We read three years of r/badbreath. Here is what 11,550 posts say actually works.

Published September 3, 2026 · Posts from September 5, 2023 to September 3, 2026 · Counts and method at the bottom, raw counts as CSV. We earn nothing on any product named here.

r/badbreath is where people go after the dentist says everything looks fine. We pulled every post from the last three years, 11,550 of them from 3,634 accounts, and counted what people tried, what they say worked, and what they keep asking. The short version: the success stories are diagnoses, not products. For every product or treatment named in at least 20 posts, more posts report it failing than working, and mints and mouthwash fail most often. The most upvoted post in three years is not a cure at all.

What do people try?

Tonsils come up in more posts than any product. Of the 11,265 posts with readable text, 13.9% mention tonsil stones or tonsils, 12.9% a dentist visit, 12.4% mouthwash, 10.8% reflux or GERD treatment, 10.7% a diet change and 9.2% tongue scraping. Oral probiotics of any named kind appear in 3.2%. The list below is document frequency: a post that names mouthwash four times counts once.

What do they say worked?

More posts report every product failing than working. For each post that names something, we read the surrounding sentence for a success phrase ("worked", "helped", "cured", "gone") or a failure phrase ("did nothing", "still smells", "came back", "tried everything"), with checks for negation, hearsay and questions. A hand audit of 80 classified posts put the method at about 70% precision in each direction, and a "worked" can be a recommendation rather than a result, so read these as directions and raw counts, not rates. Two more things shape them: the room is people whose earlier attempts failed, and the people who got better mostly stop posting.

Tonsillectomy is the clearest single finding: 90 posts pair it with a failure phrase against 32 with a success phrase, and with comments included the count is 411 against 106, roughly one success report for every four failures. Mints and breath sprays, the most-tried product category in the sub, run 156 failures to 31 successes; mouthwash 292 to 66; tongue scraping 161 to 47. Those are the three things everyone is told first, which is why the people posting are the ones for whom they already failed. Two things to hold alongside the table. Doctor visits look worst of all (dentist 203 failure posts against 39, ENT 83 against 8, gastro workup 100 against 23), but a visit that found nothing reads as a failure to the regex, and that is not a treatment failing. And the only rows near even, keto and zinc, sit on 33 and 21 verdicts.

What do the "cured" posts have in common?

At least eleven of the twenty most upvoted posts in three years are "cured after N years" stories, and the cure in every one of them is a diagnosis, usually combined with a routine: silent reflux, a hiatal hernia, tonsil crypts, chronic sinus congestion, an H. pylori infection, a gut problem found through testing, a dairy elimination, a no-sugar diet. Not one names a mouthwash or a mint as the thing that ended it. The single most upvoted post (score 140) is not a cure; it is someone telling the room that they are good people who should go live their lives.

The stories, in the posters' words:

• "What finally worked for me -Dental syringe with a nice amount of pressure, flushing the tonsil crypts more than once (you don't need to go super deep, just be consistent)" (score 63)
• "My experience with bad breath, LPR, and how cutting out dairy finally changed everything" (score 75)
• "Within weeks of doing this, I noticed the bad taste in my mouth was gone, when I tried to search for it. My perceived 'dry mouth' was gone, and my saliva flow had increased significantly." (score 73)
• "I will say I do brush, tongue scrap and water pik too but I've done that for years and it helped but never really did anything to rid the problem." (score 34)
• "I've tested every supplement imaginable over the years - herbal antimicrobials, probiotics, zinc, chlorophyll, you name it. Some of them helped for a few days, but the problem always came back." (score 75)

The pattern is the point of this page. The sub's collective advice is not "buy this"; it is "find out which of four places the smell is coming from: the tongue and gums, the tonsils, the nose and throat, or the stomach." The products only work for the people whose problem lives where the product works. One caution on the quotes: the same three routine posts surface as the top success story under five or more of the families above, so each is one person's report, not independent evidence for every item in their list.

What does everyone ask?

Two thirds of posts (7,596, or 67.4%) are questions. Three of them dominate.

Notice the last row. "Which product" is 1.7% of posts. Nearly everyone is asking a diagnostic question, and one in twenty is asking whether the problem is real at all. A page that opens with a product answers a question almost nobody in this room is asking.

