Video Transcript:
Dr. Hisham:
Hi, I’m Dr. Hisham, and I’m here to talk to you about how to banish bad breath.
Now, we’ve all experienced bad breath either personally or in person from another person, and we know how antisocial it is, how shameful it can be. But what is it, and how can we deal with it?
Some people have it on a chronic basis, some people have it intermittently. What’s the problem here? Let’s talk about that, as well as how we can banish it.
Bad breath is nothing more than things rotting away: bacteria, rotting away food debris, or rotting away dead cells.
The reason why people have chronic bad breath is either because they have a lot of untreated disease, which is gum disease or tooth decay. Basically if you’ve got a hole in your tooth it is decaying, it’s rotting, because of the bacteria and acids. That can’t smell good.
Gum disease, bacteria growing around and underneath your gum line and rotting away things there, can’t smell good, and of course it doesn’t. I can tell you, it’s a horrible smell.
And of course it’s the presence of food debris in between your teeth, even if you don’t have gum disease, or food debris on your tongue rotting away smelling bad. Same story, different scenario.
First thing is to check and make sure that you don’t have any of these diseases in any severity, and if you do, you have to have them treated. You can’t prevent something while you have an active disease process going on, so you’ve got to treat that first.
Find a good dentist, a good dental professional, who will help you treat these problems. However, treating these problems does not prevent them from happening again, either.
Where does rotting food come from? Well, it’s the food that we eat. So, if the food stays there, it’s gonna rot. What’s my job? To remove that rotting food before it becomes stale and stinky.
First thing is how to clean out teeth better. This is my electric toothbrush, which is what I use and I recommend. You can use any other manual toothbrush if you don’t want electric toothbrushes; electric ones are more efficient.
When you’re brushing your teeth, you’re actually not brushing the teeth only: you’re brushing teeth, gums, backs of the teeth, back of the gums, and of course your tongue, whether it’s with a toothbrush or tongue scraper. It’s your choice. Just make sure you clean away that sticky debris that’s built up all around.
Two minutes of brushing your teeth and gums to get all around your mouth properly is very import. Twice a day.
However, that will not clean in-between your teeth. Unfortunately we can’t open our teeth. And, as you can imagine, if I went to wash my hands like this—this might be clean, that might be clean—but between those fingers? It’s not clean.
And that’s the case with our teeth: we can’t open them and wash them, so we’ve got to clean between them while they’re closed. Flossing is a great way to do it. Some people don’t like flossing, some people can’t do it because of manual dexterity issues, there’s many reasons.
You can use something like a water pick. That’s what I like to use. You put it in-between your teeth, you turn it on, and it blasts away all that sticky, slimy, rotting food. We call it plaque, but what it is is sticky, slimy, rotting food. Don’t leave it there! It stinks and causes disease.
A dry, desiccated, full of bad, gunky stuff environment, of course, won’t smell that good. So make sure that your mouth is not dry.
The best way to explain this is when you wake up in the morning. Even if you have a clean mouth, even if you don’t have any disease, you’ll always have more smelly breath in the morning than at any other time during the day time. Why is that? Because you developed a dry mouth overnight. Once you start to clean your mouth, once you start drinking, you start eating, saliva starts flowing, things start to get better.
If you have a dry mouth all day long because you’re heavily medicated, heavily stressed, chronically stressed, heavy drinking, alcohol, lots of caffeine, or simply just not enough water, then of course you’ll have much worse smelling mouth all day long because you’re growing many more of that bad bacteria and the food is staying there, and it’s not slipping away, and all these things.
So, one of the main things is making sure your mouth stays moist and you stay hydrated.
The last thing you want to think about when you’re dealing with bad breath is volatile Sulphur compounds. Sulphur is what makes rotting eggs smell, and garlic smell.
The presence of Sulphur is not a good or bad thing because actually it has benefits in the human body. However, too much of it is smelly.
There are certain products and ingredients that directly deal with that. We have some of these main ingredients in our mouthrinse, sodium chloride and zinc, that actually bind to the volatile Sulphur compounds that are produced by bacteria, or anything else that you eat, and inactivate that.
Obviously it doesn’t go all the way down into your stomach, so if you’ve had too much garlic, some of that smell will come up from inside. However, what’s inside your mouth, we can deal with that very nicely by deactivating those volatile Sulphur compounds.