AUNTIE CHARITY: Bad breath? Clean up!

GREAT sex starts long before you set foot in the bedroom. This week I will not be talking about foreplay but bad breath and being careful about what you eat in order to avoid having bad breath. Filling your plate with the right food could pay off big during after-dinner activities (because, hey, nothing kills the mood faster than a dropping libido, or worse, some malfunctioning equipment) but this is for another day. Today we will focus on the aspect of bad breath.

I had a number of interesting inboxes and one of the e-mails read “I simply cannot stand bad breath, not even from my own husband and I struggle to tell him that he has bad breath though most of the times when we brush our teeth I talk about cleaning the tongue and this is a way of me telling him he needs to clean his tongue to avoid bad breath. I like kissing during sex, so he just kills it for me because if breath smells like a sewer, I cannot pretend it smells fresher than peppermint.

“A few times before I suggested visits to the dentist, I suggested that we brush our teeth as a game because we were bored hoping he would make sense of what had happened. At some point he blamed it on the food we ate, but I still did not understand it because I am personally an onion lover but I practice high standards of oral care because I do not want to smell like a bag of onions going bad. I tried countless times to politely get him to clean his mouth until I could not take it and I punished him with avoiding sex which for him is the highlight of his day. We had an ugly fall out until I had to tell him it was about his bad breath. It was the most bravest thing I have ever done, I mean what’s more awkward than saying, ‘your breath smells bad, that is why I cannot have sex with you’ while he is trying to get you naked?”

While you know about aphrodisiacs from some foods that get you up and going like a machine some of those foods might be bad for your breath, so it is time to work with the season as it is a brand new year and a hot season too you might just want to be careful of the food you consume.

Bad breath is a morning phenomenon that happens to everyone but there are some that just give out the burst sewer smell when they open their mouth in the morning, yet there are some people that do not have the bad breath even when they have not cleaned their mouth. The mouth is home to a multitude of bacteria that feed on the dirt that loiters on your gums, tongue and throat, as well as the spaces between your teeth. When bacteria digest the goodies you would have enjoyed, they give off foul-smelling an offensive breath.

This is one thing we cannot avoid because we sleep with our mouths inactive and closed, hence the foul smell, but some people feed these smells by not falling in love with proper oral care and do not brush and clean their mouth before bed yet they spend the day eating food.

Morning is the perfect time for sex because it is usually a bit cooler especially in these days of unbearable heat that can cause low sex drive because of so many things that we will not touch on this week as our main focus is on the bad breath. Bad breath is a real issue and quite recently my friends and I were talking about a certain guy and the name sounded familiar to all of us and his description was more on the one with a bad breath.

I then realised it was a real issue and it cannot be about the life of offering your partner a mint or something each time you want a kiss. I mean realistically it is not going to cut it. If you have detected bad breath on more than one occasion, you need to find a more systematic way of dealing with the issue if a trip to the dentist is costly especially in this our January disease phase then practice proper oral care and watch what you eat.

Putting things into context always helps to make things more manageable. In the beginning of a marriage, there is so much anxiety and anticipation that the littlest things can actually feel like the most important factors in the world and I think this is the time to work on some issues that can affect your till death do us apart. The truth, however, is that couples fall into their usual routines several months into a marriage and I guess this is where the issue becomes difficult to deal with as you may not realise that your partner has bad breath because they are still covering it up until they stop caring.

Bad breath is an all-around bad situation that needs to be addressed because no one can stand the sewer smell even when it comes from a pretty pout mouth. Oral care is important, so clean up your mouth real good. If your mouth smells like onions that have outlived their shelf life that will cause problems as it is a major turnoff. Never ever let a good marriage go because of bad breath, these problems are fixable and ultimately bearable when worked on and improved, so making any of these annoyances an actual deal breaker can leave you with much bigger problems.

This summer you need to be vigilant about keeping that mouth as fresh as a strawberry field in summer.

Till next week let us keep talking, email [email protected]