Bad Breath Treatment

If you've ever sought bad breath treatment, you know that there are more than a few products and services to choose from. People who suffer from bad breath have tried everything from herbal home remedies to breath mints to professional services from people who specialize in treating halitosis. Although it's natural for people to try different things, the reason there are still so many options to choose from is probably that no one has found a solution that consistently works. We may be closer, however, than we've ever been before.

The perfect bad breath remedy will not just hide the problem temporarily behind a stronger odor - it will work to reduce or eliminate the bad odor itself, focusing on the source of the odor and removing it. This means that bad breath treatment should be antibacterial in some way - it should reduce the numbers of odor causing bacteria in the mouth and continue to keep those numbers down so that halitosis is undetectable. In the ideal scenario, the oral bacteria of the mouth would be altered so that the anaerobes, the bacteria that produce the bad smell, never get the upper hand again.

A number of producers of commercial products are taking exactly this approach to creating a bad breath remedy, and they are tackling the problem in novel ways that suggest some real breakthroughs may have been achieved. While more conventional approaches added antibacterial chemicals to mouthwashes, attacking the bacteria more or less directly, the Two-phase method uses the knowledge that oral bacteria stick to oil droplets to produce a mouthwash that literally sweeps up the bacteria and carries them away. TheraBreath bad breath treatment introduces oxygen to the typically airless areas of the oral cavity where anaerobic, odor producing bacteria thrive (anaerobes prefer to live in the absence of oxygen and many of them actually die if they are exposed to oxygen).

If a bad breath remedy could change the composition of the bacterial population in the mouth so that odor production was more or less permanently stopped, that would be a cure for bad breath. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen until we have a better understanding of why the anaerobes take over in the first place.

Research is beginning to show that diet can be an important factor, as can underlying disease. Before a bad breath treatment can become a cure, we have to understand what leads to the problem in the first place. In the meantime, however, some of these products show great promise in that they may eliminate bad breath continuously as long as you continue to use them.