His morning breath really turns me off
Morning is the perfect time for sex because between 6am and 8am, male testosterone levels are at their highest. As a result, most healthy males wake with an erection.
Funky breath is also a morning phenomenon. The mouth is home to a multitude of bacteria that feed on the gunk that lurks on your gums, tongue, and throat, as well as the spaces between your teeth. When bacteria digest these goodies, they give off foul-smelling sulfides and amines.
During the day, these gases are washed away by saliva so they don’t have a chance to build up and become offensive, but during the night the saliva in your mouth dries out. This is particularly true for people who smoke, drink alcohol, snore, or sleep with their mouths open. The drier the mouth, the more the gases build up, and in the morning your breath doesn’t smell good.
Because dragon breath happens to everyone at some point, most couples make a joke of it. Certain foods — curry for example, or buckets of red wine — create truly toxic morning breath, but it is seldom a big deal. After the initial recoil, the guilty party dashes to the bathroom and brushes their teeth. Then they jump back into bed for a minty fresh love-in.
If your boyfriend refuses to do this because he doesn’t want to interrupt his sexual flow, you could try keeping two glasses of water on your bedside table when you go to bed at night. When he suggests sex the next morning, tell him that you need a drink first and pass him a glass as well. Water will help to flush away food debris and bacteria and it can dilute the sugar acids too.
If your boyfriend’s breath isn’t great at the best of times, he needs to brush up on his oral hygiene. It can be difficult to raise the subject of bad breath without causing offence, but if he doesn’t brush and floss morning and evening, you really should encourage him to, because bad oral hygiene can cause all sorts of dental and physical problems.
Ask him politely if you can check his tongue. If it has a whitish-yellow coating, he needs to use a scraper to get rid of the bacteria that are embedded into its rough surface. He may also need to address his diet. Garlic and onions contain pungent oils that, when digested, wind up in your bloodstream and are released in the lungs, causing sour breath for up to three days. They can also cause sour-smelling body odour.
If he is body-building, eating a high protein diet, or restricting his carbohydrate intake, he may be in a state of ketosis, where his body has begun to break down his fat cells as a source of energy. Ketosis causes the body to release foul-smelling ketones that are expelled in the urine and breath. A balanced diet should rapidly correct this problem.
Stubborn bad breath can be a symptom of more serious illness, so if it persists he should see a dentist. Or a urologist. Periodontitis is an inflammation of the tissue around the teeth that can shrink the gums, loosen the teeth and cause bad breath. As an interesting aside — and I’m not suggesting the two are linked in your boyfriend’s case — it happens to be more common in men with erectile dysfunction.
You should also get him to take a vitamin D supplement because a study in 2013 that was published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found vitamin D deficiency to be a risk factor for periodontitis. Dietary supplements of vitamin D won’t do your boyfriend any harm, but they could be of significant benefit to his oral health.
* Send your queries to suzigodson@mac.com