Where do oral probiotics sit in all this?

Small, growing, and with a caveat on the growth. A named oral probiotic strain or brand appears in 79 posts across three years, 0.7% of the total, and in 284 comments. S. salivarius K12 is the most named (72 posts, 251 comments), then the BLIS brand (36 posts) and M18 (32). Weissella cibaria, the strain in Oraticx Green Breath, appears in 9 posts and 26 comments. Posts naming K12, M18 or BLIS went from 4 in the last four months of 2023 to 8 in 2024 to 42 in 2025, and 20 in the first eight months of 2026. One account wrote 49 of the 340 documents in that set, 14% of it, so read the rise as interest plus one persistent recommender.

The room's verdict is the same as for everything else. Where a K12, M18 or BLIS post reports an outcome, 2 say it helped and 5 say it did not; in comments, 6 and 12. The other 315 documents name the strain without an outcome, mostly as a recommendation or a question. The W. cibaria set is 35 documents from 19 accounts with one qualified success ("has helped, especially with my tongue, but hasn't completely fixed it") and no detected failure, which is too small to carry a claim in either direction. Its largest single thread is a first-person testimonial from an account that posts nowhere else; it drew more comments than 99% of posts in the sub, and its three most upvoted replies call it a promotion, report that the product did nothing, and say "Fake". That is the honest state of the community evidence on the strain: attention, not agreement.

None of that contradicts the trials, which is more than most products on this page can say. K12's one study saw sulfur reductions at one week in 23 people; W. cibaria CMU's three 8-week trials saw them at week four. Neither was tested on people whose breath comes from their stomach or their sinuses, and this sub is full of those people. The strain evidence in full: W. cibaria CMU and S. salivarius K12. The three products we would actually buy, none of which pay us: the roundup.

What does it cost people?

16.8% of posts describe a social cost in so many words: people backing away or touching their nose (6.3% of all posts), staying home or losing friends (3.8%), a family member, coworker or stranger saying something (3.7%), talking less or keeping their distance (3.0%), covering their mouth or wearing a mask (1.4%), a partner telling them (1.1%). 13.5% mention depression, anxiety, crying or hopelessness. 2.4% match language about not wanting to live; that count is an upper bound, because the pattern also catches replies urging someone to get help, and we did not read or quote those posts. If that is you, in the US call or text 988.

The highest-scored posts that describe the cost, in the posters' words:

• "Left me homeless sleeping outside, car stop working , lost my job ." ("I'm FINALLY FREE!", score 97)
• "lost a lover, left my job and my parents house and isolated myself from the world." ("I'M CURED.", score 89)
• "I lost all my friends and most family." ("My Bad Breath is cured after 20+ years!!!!!", score 84)
• "I wanted to share my story in case it helps someone else struggling with chronic bad breath, because I know how isolating it can be." ("After 20 years of bad breath, I finally found the real cause", score 75)

Three of those four are cure posts. The room rewards the people who come back.

How we did it, and what the numbers cannot tell you

We pulled every r/badbreath post from September 5, 2023 to September 3, 2026 through the Arctic Shift archive (11,550 posts; 11,265 with readable text after dropping removed and deleted ones; 3,634 distinct post authors and 7,681 comment authors; a median score of 3; 4.9% of posts contain a link). Every count is the number of posts that mention a term at least once, matched with word families we wrote by hand, so every count is a floor: misspellings and unusual phrasings are missed. "Success" and "failure" come from the phrases within about a hundred characters of the term, with a check for negation ("nothing worked" counts as failure), which is a heuristic, not a reading. A success report can be someone recommending a thing that worked for a friend; the regex cannot tell. Percentages use the 11,265 readable posts as the denominator.

We also pulled the comments, 116,578 of them, and used them to read the threads and for the pooled counts named in the text, not for percentages: a post is one person's own account, while comments are mostly replies and advice, and a small number of accounts write a large share of them. We did not weight by score, so a post with 140 upvotes and a post with none count the same. The full count table is in the CSV, and the pull is reproducible from the method above with the Arctic Shift posts endpoint and a three-year window.

Start with the evidence rather than the anecdotes: Oral probiotics: which strains work, and what to expect.