What Causes Bad Breath?

Most people have experienced it at sometime or another, whether their own or belonging to the person you are talking to and generally it is not a good experience. You know they brush their teeth due to how white they are and you brush your teeth as well so now you are at a loss as to what causes bad breath.

Essentially, bacteria growing in your mouth are what cause bad breath. Evidence that it exists will appear as a white coating on the back of your tongue. The bacteria are living in that coating and one way to remove them, and eliminate one cause of bad breath is to use a spoon, turned upside down, and scrape the bacteria away. Some try to use their toothbrush to brush away this white coating, but scarping is the most effective method.

Even with a vigilante scraping program, bacteria will still grow in other parts of your mouth, above and below the gum line. Brushing and flossing will not remove all the bacteria, but it should remove enough that the remainder can be killed by other means, such as mouthwash or rinsing with baking soda. Bad breath can also be associated with certain gastrointestinal diseases.

In rare occasions, you may have bad breath and not realize that you do. Those close to you probably have a good idea, but since your nose is quite adept at filtering out background odors it may ignore the odor emanating from your mouth. Unbelievably, dental researchers have developed different methods to determine if a person has bad breath, and just how bad. The first method is the organoleptic test, which requires the use of a nose. Yes, they smell it and determining how bad the breath is may be a subjective process and since the nose rapidly acclimates itself to smells, breath that is really bad at the beginning of a test, may seem to lose some of its strength later.

Because most bad breath is the result of dead or dying bacteria, causing the release of sulfides, researchers also use gas chromatography to test for the presence of sulfides and other compounds in a person’s mouth. Another device that detects bad breath is called a halimeter, which measures the amount of sulfide gas in a person’s mouth. Similar to a breathalyzer used to determine the amount of alcohol is present in a person’s breath, it measures the breath to help determine just how bad it is.

To test for certain bacteria known to cause periodontal disease, researchers us what they call the BANA test. These bacteria are known to produce waste products, which are quite odiferous and cause bad breath. A sample of the person’s saliva is placed in a solution that changes colors if those products are present. Researches also use chemiluminescence testing to quantify bad breath. When the breath being tested shows positive for the presence of sulfides, it becomes luminances, or lights up, and the more sulfides that are present, the brighter it glows, indicating the amount of bad breath.