Halitosis

No one ever tells you that you have sweet breath, but family and close friends are quick to tell you that you have bad or unpleasant breath. I think a sensitivity to halitosis is a cultural thing, and I think it is 100 times more prevalent in the USA. Furthermore, I think that the biggest promoters of that issue are the makers of breath refreshing products.

We have lived in six countries outside the USA, and I don’t recall the mouth refreshing industry having a grip on the population’s wallet.

If you are wondering how I began thinking about this, it all started when I was timing my breathing. I take an average of 12 breaths a minute, and then I began to wonder if I was average for my age.

As I typed into the search engine “average number brea…” this is what popped up: “average number of breaths per minute.” So, you see, there have been others who have already performed that search. Therefore, I am not that weird—at least in this respect.  

I learned that for the first year of a child’s life, the normal respiratory rate is 30-60 times per minute. The average respiratory rate of a healthy adult is 12-18 times per minute. For someone in my age bracket 12 breaths per minute is average, so I felt better about my breathing.

Breathing is something that we take for granted until we are not able to catch our breath. Thinking about breathing led me to appreciate the fact that every breath I take is a gift of God. Every cell in our body depends on a steady flow of oxygen into our body. All our living processes depend on our breathing. We stop breathing and we die. And isn’t it amazing that God knows how many breaths we will take.

Stop now. Take a deep breath. Then thank the Lord for letting you take another breath.

“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” (Psalm 150:6)