Bounties attract serious brainpower to the challenge.
A pill that neutralizes the smell of onion/garlic on your breath within minutes after the meal.
Why?
Effectively clear the smell of onion and garlic from your breath.
While there are many "folk remedies" for garlic/onion breath, few actually work and none comes compressed into pills - a small form that is convenient to carry around and can be stored for a long time.
A pill is more convenient to carry on you as compared to other foods that might be effective at removing garlic/onion breath.
Food containing onions and garlic is delicious and useful but comes with a social tax of having a smelly breath for up to a day.
How it works
Problem
Eating garlic or onions causes a strong odor in one's breath that may persist for a day. The characteristic odor of garlic is due to volatile organic sulfur-containing compounds (VOSCs) that are rapidly produced upon tissue damage and diffuse into the air. The major contributor to the odor of freshly crushed garlic is allicin.
Despite brushing your teeth and using mouthwash, the bad breath will continue because the volatile compounds get into your bloodstream and are excreted continuously into your lungs. This video explains it:
Solution
The idea is to create a tablet containing compounds that survive your digestive tract (stomach acid, enzymes) and enter into your bloodstream. There they bond with the volatile compounds such as allyl methyl disulfide, diallyl disulfide, allyl mercaptan, and allyl methyl sulfide, that come from garlic or onions. The compounds in the tablet should either inactivate the smelly volatile compounds or expedite their expulsion from the body. Ideally, the onion/garlic smell would be gone within 30 minutes after the meal.
Where to look for the ingredients
Successful treatments may be due to enzymatic, polyphenolic, or acid deodorization. Enzymatic deodorization involved oxidation of polyphenolic compounds by enzymes, with the oxidized polyphenols causing deodorization. This was the probable mechanism in raw apple, parsley, spinach, and mint treatments. Polyphenolic deodorization involved deodorization by polyphenolic compounds without enzymatic activity. This probably occurred for microwaved apple, green tea, and lemon juice treatments. When pH is below 3.6, the enzyme alliinase is inactivated, which causes a reduction in volatile formation. This was demonstrated in pH-adjusted headspace measurements. However, the mechanism for volatile reduction on human breath (after volatile formation) is unclear, and may have occurred in soft drink and lemon juice breath treatments.
There's some work to be done to successfully create such a pill but should be worth it because the potential market is huge.
[1]Munch R, Barringer SA. Deodorization of garlic breath volatiles by food and food components. J Food Sci. 2014 Apr;79(4):C526-33. doi: 10.1111/1750-3841.12394. Epub 2014 Mar 4. PMID: 24592995.
[2]Borlinghaus, Jan et al. “Allicin, the Odor of Freshly Crushed Garlic: A Review of Recent Progress in Understanding Allicin's Effects on Cells.” Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 26,6 1505. 10 Mar. 2021, doi:10.3390/molecules26061505
Darko Savic May 13, 2022