Bad breath can hang around way past its ‘used by date’ and turn into something very annoying, if not a full on affliction.
It leaks into every part of your life including your professional life and deep into your social and personal lives.
Most people won’t come right out and tell you that you have smelly breath. Firstly, it’s embarrassing to talk about something so personal and secondly it’s easier to talk about it behind your back.
Yes, it’s embarrassing for all involved. But what exactly is chronic bad breath or halitosis?
Most Common Bad Breath Causes
Most people experience their worst foul breath time in the morning when they first wake up from sleep. You haven’t eaten or drunk anything for a few hours so the air inside your mouth is trapped. When you open your mouth in the morning the stale breath escapes. Disgusting!
You brush your teeth and find your okay for a few hours but as the day progresses your smelly bad breath creeps back. You feel sorry for those around you but nothing can help. So you grab a mint, a drink or some gum to mask the smell. Anything to tide you over. You need a bad breath solution that works.
Situational Halitosis Causes
Of course, bad breath causes can be strictly situational after eating a meal rich with spices, garlic or onions. If you’re a smoker or date or live with a smoker, your breath smells like smoke from cigarettes or cigars.
A third common bad breath cause that is considered situational is drinking too much alcohol.
Occasional BadBreath Causes
Many people use gum, bad breath sprays and breath fresheners to mask the effects of halitosis – a more severe or permanent condition of bad breath. But the more you rely on these breath fresheners the more you realize they don’t last very long and some other type of action is needed to get to the cause of the bad breath and get it out of your life.
Chronic bad breath or halitosis is characterized by a persistent fetid (that’s smelly, even putrid) odor that comes from your mouth and sometimes even your nose.
The odor needs to leave your body and those are the best avenues; the rest of the odor is in your stomach just waiting for a chance to escape.
Most who suffer with chronic bad breath often have excellent oral hygiene so they’re confused if not at a loss as to why this smelly ghost hangs around and what they can to do next to fix their halitosis. The best advice is to make appointments with your dentist and doctor to check your mouth and body and see if something else could be the bad breath cause.
The most common bad breath cause is from a bacterium that’s naturally present in your mouth. But if food particles are left in your mouth between your teeth, under your tongue or under your gums the bacteria grows, feeding off these tiny food particles from your last meal. Too many and you get a case of bad smelly breath.
There are many ways you can fight this. It goes without saying that using a good toothbrush that gets between teeth is the first plan of attack. A lot of people brush around their teeth but miss the crevices around their teeth, their back teeth and their tongue when brushing.
Make sure you brush your teeth for at least five minutes.
Any less than five minutes means you’re not reaching all the places that can cause foul breath. Use a good quality toothpaste and mouthwash.
Cheaper brands don’t always have the right amounts of active ingredients to really clean your teeth.
Some bad breath products can actually make your breath worse. Use products such as a baking soda toothpaste and possibly even peroxide as the main ingredients. These two elements can help control your off-putting breath and allow you to feel more confident when you’re dealing with colleagues, friends or loved ones. But as the label says; ‘if symptoms persist seek medical attention.’
If trying to treat halitosis you will have no doubt read, heard and come across many wonderful and whacky ways that claim to be able to bring an end to our embarrassing problem. However what I have often found difficult is separating the truth and scientific evidence behind their claims from the marketing hype. One thing that I have learnt in all the time I have been helping people to naturally treat halitosis is that for most people they do not need to spend a fortune on these products. Instead many of us can benefit simply be reassessing our daily oral hygiene routines and making sure we do as much as we possibly can to limit the growth of the bacteria that cause halitosis.
This article then hopes to give you some helpful tips in treating halitosis through your daily oral hygiene routine but first we need to understand the root cause of our problem. Bad breath and the chronic bad breath we know as halitosis is caused by bacteria living, breeding and excreting their volatile sulpher compound waste products in the mouth. These bacteria thrive in a dry, acidic and anaerobic environment and so are often concentrated in the sponge like groves at the back of our tongue where a thin layer of natural mucus protects them from oxygenation.
Now, like I said at the start of this article, there are tons of products out there that the big pharmaceuticals are trying to sell us which they claim can solve our problem. Before we go down that route however we want to make sure our oral hygiene routine is doing all it can to prevent this problem in the first place so here are some tips for doing just that.
Tip #1 – Floss First
When we eat particles of food become lodged in the small gaps between our teeth. If left there these particles become an ideal source of food for bad breath causing bacteria. By removing these particles after meals we limit the food available to the bacteria and can help to keep their numbers low.
Tip #2 – Brush Up
Now that we have dislodged any particles of food from between the teeth the next stage of our halitosis treatment is removing any food from the chewing surfaces by through brushing. Spending a full two minutes cleaning the teeth will help eliminate as much of the food particles as possible but also remove plague from the teeth and gum lines. Toothpaste with an active baking soda ingredient will also help to lower the acidity of the mouth which helps to make our mouths a much more inhospitable place for the bad breath causing bacteria.
Tip #3 – Clean Your Tongue
Just incase you didn’t know, the bacteria that cause bad breath can often be found concentrated at the back of the tongues where the microscopic spaces between the grooves of the tongue and the thin film of mucus shield them from too much oxygen and provide the ideal conditions for growth. By using a tongue scraper we can clean this area and expose the bacteria to oxygen. The only problem is scrpaing your tongue from back to front can seem avery unnaturally prosses and when you forst do it you will more than likely initiate the gag reflex. Please believe me when I say it just get easier but at the start just take it easy and gently scrape until you start getting used to it
**Bonus Tip**
Lots of people clean their tongue with their toothbrush and while you can do this do you really want bad breath causing bacteria festering on your tooth brush all day and all night? Me neither, so I buy inexpensive tongue scrapers to do the job and thoroughly rinse them after. (if you have to use your tooth brush wash it thoroughly after and then dip into some antibacterial mouthwash also).
Tip #4 – Rinse and Repeat
The final step in our daily oral hygiene routine should be to give our mouths a through rinse with a non alcoholic antibacterial mouth wash. Many mouthwashes, even those that claim to cure bad breath, are alcohol based however alcohol will only serve to try out the mouth and help bacteria to survive, obviously something we want to avoid! Check the mouthwash your using is what we are after and if not be sure to pick some up the next time your at the supermarket.
[mage lang="" source="flickr"]3 Embarrassing Halitosis Causes You Should Know About![/mage]
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[mage lang="en|es|en" source="answers"]3 Embarrassing Halitosis Causes You Should Know About![/mage]
Bad breath can hang around way past its ‘used by date’ and turn into something very annoying, if not a full on affliction.
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