Bad Breath

While our mouths have the power to please, they are also rife with ways to embarass. And it is not just the ridiculous things we might say. Take bad breath, for example. It can take you or someone else's breath away! Unfortunately, we may not even realize we have bad breath until the humiliating moment when a friend or lower points is out to us.

Bad breath can merely be a lingering sign of a garlic or onion rich diet. But chronic bad breath medically known as HALITOSIS or FETOROSIS, is more often a sign of smoking or chewing tobacco and having poor dental hygiene. It can also signal that something is going terribly awry in your mouth, such as an abscessed or impacted tooth or a gum, mouth, or tongue disease. About 85% of cases of bad breath originate in the mouth itself. The gastrointestinal or respiratory tracts are responsible for the rest.

If you suffer from noxious morning breath, it may be a sign of dry mouth, which can result from breathing through your mouth at night from any of a number of medications and from certain disorders.

Halitosis can signal postnasal drip, strep throat, tonsillitis, sinus infection, or other respiratory tract conditions. It is also a major sign of Tonsilloliths (tonsil stones), a small whitish foul smelling globules of food particles, dried mucus, and bacteria that lodge in the folds of the tonsils. Having enlarged, deep creviced tonsils or recurrent bouts of tonsillitis encourages the nasty build up of such debris. People who have these unsavory stones sometimes poke them out with cotton swabs or sharp objects, but they usually come back.

Foul breath can also signal serious lung, kidney, and liver diseases. Occasionally, it is a sign of certain intestinal and digestive disorders, including constipation, indigestion, and gastric ulcers. Any condition that causes frequent vomiting, including bulimia can lead to bad breath.

Stomach related bad breath is actually fairly uncommon, but halitosis is reaching epidemic proportions among some dieters. It can, in fact, be a telltale sign that someone is on the Atkins diet or another low carbohydrate, high fat, high protein diet. In fact, as many as two-thirds of people on these diets suffer from bad breath, so they may lose friends as well as weight. Their stinky breath is actually a sign that their body is breaking down fat into ketones and going into a condition called ketosis (elevated levels of ketones). Ketosis is considered a good sign for losing weight, but it can lead to acidosis, an imbalance between the acids and alkalis in the blood, which is a serious condition that increases the risk of osteoporosis and kidney stones or worse.

Bad breath particularly in people who are very thin and/or obsessed with dieting may be a tip-off that they are bulimic.