their noses. Sticks, stones, coins, erasers, lint, and items perhaps left unmentioned can block the nasal passages and cause bad breath. A cold that doesn’t seem to cause fever or fatigue is a sign that the problem may be something other than infection. A doctor or nurse practitioner can identify and remove most lodgers in the nose relatively easily and with minimal pain.
Sometimes the problem is a deviated septum or an incompletely developed nasal canal. Be sure to mention your child’s bad breath when you visit the doctor or pediatrician so the nose will be checked.
Neglected Oral Hygiene
There are children who tie their shoes, button their buttons, scrub behind their ears, and brush their teeth automatically at the age of five. Probably they are not your children.
It is usually a mistake to rely on a child who has not reached the age of six (and, in some cases, a child who is well past six) to take care of oral hygiene on his or her own. Children may “forget” to brush, or they may fail to brush all their teeth, or they may cause injury to their gums by brushing up and down or by using the wrong kind of toothbrush.
Bad breath may result. Huge dental bills may result, too.
Taking care of this kind of bad breath requires close parental supervision. Your child will have a happier social life with sweet smelling breath, and you’ll be spending a lot less time and money at the dentist’s office. Just be sure your child learns how to brush and floss the right way.
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Sometimes when you have bad breath you just want it to stop and you just want it to stop right now. This article will tell you about proven techniques that can stop bad breath in its tracks. These are not bad breath “cures,” but they will get you through a job interview or a date or a reunion long enough to leave a good first impression or to rekindle a sweet memory. But first it’s important to understand what causes bad breath.
The Number One Cause of Bad Breath
Lots of things can cause bad breath. Over 90% of the time, however, bad breath is caused by bacteria converting proteins in your mouth into volatile sulfur compounds.
The fact that you have bad breath bacteria does not mean you have neglected oral hygiene. While there are exceptions to almost any rule, the overwhelming majority of people who suffer halitosis brush their teeth and use mouthwash. The problem is that brushing your teeth and using mouthwash don’t always get rid of enough of bad breath bacteria to stop breath odor, although sometimes they do.
When Brushing Really Is Enough
Sometimes it really is enough to brush your teeth. The smaller the mouth, the smaller the number of bad breath bacteria in it. Children often can stop bad breath just by brushing their teeth. They don’t have to get their tongues scraped or floss their baby teeth or use mouthwash to overcome bad breath. They just need to brush.
Because brushing does the trick when we are children, we tend to think it is adequate for bad breath control when we are adults. The reason that brushing does not work when we are adults is that our mouths are larger and there are more surfaces that can harbor more bacteria. Only a little less than a third of bad breath bacteria are found on the surfaces of the teeth. These bacteria are constantly being replaced by bacteria that live on the tongue or in the gap between the gums and the teeth, so it’s necessary to brush several times a day to keep bad breath in control. In adults, who by virtue of maturity have larger mouths, there can be so many bacteria that brushing won’t keep them in check.
When Brushing Really Isn’t Enough
If you brush your teeth three times a day and you still have bad breath, the problem may be the 70% of bacteria that are not found on the surfaces of your teeth. About 30% of all bad breath bacteria live in the gap between the teeth and the gums. About 40% of bad breath bacteria live on the tongue.
Flossing won’t get rid of bad breath bacteria on the gums. In fact, flossing into the gums can make bad breath worse. Running floss up and down into the gum can compact food particles against the gum and injure the soft tissue of the gums. Dying gum tissue decays and releases icky odors.
The way to get bad breath bacteria and the gunk of food particles that feed them out of your gums is oral irrigation. Oral irrigation is nothing other than squirting a jet of water into the space between the tooth and the gum to remove the plaque of bacteria that can coat the tooth and any food particles that could be lodged in the gum (especially after using a toothpick or dental floss in a misguided attempt to remove them).
There doesn’t have to be anything special about the water squirted under the gums to work other than that it has to rinse the gums, not the surfaces of the teeth usually cleaned by brushing. Doing oral irrigation every day with regular water will remove about 20% of plaque in a month. Doing oral irrigation with a device that “magnetizes” water will remove about 45% of plaque in a month. Either way, the effects of oral irrigation are not immediate. It will take at least two months to get rid of most of the plaque on the teeth beneath the gums, and then you’ve only tackled about 30% of the total bad breath bacteria in your mouth. But in addition to your breath feeling and smelling the way it does right after you have your teeth cleaned, oral irrigation can remove the reservoir of bad breath bacteria that keep finding their way to your teeth and tongue.
Two Overlooked Ways of Controlling Bad Breath
Even regular brushing and oral irrigation many not be enough to get bad breath into control for good. It may also be necessary to get rid of the 40% of bad breath bacteria that live on the tongue and the bad breath bacteria that lurk in the nose and throat.
Frankly, the idea of tongue scraping makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even those of us writing this article. It doesn’t have to be, well, weird. The best instrument to use to scrape the tongue is a piece of plastic of about the same consistency as an ice scraper. This scraper is strong enough to remove the gray or yellow film on the tongue made by bacteria, but not sharp enough to cut into your tongue. There are also stainless steel tongue scrapers and you can brush your tongue the same way you brush your teeth.
