The Single Cause Of Virtually All Cases Of Bad Breath

In their studies of bad breath, scientists at Catholic University-Leuven, Belgium and at Tel Aviv University, Israel have confirmed that about “85-90% of cases originate in the mouth.”
The commonly accepted source are the odorous by-products of anaerobic bacteria found primarily within the surface of your tongue. (The word “anaerobic” literally means “without oxygen” – anaerobic bacteria only thrive in low-oxygen environments.)
If you look very closely at the surface of your tongue in a mirror, you’ll see that there are many tiny fibers on its surface, called papillae. Since the bacteria are anaerobic, they can’t survive on the surface of your tongue, where there is oxygen in your mouth. Instead, they live down between the papillae, where there is little, or no, oxygen.
Israel Kleinberg, a leading bad-breath researcher at the State University of New York, says 80% of these anaerobic bacteria live in a triangle-shaped area toward the back of the tongue. This is because the front of the tongue is selfcleaning; you move your tongue a lot throughout the day (such as when talking) and this causes the front part of your tongue to brush against the hard palate (the “roof” of your mouth). The friction this causes prevents any significant level of bacteria growth. In comparison, the back of the tongue only brushes against the soft palate at the back of the mouth, which doesn’t cause enough friction to produce a similar cleansing action.
These bacteria help to break down proteins in the food you eat, in mucus and phlegm produced by your body, and in diseased or damaged tissues in your mouth. And, as a by-product of doing this, they give off a variety of very smelly chemical compounds, collectively known as “Volatile Sulfur Compounds”, or “VSCs”.
To give a pretty good indication of how bad VSCs actually smell, here’s what some of them compare to:
• Hydrogen sulphide: Rotten eggs.
• Methyl mercaptan: Feces.
• Skatole: Feces.
• Cadaverine: Corpses.
• Putrescine: Rotten meat.
• Isovaleric acid: Sweaty feet.
Everyone has some level of unpleasant VSCs present in their breath:
Those without obvious bad breath just have a very low level that can’t be detected by the human nose. However, the number of VSC-producing bacteria in the mouth can sometimes increase dramatically – by a factor of millions – causing the levels of these compounds to increase in the same way. It’s only then that the levels of VSCs being produced start to become detectable to the human nose and it becomes “bad breath”.