Bad Breath

Bad breath (halitosis) is something we all worry about. North Americans spend billions of dollars a year on breath mints, mouthwashes and gum to try to decrease the chances that someone will find our breath offensive. We avoid breathing in the faces of other people and, if we're standing close, turn our heads away as we speak. There is such a cultural consensus that bad smelling breath is a problem, that it is common practice to pass the mints or gum around whenever you feel the need for some yourself.

Many of us believe that poor oral hygiene is the cause of bad breath. It's true that poor tooth brushing habits allow food particles to build up in pockets in the mouth and between the teeth, but many people with good oral hygiene habits can also have a problem with halitosis. It has much more to do with the population of bacteria living in the mouth than with the energy spent on oral cleansing - bacteria and other organisms in the mouth are normal and healthy, but some are easier to live with than others.

Ultimately, the cause of bad breath is a group of anaerobic bacteria that make themselves at home in your mouth. A bad breath cure would have to aim at significantly decreasing the numbers of these bacteria in the mouth. Anaerobic bacteria fluorish in the absence of oxygen, so they tend to do best in places where air circulation is poor: spaces between the teeth, in gum creases and pockets, in the tonsillar crypts and on the back of the tongue. In these locations they live on the debris that collects in all our mouths: particles of food, dead skin cells, proteins found in saliva, etc. As they break down these things, they produce foul smelling gases that we detect as bad breath.

No bad breath cure will wipe out the anaerobic bacteria completely, but the best products reduce the populations to the level where the foul odor they produce becomes undetectable. This can achieved by physical removal, such as tongue scraping and mouthwashes that literally pick up the bacteria and carry them away. It can be done with antibacterial agents that kill may of the bacteria, and it can be done by making the mouth an unfavorable environment for them, that is, providing lots of oxygen to the sites where they normally hide. New and novel approaches to the problem in recent years have resulted in the production of promising new agents for getting at the cause of bad breath and correcting the problem.