Either way, the objective is to remove bacteria, not healthy tongue tissue. If your tongue bleeds, you have scraped too hard, and you’ve actually made the problem worse. You only need to scrape your tongue every other day to get rid of most of the bad breath bacteria in about a month. You may be amazed by the difference.
Even when you get the bacteria in your mouth under control, you may still have a problem with bad breath bacteria in your nose and at the back of your throat. If you have post-nasal drip, or if you have had a cold, the constant flow of mucus also gives bad breath microbes a continuous feast of sulfur-containing proteins. Getting rid of this source of bad breath is best done with a neti pot.
A neti pot looks something like a tea pot with a long spout. After you lie on your side over a basin to catch the expelled fluid, place the spout gently against one nostril—don’t try to ram it in—and let the warm water you put in the pot flow out the other nostril. You may be surprised what you see come out. This isn’t something you need to every day, but you may benefit from using a neti pot two or three times a week to stop bad breath fast.
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If you know you have bad breath, or even if you just think you have bad breath, what you really need may be a simple hygiene how-to. The problem probably is not that neglect oral hygiene. The problem may be that you do your oral hygiene the wrong way.
Morning Breath Doesn’t Mean You Didn’t Brush
Morning breath isn’t pleasant, but it’s not necessarily a sign of bad hygiene. Everyone does not wake up in the morning with nasty, odoriferous breath, but a lot of us do.
Bad breath odor that is worst first thing in the morning is most commonly caused by bacteria growing on the tongue, not on the teeth. Even if you brush your teeth right before you go to bed, bacteria can grow in the cracks and crevices of your tongue, feeding on tiny trapped particles of food and on the dead cells shed by the tongue itself. The process of breaking down cysteine in the proteins of your tongue releases sulfur compounds that we also identify as rotten egg odor and sewer gas—not what you want to wake up to first thing in the morning.
Brushing your teeth won’t help morning breath when the problem is your tongue. Rinsing your mouth with mouthwash can even make the problem worse. Most tingly-stinging brands of mouthwash, like the original Listerine, contain enough alcohol to dry out your gums and tongue, creating new cracks and crannies to host bacteria. The problem is that they don’t contain enough alcohol to kill the microorganisms that cause bad breath.
So how can you get rid of morning breath? It may seem a little drastic, but the best way is to scrape your tongue. You don’t want to damage your tongue in the process of scraping it. Don’t get out your paint scrapers or ice scrapers or anything you’d use to remove old linoleum before putting in a new floor. Use a plastic tongue scraper you can find online or at any drugstore and scrape gently. You don’t want to remove so much tongue tissue that you bleed and feed bad breath bacteria even more.
Bleeding Gums Smell Bad
Bleeding in the mouth and bad breath go together. Tiny amounts of blood oozing from your gums feeds the same bacteria that feed on food particles to make plaque, and stopping bleeding in your mouth can reduce bad breath.
How can you tell you have bleeding from your gums? The simplest way, of course, is observing red blood on your toothbrush or in your wash basin when you rinse your mouth.
You can also recognize bleeding in your mouth from the metallic taste it leaves behind. Blood, after all contains hemoglobin, and hemoglobin contains iron. A bitter or “rusty” taste in your mouth first thing in the morning may be a tip that your morning breath is at least partially caused by bleeding.
If bleeding gums are your problem, you need to see a dentist about cleaning your teeth. You may even have to get antibiotic treatment before you have your teeth cleaned to make sure that potentially pathogenic bacteria are not forced into your bloodstream. In the meantime, what you need to do is probably to brush less, not more. That is, you need to brush your teeth more gently, not less frequently.
Brushing Teeth to Prevent Bad Breath
The way a lot of us learned to brush our teeth as kids is almost a guarantee of not just bad breath but also of a host of oral health problems. A hard-bristled toothbrush can damage both gums and teeth. The bristles can wear grooves in the teeth that can cause them simply to snap in two, sometimes as much as 50 years later.
Toothbrushes are designed for teeth, not gums. Brushing hard against a gum can create still more of those cracks and crevices mentioned earlier in this article that can host bad breath bacteria. Instead of brushing up and down and into the gum line, it’s better to brush at a 45-degree angle across the teeth to remove particles of food that are trapped on the enamel.
It’s essential to brush every tooth. The easiest way to do this is to start at one side of the top of your mouth and work across, brushing teeth front and back, and then to brush in the reverse direction across the fronts and backs of your lower teeth.
Brushing your teeth the right way can spare damage to your gums that causes bad breath. But there’s one more step in daily oral hygiene that will help keep your breath fresh.
Floss the Right Way
Brushing gets particles off your teeth. Flossing removes particles between your teeth.
The wrong way to floss is to run a piece of floss up and down between two teeth. This wears a groove into the gum that forms a home for—you guessed it—bad breath bacteria. It can also create a haven for the microorganisms that can infect your gums.
The right way to floss is to wrap a piece of floss around a tooth. Then apply a light pressure while moving the floss from right to left rather than up and down. It takes two hands to use dental floss properly. If you wrap a substantial length of floss, usually about 18 inches/40 cm, around your two index fingers, you will have maximum control over where you place the floss, keeping it around teeth but not pulling so hard that you loosen a tooth.
