The idea of taking a mint to freshen your breath seems pretty convenient to many people. The mint tastes good, usually sweet, and it makes your mouth smell good.
What these people don't know is that many breath mints contain sugar, thus making your breath smell even worse after a certain period of time, more precisely when bacteria starts forming in your mouth.
As we all know bad breath is usually caused by bacteria in your mouth that feed upon the things you eat, and produce wastes. These wastes are the source of your bad breath. By eating mints, you may temporarily cover up the smell of your breath, but after a while it will return because of the sugar contained in the mints.
Breath mints work because they make you think that your breath smells nice, using the fresh smell that they produce when you put them in your mouth. After eating breath mints, people don't worry about their breath anymore, thinking that the product did it's job. People also have this opinion about sweet foods such as chocolate, cookies, cake or whatever. It's not about how good the food smells, it's about the sugar and the fact that it helps form that nasty bacteria in your mouth.
Clinical quality mints like TriOral or BreathRx, are made without sugar. These type of mints are sweetened with xylitol, a non-sugar sweetener, so they really do what they are supposed to do. Most chewing gum these days is also sugar free, and all the manufacturers specify that.
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