Prevent Bad Breath: The Best Tips for Eliminating Halitosis

Prevent Bad Breath: The Best Tips for Eliminating Halitosis

Jul 12, 2023

Bad breath, also identified as halitosis, is embarrassing and occasionally causes anxiety. As a result, you can find store shelves filled with mints, mouthwashes, and many other products claiming they can fight bad breath. Unfortunately, most products are only temporary measures because they fail to handle the underlying reasons for the issue.

The causes of bad breath are certain foods, health conditions, and habits. Improving lousy breath with consistent dental hygiene practices is relatively easy. Unfortunately, if simple self-care techniques don’t resolve the issue, you can see the dentist in Etobicoke or your physician to ensure a severe condition does not cause bad breath.

Symptoms of Bad Breath

The symptoms of lousy breath can vary according to the source and the underlying causes. Some people worry excessively about awful breath. As a result, they have little or no symptoms, while others with bad breath don’t realize they have it. As it is challenging to assess your bad breath, it makes help from a friend or family member essential to confirm your questions about bad breath.

You can review your oral hygiene habits if you think you have bad breath. Lifestyle modifications like brushing your teeth and tongue after eating, using dental floss and drinking plenty of water can help improve your situation. Unfortunately, if the position does not improve even after making changes seeking help from your dentist is beneficial. If your dentist suspects you have a severe problem, they will refer you to your physician to ascertain the cause of the bad breath.

Causes of Bad Breath

Most circumstances of bad breath begin in the mouth, and the problem has multiple causes. Primary they include:

  • Food: breakdown of food particles around your teeth increases bacteria in the mouth and causes bad breath. Some foods like garlic, onions, and spices can also aggravate the condition. After digesting these foods, they will enter your bloodstream to be transported to your lungs to affect your breath.
  • Tobacco Use: smoking leaves an unpleasant odour in your mouth, and oral tobacco users are often likely to have gum disease, which can also be a source of bad breath.
  • Inappropriate Dental Hygiene: if you neglect to brush and floss twice daily, food particles can remain in your mouth to cause bad breath. Dental plaque, a colourless film of bacteria, forms on your teeth and, if not brushed, irritates your gums to form plaque-filled pockets between your teeth and gums eventually. Your tongue also traps bacteria to produce odours. Improperly cleaned dentures or ill-fitting prosthetics harbour bacteria responsible for lousy breath besides food particles.
  • Xerostomia: saliva helps cleanse your mouth by removing food particles responsible for bad breath. If you are affected by xerostomia or dry mouth, it contributes to bad breath by decreasing saliva production. If you have morning breath, it results from having xerostomia during sleep. Unfortunately, the condition worsens if you sleep with your mouth open. In addition, your salivary glands and some diseases can result in chronic dry mouth.
  • Mouth Infections: surgical wounds after oral procedures like tooth removal, tooth decay, gum disease, or mouth sores are also responsible for the foul odour in your mouth. Some medications indirectly produce bad breath by drying off your mouth. Some medicines are broken by the body to discharge chemicals carried on your breath.

Diagnosing Lousy Breath

If you want your lousy breath diagnosed, you must prepare your dentist to smell the breath from your mouth and nose to rate the odour on a scale. As the back of your tongue is often responsible for the source of the smell, your dentist might also scrape it to rate its odour.

Treatment For Lousy Breath

You must consistently practice excellent dental hygiene to decrease lousy breath, lower your risk of gum disease, and help avoid cavities. Additional treatments for bad breath can vary depending on its cause.

If you seek bad breath treatment in Etobicoke, ON, the dentist will work with you to help you better manage the condition. Some measures they recommend include using mouth rinses and toothpaste besides treatments for dental conditions like gum disease to remove bacteria from the gum pockets between your teeth and gums filled with bacteria. In addition, the dentist might recommend replacing faulty restorations, which become a breeding ground for bacteria responsible for foul odour from the mouth.

If a lousy odour from the mouth concerns you scheduling a meeting with Regency Dental Care helps to pinpoint the reasons for the condition. You can also receive dental measures from the practice to help manage your condition better by using simple self-care techniques.