Bad Breath May Kill You In Slow Motion

This is an excerpt from a course in my online Oral-Systemic Health for Life Masterclass.

(Be sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom of this document.)

Welcome to the Dental Fitness Weekly Newsletter v.0004; ~1940 words; ~8 minutes reading time

Click the video below for a 5 minute explanation:

Here's the PDF download from the Masterclass too:
Fresh_Breath_and_a_Kiss_in_the_Morning

And here's another PDF of the ShowerPlus Method mentioned in the video:
Seven Easy Steps to Start Supercharging Your Oral Health

This training is to start you experiencing the benefits of RM (The RENUzORAL Method). It discusses the main causes of bad breath, morning breath, and why it’s deadly. You will see how to wake up tomorrow morning with fresh breath (or at least fresher breath than usual, because you don’t have all the necessary RM products yet).

It involves a simple RM regimen you can do using stuff you most likely already have in your house. It's just a different and better way to use your stuff. In future trainings, you'll learn about other things you can use and do to EASILY fight dental problems 24/7 instead of just a few minutes per day. But for now, just use the household stuff you already have as listed further below.

Breath and Bad Breath (Halitosis)
Breath is critical for life. Four minutes without breath means you're a vegetable or dead. (I'm not including people who have been nearly frozen for hours in snow or ice water, nor frozen embryos.)

Bad Breath has many causes, including horribly smelly tonsil stones in your throat, to an incurable genetic disease called Trimethylaminuria (TMAU) that makes your entire body smell like fish and rotten eggs. But about 90% of bad breath is from the top back of your tongue, and from your gums.

Bad breath is almost as bad as having no breath because the people around you don't want to be breathing your stinky oral spew. Bad breath is a serious social blunder and a definite relationship killer. In fact, bad breath was listed in the Jewish Talmud as grounds for divorce. Bad breath can foul up a room pretty fast. I've had dental patients with such bad breath that we had to spray the dental cubicle with air freshener and avoid the room for a few hours.

Bad Breath In The Morning
Anyone can have occasional bad breath. However, bad morning breath is actually quite serious, especially if you have done your oral hygiene just before bedtime. Aside from metabolic disorders, genetic diseases, lung cancer, and other medical problems, bad morning breath usually means that gum disease germs grew exponentially overnight. It also means that either your oral hygiene routine was ineffective, or your gum disease is so serious that you need professional care. Bad morning breath also means something very sinister – your oral-systemic link is wide open. (see below.)

Gum Disease Germs Stink and Perforate Your Gums
Gum disease germs are especially stinky. They create horribly odorous compounds such as putrescine (rotting flesh), cadaverine (dead bodies), methyl mercaptan (poop), hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs), skatole (poop), and indole (musty). It only takes a few parts per million of these odors to start fouling up a room. Hydrogen sulfide ( the main gum disease odor) is detectable at only 0.13 parts per million in the air, and billions of gum disease germs can easily multiply overnight in your mouth if your oral hygiene is not effective. 

Not only do these odors ruin your love life, confidence, friendships, and even sales, they also actually kill you in slow motion. By that I mean they create irritated gum tissues that allow dental pathogens and their toxic products to enter your bloodstream and infiltrate your body. Bad morning breath means that some horrible germs grew like crazy overnight and many of them entered your body through irritated gums (the oral/systemic link) and traveled to places where they can cause systemic damage. Over time, chronic infiltration of the body with dental pathogens can result in blood clots, heart attacks, infected artificial joints, Alzheimer's brain plaques, worsened diabetes, pneumonia, more morbidity to COVID variants, and more!

In addition to odors oozing from your gums, the top of your tongue is like a huge, dirty, stinky carpet in your mouth. Gum disease germs can embed themselves in biofilms among the velvety filiform papillae on the top of your tongue. Therefore, the top of the tongue is a reservoir for gum disease germs. For fresher breath, everyone must scrape the top of their tongue every day. Tongue scraping is better than tongue brushing.   

Therefore, it's critical to make sure you do not awaken with bad breath in the first place. To do that you need RM to fight dental pathogens all night long.

Here's a simple RM regimen for your first win -- fresh breath in the morning.
Basic products and equipment needed:
● something to scrape the top of your tongue, such as a spoon or butter knife
● interdental cleaner such as floss or toothpick, (I'm assuming at this point you don't yet have an oral irrigator or interdental brush
● toothbrush
● toothpaste
● cup for water
● water
● mouthwash if you have it
● hydrogen peroxide if you have it (optional -- for now)

I don't know about you, but I need to shower before bedtime. That's because I live in dental biofilm spray every workday at the dental office. You should see the splatter that gets on my face shield after each dental procedure. I get all “patienty” every workday, so I don't want to sleep all night with the day's germs that may have gotten past my personal protective wear and in my hair. And neither do I want my mouth to sleep with the day's germs. And my wife wouldn't like it either. Therefore, I always do my dental fitness with body hygiene before bedtime, as well as in the morning.

Overnight, your mouth is basically a warm, moist incubator (STINKubator). That's because your saliva flow during sleep is half as much as during the waking hours. Overnight, you don't make enough saliva to dilute and wash away the plaque and microbes that proliferate while you sleep. As a result, if you skip your nightly dental prevention or don't do it well, you'll awaken with a mouthful of billions of germs, some of which, if they stink, are highly toxic.

Below are the steps of the regimen. It's too early in the course to explain the rationales behind each step. Just do them. You will soon understand the science and rationales behind each step as you progress through the entire course. The cool thing is that once you understand the formulas of the RENUzORAL Method of dental fitness, you'll be able to develop your own techniques by following the formulas that you'll discover in other modules in this course.

