Professor Mel Rosenberg, a breath specialist at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine has discovered that a component in coffee can actually prevent bad-smelling bacteria from creating bad breath.

"Everybody thinks that coffee causes bad breath," "and it’s often true, because coffee, which has a dehydrating effect in the mouth, becomes potent when mixed with milk, and can ferment into smelly substances," Rosenberg said.

Certainly, Rosenberg and his colleagues were expecting to find evidence that coffee breath is connected to bacterial interaction with saliva in the mouth. But what they discovered surprised them.

"Contrary to our expectations, we found some components in coffee that actually inhibit bad breath," Rosenberg said. "The lesson we learned here is one of humility: we expected coffee would cause bad breath, but there is something inside this magic brew that has the opposite effect."

The task now is to isolate the bacterial-inhibiting component and find a way to incorporate it into a new category of breath fresheners such as gum, mouthwash and breath mints.

"It’s not the raw extract we will use but an active material within it," Rosenberg clarified.