2 Natural Cures for Bad Breath

All of us have been there. There's this attractive person on the other side of the room you want to meet. You think to yourself, "Do I have bad breath?" You forgot your mints so you are reluctant to take a chance. Another opportunity lost. Is there some natural way of either eliminating or at least reducing the smell of bad breath? The answer is yes.

You may not know what causes bad breath. The answer is surprising simple. Bacteria that live in your mouth produce a substance called hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs. So you can see the bad breath smell is not very pleasant. Bacteria love to live in warm, damp places. Well, your mouth is a perfect place for these "critters" to live. The secret to bad breath is to eliminate or at the very least counteract the bacteria. If you can reduce or counteract the bacteria, you can reduce the hydrogen sulfide amount and thus reduce or eliminate the bad breath.

Here's a new finding presented by Dr. Kenichi Hojo of Tsurumi University in Yokohama, Japan, at the 83rd General Session at the International Association for Dental Research. He took some volunteers and asked them to change their diet slightly. They were asked to eat about 3 ounces (about half a normal 8 oz container) of sugarless plain yogurt twice a day for 6 weeks. The results were amazing, with this one simple change, 80% of the participants reduced the hydrogen sulfides in their mouth significantly. The speculation was that the live bacteria in the yogurt drowned out the bacteria in your mouth that produced the hydrogen sulfide.

The secret to this food is the kind of yogurt you use. It must be sugarless and not flavored with any flavoring agent. There must also be live cultures in the yogurt. When these are present, the container will have printed on the label "live cultures" or something similar. The active bacteria we are looking for is called "Lactobacillus bulgaricus" and "Streptococcus thermophilus". You need to read the label carefully. The best place to find these is in the natural food section of your grocery store or a health food store in your community.

Plain yogurt without sugar may taste strange the first time your eat it. Remember, you are only eating 3 ounces twice a day. That's less than half a normal container. You will find that after time, the yogurt will start to taste OK and then you may start to actually like the taste.

The second natural cure for bad breath is cleaning your tongue. We already learned the bacteria that produce that foul odor live in our mouth and there's little we can do to prevent that. What we can do is to remove the bacteria from our tongue where most of the bacteria live. You can do this by using either one of two methods; a toothbrush or a tongue scrapper. A tongue scrapper, sold in drug stores, works the best as it is thin and can reach far back in your mouth to the back of the tongue. You simply scrape the tongue with the scrapper and thusly remove the bacteria living there. Ask your dentist for the proper procedure.

There you have two natural and easy ways to cure bad breath without the use of chemicals and mouthwash. The next time you want to meet that attractive person across the room, go for it!