BODY SIGNAL ALERT BAD BREATH
Description and Possible Medical Problems
The majority of Americans believe that to have anything less than clean, minty breath 24 hours a day is something akin to sacrilege.
Of course, sweet-smelling breath is a real asset in life, but frequently, eliminating bad breath isn’t just a matter of brushing your teeth and gargling with mouthwash. After all, mints, toothpaste, and mouthwash will only partially mask bad breath that doesn’t respond to improved oral hygiene. Sometimes gingivitis, or gum disease, or a serious health problem such as lung, kidney, or liver disease or any mouth or throat infection is responsible for persistent halitosis. Most of the time, however, the problem can be solved easily with a simple change in diet.
The first thing to check—and the easiest symptom to treat—is your oral hygiene habits. If you’re not brushing and flossing properly—or cleaning your dentures thoroughly each day—you should immediately start to pay closer attention to your dental routine. Advanced cases of gingivitis or gum disease can also cause persistent bad breath.
If you improve your dental hygiene program but you still have bad breath, you should give yourself a nutritional checkup, since, as you age, your digestive system can slow down considerably. And if you eat a lot of processed and refined foods—which take longer to digest than unte-fined foods do—the food can stay in your stomach longet and ferment, producing a noxious gas. Low-calorie diets ate notorious for causing bad breath, as ketones, a by-product of digestion, are produced by the digestion of excess protein and expelled through your mouth as a foul-smelling gas. If improving your diet doesn’t work, you may have a problem in your gastrointestinal tract, which is often responsible for releasing foul-smelling gas through the mouth.
Lung disease and its primary cause—cigarette smoking—can also cause bad breath that doesn’t go away with brushing and flossing. Other serious diseases, such as kidney or liver failure or diabetes, can also cause the breath to smell foul, as can any infection that occurs in your mouth or throat. If your bad breath has appeared suddenly and doesn’t respond to your own treatment, see your doctor to rule out these diseases as the cause. Over-the-counter cold remedies and antihistamines such as Benadryl and prescription medications, especially antidepressants such as Elavil and others that cause your mouth to become dry, can bring on bad breath since adequate saliva production helps to keep your breath fresh. Ask your doctor about switching to another medication.
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Tags: General health