Bad Breath - Stinky Breath

Definition and cause of bad breath in brief

Bad breath - stinky breath - is also known as, defined as, halitosis.  Main cause is sulfur aka sulphur.  The sulfur being produced by bacteria living in your mouth or throat - but wait, don't grab that antibiotic, it wont likely help that much.

Tongue scrapers and getting rid of bad breath

A tongue scraper is often extremely useful in helping get rid of your bad breath if your tongue is NOT pretty pink and smooth - if it is whitish or such, you can often improve or get rid of your bad breath by scraping the coating off. 

You can scrape the tongue a bit with a small soft toothbrush and a bit of toothpaste, but it's somewhat limited, painful and awkward, as the head of the brush is too big to get at the back of the tongue and the bristles can cut in.

A tongue scraper is purposely designed to get much further back on the tongue and remove the coating much more efficiently than a tooth brush without the pain or very little.

Tongue scrapers, along with many other bad breath products that simply do work, can be bought online from TheraBreath. ThereaBreath is a group of clinics called The California Breath Clinics and are run by Dr. Katz, who holds degrees in Dentistry and in Bacteriology, both obtained from the reknowned UCLA. So he really knows his stuff.

The trick to using the tongue scraper is to first remove the mucous layer on the tongue with it, so that the toothpaste can then be used on the tongue scraper to get rid of the bacteria beneath. In other words you have to go over the tongue at least twice with the tongue scraper.

The role of sulfur / sulphur in bad breath

  That's right, if your tongue isn't a pretty pink and smooth, the tongue's coating is probably adding to or causing the bad breath, as the coating is holding bacteria underneath it, with that bacteria producing sulfur and sulfur causes bad breath.

Ever eaten garlic and got garlic breath, or had the garlic smell come out of your skin pores when you overheat?  That garlic stink is caused by the sulfur in the garlic.  So you can imagine how important it is to stop the sulfur producing bacteria in your own mouth.

Bad breath is demoralizing, undermines self confidence, embarrasses and makes people into social outcasts

Face it, everyone who has ever lived, has had bad breath at some time in their life and more likely many times in their life.  Bad breath is probably one of the commonest and most embarrassing things that can happen to a person. 

What makes bad breath bad, is that you can have bad breath and not even know it until someone pulls you aside and quietly tells you your breath stinks!  At which point you want to run away.  It shatters your self confidence immediately.

Bad breath makes you feel awkward when near people and you can be having a great conversation then the thought crosses your mind, "Is my breath stinky?", then you want to move just that little bit further away from everyone to try and stop them from smelling your breath, just in case it's stinky.

Bad breath treatments

The first most important question is: Are you cleaning your teeth properly?  If not, you may have found the simplest, most obvious cause of your bad, stinky breath.

Bad breath treatment is largely determined by it's cause, so chances are that if you don't know what is causing it, you're only getting feeble treatment results no matter what you buy.

The over the counter, off the supermarket shelf products for bad stinky breath, normally only deal with masking the stinky bad breath.  Some bad breath products work by assuming all bad breath is caused by bacteria and set about killing all the bacteria in the mouth.  This bad breath treatment may work for some people, but not all, as most of the sulfur producing bacteria are protected by a layer of mucous.

Another common treatment talks about bad breath being caused by the digestive system and that the digestive system need to be fixed up.  Not so.  The digestive system just digests the food, but if the food has sulfur in it .. you know the rest .. bad breath and stinky skin pores.  We all know who ate loads of garlic the night before!

Other than watching foods and drinks, "The ONLY proven way to eliminate bad breath is to change your existing oral
environment so that it is ‘less friendly’ to creating and sustaining the volatile
sulfur producing anaerobic bacteria which cause bad breath and taste." Dr Katz.

  In fact there are a myriad of causes for bad breath, but it all comes down to understanding that the stink is related to sulfur. The bacteria in the mouth and throat are part of the normal and natural way our body breaks up food and other compounds coming into our body.  Try killing them all off with antibiotics and you wont normally achieve much for too long, as the bacteria are in every one and will quickly come back.

However, once we get the mucous off, clean a lot of the bacteria off, the stink goes.  Allowing the air to get to the bacteria by removing the mucous layer regularly, also helps prevent the bacteria from producing the smelly sulfur compounds. 

Bad breath tends to get more common and more severe the older we get

Remember, that as we get older our tongues and throat change - our tongues develop crevices, grow longer hairs and so on - all these ageing things can alter the bacteria types and numbers, the mucous and the amount of sulfur being formed.

More on the causes and treatments of bad breath

 There are other signs and symptoms and conditions that can help determine the cause of bad breath and suggest a more accurate bad breath treatment, remedy or cure, tailored to your needs and condition. 

For example, sinusitis leads to nasal drips down the back of the throat, which in turn can be a cause of bad breath, because those sulfur producing bacteria love to feed off that nasal drip!   This simple home remedy for bad breath may help:  A common salt spray from a chemist or druggist - squirt three sprays up each nostril separately, as this will help kill any drip causing infection and also reduce the recurrence of such if used on a regular basis.

Another example, saliva, being loaded with oxygen helps to keep the bacteria from producing smelly sulfur compounds, but if you have dry mouth, that means there is a lack of saliva, also then means reduced oxygen in the mouth, which in turn can cause the bacteria to form the smelly bad breath compounds much more easily.

Not cleaning your teeth, not cleaning between your teeth with dental floss or similar, is another cause of stinky breath as well.  Think about it, that food is left decaying, right there on your teeth.  Rotting dead animals or plants pong like anything.

They are the most common, most easily treated causes of bad stinky breath, but, in fact, there is so much involved in proper diagnosis to determine the bad breath cause, so as to determine the appropriate treatment or intervention for bad breath, that I was quite pleased to find a comprehensive bad breath ebook, which appears to do just that.

Free bad breath ebook by Dr. Katz

You can download and view it here on www.toothandteeth.com for FREE!  It's called the bad breath bible and carries a retail price tag of between $9.95 to $19.95 in some places, but it is certainly free from us.  It's also a smallish download, being only about 2 mb in size - but it may take a little longer on dial up.

It's one draw back from my perspective, is that the bad breath ebook is very much a sales pitch as well, but it's free here, so not really much to complain about.

Bad breath concluding remarks

A lot of my own bad breath, when I do get it, comes from my nose.  I often come down with bad breath because I have a misshapen inside part of my nose, which makes me prone to nasal infection.  For me, the sinusitis is a leading cause of my bad breath when I have it.

Since taking to scraping my tongue, as I found it had a white coating, has certainly given me greater confidence in talking to people close up and even in kissing my wife.  The tongue scraping is such an important and simple idea, yet so effective against many forms of bad breath.

But first, if you want to come back to www.toothandteeth.com again, just add it to your bookmarks or favorites now! Then you'll find it easy!

Also, please consider sharing our helpful tooth and teeth website with your online friends.