Atkins Diet: Aiming For a Slim Body But With Bad Breath?
While effective in helping to burn calories, a common side effect of the Atkins Diet is bad breath. However, as people progress into latter stages such as Maintenance, many of those who developed bad breath report a reduction or end to the embarrassing side effect. In order to better understand how a low carb diet could possibly lead to bad breath problems, it is important to understand how the plan helps to burn calories. In theory, eating carbohydrates provides the body with ready-to-use energy sources. By restricting carbohydrate intake, the Atkins diet tries to induce the body into ketosis and that is essentially the source of the bad breath symptoms many report while on the regimen. Ketosis is the state of elevated metabolism where the body is forced to burn fat stores in order to create energy-and this is how weight is lost while on the diet. The other big reason why ketosis causes bad breath is because the Atkins diet acts as a diuretic-it causes dehydration due to the elevated metabolism rate. In order to reduce the bad breath symptoms while in the initial stage, try adding in more water to your diet. If you are on the Atkins diet and bad breath suddenly appears-look on the bright side because that at least means that you have reached ketosis and are now burning fat and well on your way to a slimmer body!
