Of course, there are reasons for that. There are medical conditions, diet, and habits that can all contribute to bad breath.
Insufficient oral hygiene is one reason. Did you know that 8 out of 10 Americans don’t clean between their teeth, aka flossing. The odds are that you are one of those people. Are you?
Most people find flossing too uncomfortable and time consuming. But it really is essential. If you think about a tooth, it has five exposed surfaces – and two of those are facing other teeth. So if you are not flossing, then 2 out of every 5 surfaces are not getting cleaned – that’s 40%!!
Of course, some people find brushing their teeth in itself to be time consuming – so they do it really quickly. And that usually means they don’t do it properly. A power toothbrush is really helpful in this case because it normally has a timer that will keep it going for two minutes. It also brushes far more than you could do manually, doing thousands of brush strokes in a minute.
And such people often develop gum disease, aka gingivitis. This is caused by a build up of plaque and bacteria around the gum line, which weakens the gums, makes teeth loose and wobbly, and causes the gums to bleed easily. The bacteria give off a bad breath smell.
And did you know that a majority of people just simply don’t drink enough water during the day? What does that have to do with bad breath, I hear you say. well, drinking water stimulates the mouth to produce saliva – and saliva is your mouth’s way of cleaning itself. Produce less saliva, and you get less mouth cleaning going on.
Oh, but that’s okay, I hear you saying – I keep hydrated, I may not drink water, but I drink coffee – and that’s made with water. Uh oh – coffee actually has the effect of drying your mouth out by inhibiting the production of saliva. So it actually decreases your mouth’s capacity to clean itself. Plus it leaves that coffee smell in your mouth. Smells okay in the coffee shop, but when you get a stale coffee smell wandering out of someone’s mouth, it doesn’t smell so nice any more.
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