Expert: Odor Sticks Around Until Food Leaves SystemThere you are in the office, sitting down for a meeting when something catches your attention.
It's the girl from accounting sitting next to you. You are convinced she ate a raw onion on her lunch break. She has no idea that the slice of onion in the pita wrap she ate an hour ago is causing people in the meeting to slowly scoot their chairs farther away. Halitosis -- or bad breath -- is more common than people think.
Dr. Harold Katz said one-third of the population suffers from bad breath and some don't even know it. "That's because you can't smell your own breath," he said, adding that your brain gets used to your own odor, a process called acclimation.
According to the American Dental Association, mouth odors will continue until the body eliminates the food. So from the time you take a bite of that garlic bagel, it becomes absorbed in the bloodstream, gets transferred to the lungs and is then expelled you give off a scent...
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