The regimen:

Step 1) Vigorously rinse, squish, and swish half a mouthful of air and water around and between your teeth for about 10 seconds. A little air with the water increases turbulence. This starts loosening and diluting some dental plaque and residual food particles. In addition, periodontal disease (gum disease) germs are mostly anaerobic. They don't like oxygen. They hide from air. That's partly why they burrow deeply between teeth and under gums, and why they create such sticky, gooey plaque -- to escape from, and protect themselves against oxygen. Therefore, get a head start on killing those suckers with turbulent water+air rinsing.

Step 2) Spit out the water, then pour a little bit of hydrogen peroxide into the glass and stir it around with your toothbrush to sanitize your toothbrush. Then dump out the peroxide and rinse off your brush with water. (Household hydrogen peroxide is acidified for long-term storage and stability -- you don't want to brush your teeth with acid.)

Step 3) Put a glob of toothpaste on your brush BUT DONT START BRUSHING JUST YET. Simply wipe the toothpaste from your brush onto your teeth, and then repeat step #1, except you are squishing and swishing with the toothpaste instead of water+air. Look in your mirror and try to express the toothpaste between the teeth. Look to see that the toothpaste is worming itself out from the spaces between your teeth. Then keep squishing and swishing to turn the toothpaste into foam. (This is critical for many reasons you'll discover later.)

Step 4) Use your interdental cleaner (floss or pick) to clean between your teeth. (There are several reasons for interdental cleaning before brushing.)

Step 5) By now you probably look like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth, so spit out some toothpaste, and NOW YOU CAN BRUSH for two minutes. (There are critical reasons for not putting too much toothpaste on your brush.)

Step 6) Spit out the rest of the toothpaste foam but don't rinse. (More reasons later.) You should rinse off your toothbrush though.

Step 7) Use your butter knife sideways to scrape your tongue, or use your spoon upside down to scrape your tongue as far back as possible without gagging yourself. Scrape your tongue four times: once on each side and twice in the middle. (Again, more reasons later for tongue scraping.) Do not rinse with water at this step. You could use mouthwash if you have it.

Step 8) Pour a little more hydrogen peroxide into your glass and stir it around with your toothbrush to re-sanitize your brush. Believe it or not, the average toothbrush is one of the dirtiest things in your house! Yet you usually use it on your teeth without sanitizing it. Most people clean their silverware WAAAY better than their toothbrushes, yet they don't stick their silverware into smelly gum tissue, bloody gums, and dental plaque twice a day. So, does it make any sense to just rinse off your brush and throw it into a drawer or a cup? Just think of all the nasty stuff floating around in bathrooms -- hair, skin dander, microbes, even toilet flushing water droplets -- it's pretty gross if you really think about it. Later in the course, I'll show you products that can help keep your toothbrushes cleaner in between uses.

Summary 
The above regimen is a bit like oral hygiene. You still have to clean between your teeth and brush them. However, the WAY you do things is different. The order may be different. Squishing water and toothpaste are probably new to you. Scraping your tongue is probably new to you. Using hydrogen peroxide is probably new. 

BUT

Notice in the above regimen that I didn't mention the method of brushing, nor the method of interdental cleaning. Nor did I mention the type of toothbrush, toothpaste, etc. In fact, there's a lot missing in the above regimen. Yet the simple regimen above can still work quite well because there's solid science behind it, and it's better than what you have been doing.  

If you were to use an electric toothbrush, such as a Sonicare or Oral-B, you'd get better results. If you used a Waterpik instead of floss, you'd get even better results. And if you would put a little hydrogen peroxide (like 1%) into your Waterpik, you'd see phenomenal results. Using chlorine dioxide toothpaste would shoot your results into the stratosphere. Using dental probiotics would get you into orbit. There are other techniques that would get you to the moon, etc. I could go on and on.

Anyway, as you follow my newsletters, you will learn new methods for toothbrushing that minimize damage to teeth (that's right -- much of my dental business is spent fixing self-inflicted toothbrushing damage). You will learn new methods for interdental cleaning, how to chew a special gum for oral health, how to shower for oral health, and even how to sleep your way to oral health by letting probiotics fight dental pathogens overnight!

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Now that you’ve gone through this basic Dental Fitness education, you can jumpstart the rest of your Dental Fitness training in the links below.

Whenever you're ready, here are some ways I can help you, your family, and friends:
1. Improve your home oral hygiene with this free, downloadable, 22-page, PDF booklet: "7 Easy Steps to Start Supercharging Your Oral Hygiene Efforts".
2. Get my 58-page downloadable book "The RENUZORAL Method of Dental Fitness" for just $5.97 USD.
3. Visit my websites RENUORAL.com or Breathificdental.com and get any of the products I recommend
4. Enroll in my Oral-Systemic Health for Life Masterclass to create customized, effective dental fitness systems and take charge of your dental destiny once and for all.

To our oral-systemic health!

Dr. Steve Edwards

PS

Next week’s newsletter will be: Nighttime is the Undiscovered Country of Oral Health

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Disclaimer The purpose of this document is to improve dental literacy. It is not meant to provide dental or medical advice, treat or prevent any disease, or take the place of regular dental care. As individuals differ, so will the results of the products and exercises in this document. The publisher, RENUzORAL, and Dr. Edwards shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage related to, or alleged to be related directly or indirectly to the content herein. This document is written mainly for average people in average dental and medical health from ages six through the golden years. For more specific or severe problems such as oral cancer, dry mouth, or advanced periodontal disease, and when starting any plans of nutrition, diet, supplementation, exercise, or prevention, please consult your dentist and/or physician to ensure that you are in proper health. Some of you may have medical problems or allergies that might limit your participation in the steps that follow. For additional preventive dental educational materials, videos, training, seminars, services, and links to products mentioned in this document, please visit: https://www.renuzoral.com.