What is Ketosis?
Blog
You may have noticed, if you’ve been eating our cauliflower pizza crust, that it does not contain many carbs. Granted, that’s strange for pizza but also a great thing. While carbs are important in the daily balance, the amount and the type are just as important. But why are we talking about carbs when we want to be talking about ketosis?
What is this strange word that seems to be thrown around so flippantly?
Ketosis is commonly understood as a state of fat loss. Ketosis happens on a low-carb diet, when there are no longer any carbs to burn for fuel and your body begins to burn fat instead.
When you begin to restrict your caloric intake, and cut down your carb amount or change it to better, more complex carbs, your body gets less sugar as fuel and starts to use the stored fat. The breakdown product of fat is ketones. Thus, the body gradually goes into a state of ketosis. Ketosis is literally the burning of your stored fat for energy.
Bad breath
Which brings us to the next factor. Imagine what burning fat would smell like. Your body is no exception to this type of reaction, and all that “burning” smell, well, it has to go somewhere! The most efficient route out? Your mouth. You are breathing off the ketones.
There really is a reason for it. Not all bad breath is a direct result of ketosis, so you should pay attention to all the factors. If you’re trying to lose weight by restricting calories, exercising, and performing other healthy habits and you have bad breath you can pretty much guess it’s all that fat dying off. That is your sign that you’re in fat burning mode.
This is not an oral hygiene problem, certain things can help banish the bad breath or at least mask the odor.
Drink more water.
Chew sugarless gum.
Suck on sugarless mints.
In particular, those that contain Xylitol also kill bacteria and can prevent cavities.
In addition, just because you’re losing weight doesn’t mean you will certainly have bad breath. The worst of it comes in a very deep state of ketosis, which is only a likelihood if you’re fasting for long periods of time.
We’ve had people experience the wonderful effects of carb cutting with our pizza crust. It’s truly ketogenic in nature, low in carbs and only containing the good ones (veggies!) and satiating enough to help kick that carb craving. So we wanted to encourage you if you’ve been wondering about that new breath mint habit you may have picked up. We hope you can look at the positive side, and rejoice that you are getting rid of those unwanted pounds.