Bad Breath Remedies: What Works, and What Doesn’t
Bad breath has probably been around as long as people have been around. And as long as people have had bad breath, they have tried to treat it.
The ancient Chinese masters of herbal medicine theorized that bad breath during winter was caused by “wind devils.” These evil spirits lodged in the throat and caused bad breath. Drinking hot tea with cinnamon would cause them to flee, as would drinking what we would call miso soup with scallions.
The ancient Greeks treated bad breath with ouzo, the alcoholic drink made flavored with aniseseed. If it didn’t kill your bad breath, it at least masked it.
The ancient Romans taught that red wine causes bad breath and white wine sweetens it. Of course, if you drank enough wine, you stopped being worried about your bad breath.
And the twentieth century Americans were by and large convinced that the one best way to treat bad breath was with a kind of chewing gum known as Clorets. Laced with artificial green dyes and chlorophyll from parsley, tens of millions of Americans convinced themselves on tens of billions of occasions that chewing Clorets took care of bad breath. But as someone who lived in the USA in the 1950′s and 1960′s, I can attest that it didn’t.
There have always been bad remedies. Some of the work. Some of them don’t work. A few of them actually make your breath worse (usually so you will keep buying more). Here are the highlights of the good, the bad, and the just plain stinky of common bad breath remedies.
Brushing Your Teeth
The good news about brushing your teeth is that will in fact reduce bad breath odor. The bad news about brushing your teeth is that it will only reduce bad breath for about an hour.
Only about 30% of the bacteria that cause bad breath are actually on the surfaces of your teeth. Another 30% are in the crevices or sulci between your gums and your teeth that your brush can’t reach, and the remaining 40% are mostly in the cracks on your tongue. As soon as you get bad breath bacteria off your teeth, they migrate from your gums and tongue and form new colonies. But brushing your teeth is a great short-term fix.
Flossing Your Teeth
If you brush your teeth regularly, flossing won’t do anything to prevent morning breath. If may be helpful after you have eaten a meal including chopped onions or garlic, and it’s a good thing to floss once a day for general oral hygiene. Flossing the wrong way, digging into your gums by flossing up and down between your teeth instead of with a loop around each tooth, however, can make your breath worse.
Oral Irrigation
Oral irrigation devices shoot a jet of water into the sulcus, the tiny gap between the base of the tooth and the gums. These machines, such as the WaterPik and Hydrofloss, shoot a stream of water into the 2 to 10 mm (1/10 to 1/3 of an inch) gap between the gums and the tooth that is strong enough to dislodge bacteria and debris but not so strong as to loosen the tooth. Some brands “magnetize” water so that it removes even more of the smelly gunk beneath the gum line, about 44% of tartar over three months of use compared to 20% of tartar removed by untreated water.
For oral irrigation to work, however, the stream of water has to go below the gum line. Water you squirt against your teeth won’t do any good beyond the benefits of brushing your teeth or sipping water throughout the day.
So What Doesn’t Work?
Brushing, flossing, tongue scraping, and oral irrigation are slow but sure ways to get bad breath under control. There are some other common methods that don’t work as well.
- Breath mints for bad breath are a little like sledgehammers for an itchy nose. If you take a breath mint, you will still have bad breath but you won’t notice it. If you hit your toe with a sledgehammer, your nose will still itch but you won’t notice it. Breath mints only mask bad breath, and only temporarily. Breath sprays are not any better.
- Mouthwash usually freshens breath for several hours, but leaves you needing more and more. That’s because most brands of mouthwash contain ingredients like alcohol, chlorhexidine, and sanguinarine that can dry out your tongue and gums and create places for germs to hide that the mouthwash can’t reach. The process of drying out your tongue and mouth kills tissue that in turn becomes food for bad breath bacteria. A few brands, such as Dr. Katz’s and Oxyfresh kill germs without killing tissues to feed them.
- Megadoses of nutritional supplements don’t provide additional protection against bad breath. That is not to say that smaller doses of nutrients are not useful. Up to 5,000 IU of vitamin A every day may help prevent a condition called “hairy tongue” (although medication may be needed to treat it). Up to 100 mg of vitamin C a day may help strengthen your gums so that gingivitis is less of a problem. It can be useful to take CoQ10 (at 30 mg and up to 200 mg a day) and methylsulfonylmethane (MSM, up to 5,000 mg a day). Taking larger doses of these useful supplements, however, won’t do anything for your oral health and can cause unpleasant or even dangerous side effects.
You will get better results for controlling bad breath from things you rather than from things you take. Personal attention to your oral hygiene every single day is the single most important thing you can do to control and prevent bad breath.
