South Beach Diet and Bad Breath
If you're on the South Beach diet you're, probably losing weight and you probably have bad breath. Now that you're offended, let's discuss why you or anyone would have a foul smell from being on such a popular and successful diet program. Low carbs, high protein, fruits, and vegetables…sounds like the ideal diet. It is beneficially healthy for our bodies to eat well. However, for our breath, eating a low carbohydrate diet works against us. Why does it do this?
The reason lies in the way the body burns fat when it's on a low carbohydrate diet. Certain chemicals called ketones are released through the breath when you burn fat. The quicker you burn fat, the more of these ketones are let go into the mouth. Chances are, if you have bad breath and are on this diet, you are probably having success with the diet. Just take a look at the loss of weight you have achieved, and that alone will tell you that you have a great chance of having a foul mouth.
When you are on a low carbohydrate diet, new fats are not available to burn, so you start burning other fats, as well as proteins. This action is what makes the ketones release and therefore gives you a foul smell from the mouth.
When it comes to the low carbohydrate diet, all the brushing, flossing, and rinsing won't help. What must be done is the diet must be revaluated. Add more carbohydrates to the diet. It doesn't have to be a lot more, but a little more will help.
Sugarless gum and sugarless mints may be of assistance in this case as well. Chewing on sugarless gum helps your mouth produce more saliva. A moist mouth helps keep breath smelling good. Sugarless peppermints are also good. The peppermint in the mint has a calming effect on the muscles in the digestion tract. Regular candy or gum can help too, but both can seriously damage your teeth because of the sugar contents. Choosing the sugarless version will give you the same breath benefits without damaging your teeth or your diet.
Drinking more water can help, too. This solves the problem in two ways. First, it hydrates the mouth more so that it does not become dry. A dry mouth is a breeding ground for bacteria to give off more of the Volatile Sulfur Compounds, or VSC. Keeping the mouth moist is the key to avoiding this problem. Secondly, drinking water helps dilute the ketones that are concentrated in the mouth that was broken down from the fat being used. That fat was used because of the low amount of carbohydrate intake.
While most everyone tries to avoid bad breath, losing weight is also on the top of their list of desirable achievements. Since low carbohydrate diets like the South Beach Diet are beneficial to us in more ways than just losing weight, we must do something else to help clear up our foul breath.
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