Your Teeth Are Fine. So Why Does Your Breath Still Smell?
12 appointments. The same question. The same wrong answer.
“Is there something wrong with my breath?”
She asked me that 12 times over 6 years.
Never during the appointment. Always right at the end, standing up, coat already on, when it could still pass as an afterthought.
And 12 times I gave her the same answer. Your teeth are fine. No decay. Gums look healthy. Brush twice a day, floss, scrape your tongue.
She said thank you. She booked the next appointment. She came back 6 months later and asked me again.
I have been a dentist for 19 years and I have looked inside more than 20,000 mouths. When somebody asks me about their breath and I find no disease, I tell them there is no problem.
I was answering the wrong question.
Her name is Diane. She is 52. And she is the reason I am writing this.
The bag she brought to her twelfth appointment
One morning she walked in, put a carrier bag on the counter and said, “I want you to see what I have bought.”
Here is what was in it, in the order she bought it.
- Listerine. Twice a day for 2 years, held past the burn. Fresh for 20 minutes. Then back to normal. About $180.
- TheraBreath. A bottle a month for over a year. Better. A few hours instead of 20 minutes. It never lasted a day. $260.
- A tongue scraper. “The first time I used it I nearly threw up. And then I looked at what came off it and I had to sit down on the edge of the bath.” It helped for the morning. Back by lunch. $12.
- Mints and gum. Work bag. Coat. Car. Desk. Kitchen drawer. About $200 a year.
- A $200 electric toothbrush. The box said it removed more plaque, and more clean had to mean less smell. It removed more plaque. That was all it did. $200.
- A water flosser. Loud, messy, and it sprayed the mirror every morning for 4 months. $80.
- Mouth probiotic tablets. $45 a month, given 4 months because the reviews were so good. $180.
There were 2 more I have left out, including parsley capsules, which she was embarrassed to admit to.
Total: over $1,000.
And here is the part that stayed with me.
Every single time I bought one, I believed it. I am not stupid. I still believed it. I would think, this is the one. This is the morning I get to stop checking.
By year 3 the blame had moved
Not onto the products any more. Onto herself.
I stopped thinking it was the mouthwash. I started thinking it was me. That there is something rotten in there that I was born with and everybody else got a normal mouth. You start washing more. Then you start washing more than that. Then one day you are standing at the sink at half past 6 in the morning brushing for the fourth time and you think, this is not normal behaviour.
She had decided this was permanent, and that the only job left was hiding it.
And she was hiding it well. That is the part people get wrong about this. She had not given up. She was running a full time operation. Far end of the table in every meeting. Hand near her face when she talked. 5 supplies of mints. A brush at her desk.
I asked her once whether she was sure. Whether it was possible she had built this up over the years into something bigger than it was.
She did not blink.
I know when it is bad. I can taste it. That sour, metal thing at the back. And a woman at work offered me gum once, in a meeting, with a look on her face I have never forgotten. So I do not need anybody to tell me it is real. I need somebody to tell me why.
And in 6 years I never gave her a why. I gave her advice.
Twelve times.
Your teeth are almost certainly not the problem
If you have been told the same thing I told Diane, this next part is for you.
Long term bad breath starts inside the mouth about 90% of the time. Not the stomach. Not the sinuses. Not the food.
So if you have ever lain awake wondering whether the smell means something is badly wrong inside you, put that down first.
But it does not start on your teeth. If it did, brushing would have fixed it. You have run that experiment yourself, twice a day, for years.
It starts about 2 inches further back. And in 19 years it is the one place I never properly looked.
Deep in the grooves at the back of your tongue
Push your tongue out in front of a mirror right now.
It looks smooth. It is not.
Under a microscope the top of your tongue looks like carpet. Thousands of small folds and grooves, and towards the back they get deeper and tighter.
That is where the germs live. Not on top of your tongue. Down inside it.
And they do not sit there loose. They build a shield.
The colony makes a layer of slime and pulls it over itself like a roof. It is sticky, it is tough, and it is the entire reason nothing in that carrier bag ever worked.
- A tongue scraper takes the roof off the top. It reaches the surface and drags away whatever is sitting on it. That is the stuff you see on the scraper. Everything down in the grooves survives, untouched, in the dark.
- Mouthwash never gets through it. The rinse runs over the shield and kills whatever is loose on the surface. The colony underneath does not notice it happened.
- And then they rebuild. The germs left in the grooves multiply. Within a few hours the colony is back to full strength and the shield is back over the top of it.
That is your morning. That is why it is back by lunch.
You are not failing to clean properly. You are taking the roof off a building and calling it demolition.
Down in those grooves they feed on tiny scraps of protein from your food and from your own tissue. They break it down. And the waste they give off is a sulphur gas.
That gas is the smell. It is also that sour, metal taste at the back of your mouth, which is the one part of this you get to notice yourself.
So what gets through a shield?
That is the question I should have been asking 6 years earlier.
Not how do we clean harder. There were 6 years of evidence sitting in a carrier bag on my counter that harder does nothing.
Look at what was in that bag again. The mints. The rinses. The scraper. The $200 brush. The water flosser. Every single one of them works on the outside of the shield. Not one of them was ever going to reach what is underneath it.
So what gets through a slime layer that scraping does not lift and rinsing does not reach?
Nothing you scrub with. Nothing you rinse with.
But light can.
Blue light at 460nm
It goes straight through the shield.
The slime does not stop it. It does not slow it down and it does not block it. Light passes through soft tissue and it passes through the layer these germs hide under, and it reaches the colony in the same second you switch the brush on.
And it kills them on contact.
Not later. Not after a course of something. The light lands on the germ and the germ dies.
