4 Reasons You Could Have Bad Breath

Bad breath is one of those things that can make you self-conscious even if you don’t plan on going on a date. Covering that bad breath can be as easy as eating a mint or gargling with mint-flavored mouthwash, but depending on the cause of your bad breath you may want to do something to deal with the reason your breath stinks in the first place. And to do that, you’ll need to know what can cause bad breath.

Food

 

This is the easiest cause to identify. If you eat food with a strong smell, that smell can stick with you for hours. Onions and garlic are classic examples, but heavily spiced food can linger on for a long time, too. In this case, masking the smell with mint or a stick of gum is the best option, because while the smell might be less pleasant coming from your mouth than it was coming off a plate of food, it’ll go away on its own. Of course, brushing your teeth to get rid of the food particles will make it go away faster.

Tobacco

 

Smoking cigarettes has you breathe in particles of ash and smoke, and you’ll breathe those particles back out for a long time afterward. Depending on how much you smoke in a day, the smell might never leave you. But even if you use a smokeless tobacco like snuff or chewing tobacco, that can also affect your breath. Mints can only do so much against the smell of tobacco smoke coming from your lungs, so it should come as no surprise that the best solution to ending tobacco breath is to quit smoking.

 

Dry Mouth

 

Part of the reason for “morning breath” is the fact that your mouth naturally dries out when you sleep. That doesn’t cause bad breath directly, but saliva washes food particles and bacteria out of your mouth and when that stops these particles can break down and leave behind a bad smell. But dry mouth shouldn’t happen when you’re awake, so if it does it means either something’s wrong or you’re taking a medication that causes dry mouth as a side effect.

 

Gum Disease

 

When bacteria start to seriously infect your gums, it creates a bad smell. It can also lead to some serious problems, both for your teeth and for your health in general, so in this case, you should skip the mint and go straight to the root of the problem.

There are plenty of reasons your breath won’t always smell like spring roses, and those reasons can be easy to solve or serious. So make sure you know why your breath smells off and treat the cause instead of the symptoms.