All About Curing Bad Breath
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.
