Oral care probiotics work wonders for bad breath

An intractable case of halitosis can be a serious problem, affecting work activities and home life. To get some much-needed relief from oral odor, what is a person to do? Well, if the latest scientific studies have anything to say about it, oral care probiotics may be the best bad breath treatment to come out in the last 30 years.

The key to the success of probiotics is that they work with, rather than against, your mouth's ability to culture bacteria.

On your tongue and palate, billions of microbes make their home. Plenty of these bacteria are essentially harmless, but there several dozen species that are anything but. These varieties actively contribute to tooth decay, yellowing, gingivitis, periodontal disease and bad breath. Unfortunately, brushing and flossing isn't always enough to get rid of them, either.

This is when oral care probiotics can help. These products introduce particular strains of microbes - most prominently Lactobacillus salivarius K12 or M18 - into your mouth, where they muscle out the odor-causing varieties.

It's an old strategy, one that's been around for about a century. Probiotics were first used for tummy complaints (and they still are), but today's most advanced probiotic kits are primarily made to treat bad breath and other oral health problems.

Consider a presentation made at the General Session and Exhibition of the International and American Association for Dental Research. In it, researchers from Japan added a new subspecies of L. salivarius - named WB21 - to the roster of microorganisms that help beat back halitosis. The group noted that patients who took daily oral care probiotics products had radically reduced levels of oral odor.

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