Bad Breath (Halitosis)

Here’s the thing about bad breath. 99 out of 100 people who have it don’t know that they do! Generally speaking we can no more smell our own breath than we can lick the outside of our elbows!

What that means is that aside from brutally honest close family members the main ones who finally get to break the news are those little lap-climbing children who haven’t yet learned to not say exactly what’s on their minds. Oh, and sometimes I get the unenviable job of informing a patient (often the ones who live alone I notice) that they have a particularly strong body odour or ‘hard to take’ breath.

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Because bad breath is really easy to fix so long as you take care of one or both of the two things that cause it:

1. Restore good bacteria in the mouth and throat

Studies have shown that one of the major drivers and perhaps the biggest single cause for bad breath are those undesirable bacteria that take up permanent lodging in the mouth and throat. This is very easy to fix. As an example here is the kind of formula that I have used with much success in the past in this regard.

20mls Echinacea root                       
15mls Myyrh resin extract                
15mls Licorice root                           

These should be the strongest, highest quality extracts or tinctures you can get and ideally you will find a good herbalist to help you get this mixture or one similar to it.

For an average adult I would recommend 1 ml or 20 drops of this formula to be diluted in just a little bit of water, no more than 10mls and even as little as 5mls. You have to get the herbs to briefly coat the mouth and the back of the throat. Swish, swill and swallow them, do not spit them out. 

This is not something you would do for fun but it is very fast acting so your breath will generally start improving from the first day you start the treatment. Ideally do it twice a day to begin and then once a day to stop any regrowth of bad bugs.

At some point you will also need to get thee to a dental hygienist and then put up with an hour of that particularly indescribable torture for the sake of your loved ones as well as your own likelihood of keeping your teeth for the long term. This will be necessary if you have the kind of ‘dug-in’ plaque, or tartar, on your gums and teeth that just won’t go away no matter how much you clean and wash.

To some extent your natural bacterial flora will re-exert itself once you properly deal to the bad guys but there are also commercial products that you can buy in the form of ‘good bacteria’ lozenges to speed things along by putting the good bacteria back quickly. I would recommend taking this extra step if you have particularly paint-peeling power to your breath.

This whole area of good and bad bugs affects our health in all kinds of unexpected ways; you might like to read more about this subject in general in my article here on Dysbiosis.

2. Make sure the stomach is doing its job well.

This side of the equation is a little harder to address in such a simplistic manner. Unless you have some stomach problems that you know about already then I would suggest taking the above step first and then seeing if you still have a problem after a week or so.

If on the other hand you do regularly have some common symptoms of indigestion (such as bloating, belching, reflux, discomfort etc.) then you should probably assume that this is at least a part of the reason for the breath lacking sweetness and get on to this side of things from the outset.

You should know that a lot of people have pretty bad digestion but don’t necessarily get a lot of symptoms for it, at least while they are comparatively young anyway, so you have to at least consider this as a possibility, especially if an antiseptic mouth wash such as the above doesn’t work.

The first thing most people should look at in this regard is if they are regularly combining a lot of protein with starchy food. Proteins (such as meat, fish, chicken, eggs, nuts and seeds) get digested in the stomach whereas starches (bread, flour, pasta, potatoes rice etc.) get digested in the small intestine. Having a significant amount of protein in a meal makes the food stay in the stomach a lot longer. What that means is that if there is quite a bit of starch in there at the same time that is not being digested then it can start to ferment and cause indigestion; and bad breath.

In practical terms what this means is to have proteins with a salad rather than with starchy carbs, and when you do have a meal of rice, pasta, bread etc. to have vegetables with it rather than a lot of protein.

The second thing to consider as an issue for the stomach doing its job well is the possibility of an inadequate amount of digestive juices being available to break down the food.

This is a common problem, especially as we get older. In many people there is a need to increase the amount of zinc in the diet (through eating lots of eggs and pumpkin seeds) or through taking zinc supplements.

The strategy that I use all the time for people and get a lot of good results from is a very old herbal formula that combines Gentian root with Ginger. I have written it up in more detail in the article on Gentian. It might sound like a daunting prospect to try such a program but I can truthfully state that, when it has been necessary to improve digestion in this way, it works really well.

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