These are the basics of your hygiene how-to for getting bad breath under control. But you may also be interested in other methods of how to get rid of bad breath. Fortunately, a bad breath cure is within easy reach for approximately 97% of bad breath sufferers, even those who endure halitosis – or chronic bad breath.
Click here to learn how to cure bad breath in 3 days
Millions of people every month enter the search term “cure bad breath” or its equivalent on Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and all the other search engines. Medical professionals tend to pooh-pooh concerns about bad breath, but hundreds of millions of people forced to hunker down with halitosis consider finding a cure for bad breath almost as important as finding a cure for cancer. And the simple fact is that finding a way to get rid of bad breath for good can open up not just new opportunities in your social life but might also be the one stress you needed to remove to enjoy vibrant, energetic overall good health.
The problem is that people look for bad breath cures in all the wrong places. One person might believe that all is necessary is to avoid eating onions and garlic, and have horrible bad breath due to gum disease. Another person might believe that a swig of Listerine every morning is all anyone needs to do to keep bad breath away, and suffer bad breath later in the day because the alcohol in the mouthwash has dried out his mouth.
People try to cure bad breath with toothpastes and tooth brushing and dental floss and oral irrigation devices, but you can’t cure bad breath if you don’t know why you have it.
We can’t give you any tools for medical diagnosis or treatment. We can, however, list symptoms and causes for the most common causes of bad breath. See if any one or more of these symptoms applies to you.
1. You have morning breath but once you brush your teeth your breath smells OK the rest of the day.
The problem might be related to breathing. Conditions that force you to breathe with your mouth open through the night, such as sleep apnea or nasal congestion, dry out your mouth. Drying your mouth and tongue creates tiny cracks in the linings of the mucous membranes in your mouth that form safe harbors of halitosis bacteria. It may be more important (and treating sleep apnea is essential for long-term overall health) to treat your breathing problem than it is to treat your breath problem. If you take care of what is keeping you from sleeping with your mouth closed, you may no longer have a problem with morning breath.
2. You really smell awful when you eat onions and garlic.
Well, one way of dealing with this not to eat so many onions or so much garlic. Another way to deal with this problem is to be sure you eat a salad, preferably one with bitter vegetables such as endive or radicchio, before you eat the food that contains onions or garlic. The sensation of bitter taste on your tongue triggers the release of stomach acid that digests your food more completely. You’ll be less likely to erupt in garlicky burps after your meal.
Another way of dealing with this problem is to eat or drink high-fat foods or beverages along with your meal. Fat coats garlic and keeps its sulfurous odors inside.
But the best way to deal with onion and garlic breath is simply to make sure you have rinsed your mouth before you go back to work or your social activity after you eat. As long as belching and burping aren’t keeping onion and garlic odors in your mouth after you eat, the last little bits of onion and garlic will break down in about six hours—faster if you rinse, brush, or at least sip water after your meal.
3. You brush and floss and use mouthwash and they don’t do any good.
Sometimes people of fastidious oral hygiene have bad breath. The problem isn’t that they don’t take care of their mouths. The problem usually is that they take care of their mouths the wrong way.
Anything that injures the lining of your gums, the surface of your tongue, or the enamel on your teeth can provide a home for the germs that cause halitosis. Use a toothbrush with soft bristles. Make sure you are brushing your teeth, not your gums.
Brush across your teeth, not up and down. This results in less pressure being placed on your teeth and fewer bristles bruising your gums.
And floss to the left and right rather than up and down. Digging floss into your gums creates an environment where bacteria can flourish, and provides them with your own injured tissue to consume as food.
4. You suffer from purple burps.
If you have purple burps, there is absolutely no doubt that you and everyone around you knows about them. They are little like flatulence in reverse.
No amount of antacid or peppermint tea or Pepto Bismol will quell this problem. It is typically caused by a microorganism known as Giardia, acquired from contaminated drinking water. (Nearly everyone who does a trek in the Himalayas or in certain parts of the American Rockies gets this infection.) You’ll have to get treatment for the infection to get rid of horrendous halitosis it causes, but once you do, the bad breath goes away.
5. You get bad breath when you get hoarse.
The solution for this problem will probably surprise you. You probably need to eat less at each meal.
A sore throat can cause bad breath, but it usually doesn’t. That’s because the tissues that would be eaten away by bad breath bacteria are constantly cleansed by the flow of saliva down to the stomach.
The problem that causes bad breath usually is stomach acid going up. The condition is a very mild form of heartburn or esophageal reflux disease. You might try to treat it with Rolaids or Tums, but they interfere with your body’s ability to absorb minerals—and not just the calcium added to the antacids.
It’s usually better simply to eat smaller meals. Less food goes into your stomach, and less stomach acid comes back up. There is less irritation of your throat, gums, and teeth, and bad breath germs have fewer places to hide. When all else fails, going on a diet just might do the trick.
These five causes of bad breath are the easiest to overlook.
Click here to learn how to cure bad breath in 3 days
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.
Click here to learn how to cure bad breath in 3 days
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.
