From the Desk of Carolyn Dean MD ND
In my spare time I’ve been working on a book that chronicles how food moves through your body and the impact it makes; the nourishing, repair, or damage that food can do. My working title for the book is, From Halitosis to Hemorrhoids: Spilling My Guts about the Digestive System. Here’s a teaser blog to spark your tastebuds for a new way to look at food.
Bad Breath – Halitosis
Your mouth is the gateway for your entire digestive system and a breeding ground for smelly bacteria. Your friends and family may be embarrassed to tell you about the toxic environment you are emanating when you speak. Your first clue may be a coated tongue that sticks to the roof of your mouth when you wake up in the morning. The global “mouth freshener” market is valued at $15.77 billion with mints, sprays and chewing gums flying into mouths across the globe.
Spoiler Alert: If you keep killing off the bad bacteria as well as the natural flora in your mouth, you can develop high blood pressure!
What Dr. Google or an MD might say about Halitosis:
Bad breath is not a life-threatening condition and therefore doesn’t warrant much in the way of scientific examination. However, please pay attention because you may be the last person to know you harbor bad breath!
There are several reasons you might be experiencing bad breath:
- Unfortunate oral hygiene creates an environment that willingly allows bad breath bacteria to breed in unflossed and unbrushed teeth and to run rampant on the tongue.
- Cavities, plaque, gingivitis, and gum disease can be at the root of bad breath. Food trapped under a dental bridge, or in crevices between teeth will rot if not removed with a toothbrush or dental water pik.
- Fragile bleeding gums from all the debris in the mouth cause a particularly bad odor.
- Ear, nose, throat, gastric, and respiratory conditions like sinusitis, tonsilitis, dry mouth, reflux and bronchitis can also contribute to bad breath.
- Certain spices and foods like onions and garlic can leave behind an odor.
- Cigarettes and alcohol will add their odor to the bouquet.
- Dehydration can cause dry mouth and bad breath.
- And a number of drugs can contribute to bad breath.
Dodgy oral and dental hygiene are responsible for bad breath nearly 90% of the time. A lack of flossing and brushing will allow food to become lodged between teeth or stuck in appliances which results in the evolution of stinky bacteria.
Medical tests
Hopefully we all have someone in our lives who will honestly alert us if we are emitting a foul odor so we can take corrective measures before seeking medical attention. But if that smell isn’t budging, it might be time to see your dentist who can examine your mouth, gums and teeth for trapped food, infection or tongue coating that could contribute to bad breath.
But be aware that your doctor or dentist isn’t likely to do a deep dive on why you’re emitting foul odors, they’ll probably just suggest an air freshener…
Dr. Google might … I mean, Will, suggest drugs
While they’re not classified as drugs, chewing gum, breath mints, spray, and mouthwash are meant to mask breath odor. They do nothing to correct the source of the odor.
Chlorhexidine is an antimicrobial prescription mouthwash used to disinfect the mouth before and after oral surgery to kill bacterial and to treat gingivitis. Cetylpyridinium chloride, and hydrogen peroxide are also used in mouthwashes along with alcohol and menthol which kill some bacteria, and their strong flavor will mask breath odor for some time.
What’s particularly shocking to me is that doctors prescribe medications to increase saliva production to “treat” halitosis. If it’s suspected that sinus infections are the smelly culprit, docs prescribe antibiotics and decongestants. Harsh medications that are prescribed for acid reflux are used for halitosis in case that’s a contributing factor.
What I say about bad breath
Bad breath may be another symptom of a body out of balance. Most people think that bad breath comes from eating strong smelling or highly spiced food. These foods include the obvious ones like garlic, onion, spicy, and heavy meats and cheeses, fish, coffee, and alcohol. But bad breath is mostly due to bacteria in the mouth that feed off the food we eat; they are especially attracted to sugar. Plaque forms on the teeth and the bacteria become attached to the plaque.
Add to that the lack of brushing and flossing and you have a bad case of halitosis. But if you weren’t taught the art of brushing and flossing when you were young you may still treat dental hygiene as a chore.
Let’s consider the function of the tongue. In animals, especially dogs, it eliminates moisture, much as our skin eliminates perspiration. Perspiration or sweat is not just pure water; it contains salt and by-products of chemical processes in the body, through which the kidneys, intestines and skin, excrete waste.
