Everyone knows that in addition to being delicious garlic is perfect for keeping away vampires because they can’t abide bad breath.
But if you can’t stop munching on garlic bread and want to attract a vampire you may be interested to know that there’s a
The reason why your breath smells so strongly of garlic even hours after eating an Italian is because garlic is stuffed with sulphur compounds that are released into the bloodstream after being digested.
This means no matter how much mouthwash you quaff you can’t rid yourself of the smell because it’s not in your mouth, it’s in your blood.
So how do you combat bad breath?
Well according to scientists you fight fire with fire and use chemistry to defeat the stinky sulphur compounds in your blood.
Researchers have discovered that eating apples, lettuce, chicory, celery, potato, parsley, mint leaves, peppermint, basil, and mushrooms alongside garlic will reduce the odour.
Scientists believe these foods most likely remove odours because of a chemical reaction between four of garlic’s sulphur compounds and molecules called phenolics present in the various foods.
They discovered that when they got volunteers to chew garlic along with these foods that when they exhaled into a mass spectrometer, a device that detects elemental molecules, there was less sulphur.
Rather obviously mint has the most phenolics and is the best at killing stinky odours but because science is more of an art than a science it turns out that lettuce, which has barely any phenolics in it, is also good at stopping stinky breath.
So there you go munch on a leaf of lettuce after you’ve eaten a piece of garlic bread and you’ll be fine.
