A Hygiene How To: Bad Breath
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.