Here is why they have no defence against it.
These germs build a dye inside their own cells. They need it to live and there is no way for them to switch it off. 460nm is the exact wavelength that dye absorbs. The moment it soaks the light up, it turns into a form of oxygen that destroys the germ from the inside.
So the weakness is not something they picked up. It is part of being alive.
Somebody put that wavelength into a toothbrush
It is called Helios.
I was never sceptical about the light. I was sceptical about the toothbrush.
Blue light killing these germs is not news to anybody in my profession. There is a blue light in every dental practice in this country. Mine cost more than a used car and I have been pointing it into mouths for 19 years.
So the light was never my question.
My question was delivery. Light does nothing at all unless enough of it reaches the right place for long enough. Put one weak LED in the base of a handle and you have a torch, not a treatment.
So the first thing I did was count them.
- 6 LEDs, set into the head itself. Firing into the mouth rather than at the bristles. Running the whole 2 minutes rather than a portion of it.
- All 3 wavelengths named on the box, in nanometres, which is not something I take for granted. Blue is a colour. 460nm is a specification.
- 460nm blue at the colony. 660nm red at the tissue. 830nm near infrared, deepest of the 3.
- Sonic cleaning at 40,000 movements a minute, so the mechanical clean is still there in full. 2 minutes, twice a day.
- A 90 day money back guarantee. $149.
One hundred and forty nine dollars for a toothbrush sounds like a great deal of money.
Then I looked back at the carrier bag on my counter. $1,000. On things that worked for 20 minutes at a time.
So I gave it to her, and I photographed that tongue every week.
See How It WorksWhat I saw
The coating had pulled back from the middle of her tongue. Still heavy at the back. I would not have called it anything yet, except that in 6 years of looking at this mouth I had never seen the pattern change at all.
The back third was thinner and the colour had gone from a dense yellow white to patchy. She said the sour taste was there when she woke up and gone by 9 in the morning, which had never once happened before.
The taste did not come back at all. She left one of her mint supplies in the car and did not replace it, which she told me about the way somebody tells you they have stopped smoking.
The coating was gone. Not thinner. Gone. Pink tongue to the back. And the smell went with it. Not shortened to a few hours. Not covered until lunchtime. Gone.
You are the only person who has ever looked at my tongue and not looked away.
6 months on. Still gone. That is the part I most wanted to see, because everything in that carrier bag had worked for a while.
I got all the way to the car park last Tuesday before I realised I had not checked. I sat in the car for a minute. I did not know what to do with myself.
What the other 2 wavelengths are for
Blue is the one that kills the germs. The other 2 are there to make the tongue a worse place for them to rebuild in.
And there is a reason it has to be blue that does the killing. That dye inside the germ only absorbs light at the blue end. Red goes straight through the germ and does nothing to it at all, which is exactly why red is safe to put against your own tissue.
660nm red light
Red light at 660nm reaches the tissue itself and settles it down. Calm tissue leaks less of the protein these germs feed on. Less food, smaller colony.
830nm near infrared
Your eye does not see this one at all. It reaches deepest of the 3, down to where the grooves bottom out and the shield sits thickest. Blue does its work at the colony. This one carries on past it.
40,000 movements a minute
The bristles still do the surface, and they do it properly. That has not been taken away. It has just stopped being the only thing happening.
“So why has my own dentist never mentioned this?”
Ask it. It is the right question and you deserve a straight answer.
Because we are trained to find disease. Decay, bone loss, lesions. When you ask about your breath and there is no disease, you get told there is no problem, and we both leave the room believing the conversation is over.
I did that 12 times to the same woman.
And because the light in my practice costs more than a used car, so nobody in that building was looking for the version that costs $149. We had one. It did not occur to us that you should be able to own one.
Your dentist is not hiding this from you. Your dentist was answering the question that was asked, the way I was.
Why I am writing this
I spent the better part of 2 decades giving the same wrong answer to the same question. That is the only reason this exists.
- If you have asked a dentist about your breath and been told your teeth are fine…
- If you keep more than one supply of mints and something drops in you when one runs low…
- If somebody has offered you gum in a meeting and you have never forgotten their face…
- If you have turned away from somebody you love in your own bed…
It was not your effort. It never was. You were cleaning the outside of a shield.
It is $149 and 90 days. If nothing changes in that time the money comes back, and you are not left holding another expensive mistake in a cupboard.
The honest truth
A toothbrush did not fix Diane’s life. I am not going to write that sentence.
And it is not instant. Week 1 you will not be sure of anything. Week 2 you will probably talk yourself out of it, because you have been let down enough times to expect it.
Watch the back of your tongue. In Diane’s mouth the coating took 4 weeks to go.
And the smell went with it. Not for a few hours. Not until lunchtime. Gone, and still gone 6 months later.
Helios. $149.
- 6 LEDs in the brush head, firing into the mouth for the full 2 minutes
- 460nm blue light, the wavelength these germs have no defence against
- 660nm red and 830nm near infrared alongside it
- Sonic cleaning at 40,000 movements a minute
- 90 day money back guarantee
Not masked. Gone.
See How It Works
What other people are reporting
I stopped covering my mouth at work. That is the whole review.
The white coating at the back of my tongue is gone. Not thinner. Gone. I have had it since my 30s.
My wife noticed before I did. She asked me what I had changed.
I have spent more on mouthwash in a single year than this cost once.
3 weeks in and my hygienist asked what I had been doing differently. Nobody has ever asked me that.
It is not a miracle. It is the first thing that lasted past lunchtime.
I threw the mints out of my work bag last week. I did not think that day was coming.