ScienceDaily: Bad Breath: How Fermented Foods Such as Yogurt Can Help Prevent Halitosis

It’s important to note that this publication was a meta-analysis, meaning the authors reviewed existing studies. The researchers originally identified 130 studies to examine but ultimately winnowed the pool down to just 7 studies. “The whole idea behind probiotics is if we have a group of bacteria in the environment that we don’t like if we introduce bacteria that we do like and can supplant the ‘bad guys’ with the ‘good guys,’ then we’ll end up with a better result,” Dr. Matt Messina, a consumer advisor for the American Dental Association and assistant professor at the college of dentistry at The Ohio State University, told Healthline.

Foods containing probiotic bacteria include yogurt and sourdough bread. There are also probiotic supplements on the market, although the benefits of swallowing a capsule might differ from when chewing probiotic foods. “[The research] is very thought-provoking. The value is that it pulls a lot of studies together to show where the gaps in the research are. And the gap here we really need to go after is causality,” Messina added.

While some people with halitosis did experience short-term improvements, it’s not clear that probiotics were necessarily the reason. “The bottom line is probiotic use certainly doesn’t hurt, but the jury’s still out on the overall benefit of this,” Messina said. Dr. Thomas M. Holland, MS, a study clinician and medical advisor for the RUSH Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago, told Healthline that “although not conclusive, the results indicate that what we eat does in fact matter with regards to gut and oral health.

My Takeaways:

• Struggling with bad breath or conscious about your breath? According to previous studies perhaps one of the best ways we counteract bad breath is to eat foods that actually contain bacteria (seems counterintuitive doesn’t it?).

• However foods with good bacteria (better known as probiotics) have been proved to show countless other benefits to our digestion and our regularity. It makes plausible the connection to our breath.

• Like our intestines, our mouth is filled with bacterial populations that can affect the way that our breath smells. Sometimes uneven populations of certain types of bacteria can be causing bad breath. Probiotics serves as a method to solve this issue by readjusting the population.

Full article is here!

What are your secrets to countering bad breath?

#Oralhealth #BadBreath #DentalHygeine