1. Alcohol is what’s known as a diuretic. When you consume alcohol in large quantities, it dehydrates you, and it dries out your mouth too.
That reduces your saliva production and without saliva naturally flushing your mouth of bacteria, oral bacteria increase.
2. But there’s more. Alcohol not only reduces saliva, which is your mouth’s natural breath control system, it also kills bacteria.
That might sound good – but it’s really not. Here’s why.
Alcohol un-naturally kills both good and bad bacteria.
3. And since the bad bacteria begin replenishing their losses MUCH faster than the good ones, what you’ve accidentally done with alcohol is to give the bad bacteria a head start on re-populating your mouth.
4. Now here’s the stinky consequence of that. The bad bacteria produce sulfur gasses, (that cringe-worthy odor of rotten egg smell), as part of their normal metabolic processes. As your breath becomes saturated with those bacterial sulfur gasses, you are actually exhaling those gasses as…