The tongue serves the same function, so the body in trying to eliminate waste uses the tongue as an exit point. Waste products, being eliminated through the tongue will coat it, contributing to bad breath. The more waste products and the more toxic the waste products from the body, the more the tongue is coated giving the breath a foul odor. If you have a coated tongue, it might be an indication that you should undergo a cleansing program to remove toxins from your body.
NOTE: You may have thought of using tongue scraping, which can help remove some of the bacterial coating, but you can do a more thorough job with a whole-body detox.
People who have a very clean diet, which means plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, fish, and chicken – rarely have bad breath. People who eat sugar, dairy products, coffee, and alcohol have more of a tendency to bad breath.
Then There’s the Chewing
Most people do not chew their food properly. If you chew properly, you can digest up to one-third of carbs in your mouth. Meat is a protein that requires hydrochloric acid in the stomach for digestion. Meat takes up to seven hours to digest in the stomach and intestines, because it can take that long for enough hydrochloric acid to build up and break down the protein molecules.
During that seven-hour period, if more and more food is eaten this interferes with the digestive process. Incomplete digestion creates undigested food molecules that become food for intestinal bacteria and yeast both of which cause fermentation and gassy waste products.
Besides belching and flatulence, these waste products can cause bad breath. Similarly, when sugar is eaten and there are other foods in the stomach, the mixture can become fermented and create alcohol in the stomach and intestines. Shockingly, when there is an extreme overgrowth of yeast, undigested food and a high sugar diet can create high enough alcohol levels to give a positive reading on a Breathalyzer test.
Bad breath triggers
- Food stuck between your teeth
- A coated tongue
- Alcohol
- Cigarettes
- Certain drugs
What you can do
Approach brushing and flossing with a certain goal in mind. For example, you may find that flossing, especially, will cause your gums to bleed. However, after as little as a week of diligent flossing, your gums will be free of debris and able to heal and toughen up and no longer bleed. Then when you brush your gums with your toothbrush, they will no longer bleed and they will look and feel stronger and dental pockets will begin to disappear.
NOTE: Flossing is a way to test your Vitamin C levels! If your gums bleed, it means you may be deficient in this important vitamin. And being deficient in Vitamin C means you aren’t making the collagen you need to keep your gums healthy. That deficiency can have effects on the collagen throughout your body.
If you have a dental bridge in your mouth, really consider getting a Water Pik to flush out debris that can be trapped. It works better than trying to floss under your bridge.
Deconstructing the drugs
As briefly noted above, the medical treatments for bad breath include:
Chlorhexidine, which is an antimicrobial prescription mouthwash that kills bacteria in the mouth that can contribute to bad breath. However, when you set out to sterilize an area of the body, you can actually make drug-resistant bacteria that you will never be able to eliminate. Many mouthwashes have alcohol as their most active ingredient, which also kills everything in its path.
As noted above, some researchers are saying that killing off your mouth microbiome can cause high blood pressure. It’s got something to do with reducing the amount of nitric oxide that your microbiome is supposed to produce.
Healthy options for bad breath
Deal with the debris! Brush your teeth and rinse your mouth after eating, especially if you’ve eaten a sugary snack. Floss between your teeth to remove food particles before they decompose.
Popping breath mints and using mouthwashes that contain sugar and alcohol are only short-term solutions that can actually cause yeast overgrowth. A white tongue in a friend or singer who is hitting a high note can actually be yeast.
Diet
Look at your diet to see what you are eating on a regular basis that can be causing bad breath. The most likely substance is sugar, which feeds bacteria and allows them, in the dark, moist recesses of the mouth, to create yeast and bacterial gases that can cause bad breath. Of course, coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol all taint the breath.
Supplements
Herbs
Cloves: Whole cloves have been my go-to breath mint for decades. You can hold a clove in your mouth for an hour or so. You don’t chew it but just gently bite down on it to release the clove oil that refreshes your mouth. It’s also antibacterial and antiviral. Here’s a side benefit, a young patient of mine told me I smelled like Christmas when I was examining him.
Detox
I’ve mentioned detoxing your whole body a few times. To me, that can be accomplished by:
- Hydrating with sea salted water. Measure your weigh in pounds. Divide that number in half and drink that many ounces of water a day. To each liter of drinking water add ¼ tsp of a good colorful sea salt.
- Using psyllium seed powder daily. Take 1 tsp to 1 Tbsp in a few ounces of water – shake quickly, drink quickly, and follow with another 8 ounces.
- Taking Picometer Magnesium, which supports body detox and keeps the intestines moving natural without fear of constipation.
Carolyn Dean MD ND
The Doctor of the Future
