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How can your diet help you combat bad breath? What you do or don’t eat can have a direct affect on bad breath smells. Let’s have a look at how diet can cause bad breath as well as help you combat it.

The old saying “you are what you eat” applies to your breath as well. Strong-flavored foods like garlic and onions contain odor-causing chemicals that are broken down during digestion and carried through your blood stream. When blood returns to the heart to be re-oxygenated, these chemicals enter the lungs and are exhaled as bad breath. Good oral hygiene covers the smell slightly, but the bad breath will remain until the chemicals are processed out of your body.

Skipping meals can also result in bad breath. When the salivary glands receive no stimulation to produce saliva, dry mouth ensues, allowing the bacteria that causes bad breath to over multiply, hence the bad breath smell.

Skipping meals also causes your body to burn stored fat for fuel. This process causes the release of chemicals known as ketones that build up in your body tissue. These ketones have a foul smell and are released through breath and urine. The Atkin’s low carb diet may also result in ketone release, so we’ve identified another way diet may result in bad breath.

Certain foods like chocolate, onions, coffee and peppermint have a tendency to relax the valve on your esophagus, allowing food and stomach acid to backwash into the esophageal tube, causing more bad breath. When recurring, this condition is referred to as acid reflux disease.

You can use your diet to combat bad breath in several ways. Eating regular meals in reasonable portions should reduce the effects of ketones and acid reflux disease, alleviating some bad breath. Avoid known bad breath-causing foods like onions and garlic, or else drink plenty of water to help flush them out of your system. Chewing parsley is also considered to combat bad breath with the chlorophyll it contains.

Dietary measures such as these should help reduce incidences of bad breath for most people.