Onions & Garlic

Some time ago Dr. Howard Wilcox Haggard, Yale physiologist, by chance attended a dinner of nose & throat specialists. One of the rhinolaryngologists brought up the question of the serious hardship that some of his patients underwent because of the persistence of onion and garlic odor on their breath. Try as hard as they might to avoid these alliaceous vegetables, they occasionally fell victim to them camouflaged in soup or salad. Then for a time their lives, and the lives of their associates, were miserable.

The nose & throat specialists argued the persistence of onion and garlic odor on the breath was due to: 1) the essential, odorous oil of such vegetables passing into the blood stream during digestion, being aerated from the blood into the lungs, and then being expired; 2) the essential oil appearing in the saliva by secretion from the blood passing through the salivary glands; 3) the odor passing up into the mouth from the stomach during digestion.

Dr. Haggard maintained that the odors were due to particles of the vegetables or flecks of their essential oils sticking inside the mouth, especially to the rough base of the tongue. If that were so, he was reasonably sure that he could remove all offensive odors by gargling with a cheap deodorant like chloramine. Reason for Dr. Haggard's confidence: He had been ''able to remove quickly from the skin all trace of the odor from the discharge of a skunk (accidentally received) with the use of a strong suspension of chlorinated lime in water."

At the first opportunity Dr. Haggard and his laboratory Associate Chemist Leon A. Greenberg rigged up the following apparatus at New Haven: a large glass tube through which the experimenters couid exhale into bottles containing fluids having affinities for garlic and onion odors; a gas meter to measure the amount of breath Drs. Haggard and Greenberg exhaled; a suction pump to pull their breath through the detector apparatus.

Having set up his detector, Dr. Haggard nipped a clove of garlic, chewed and swallowed one-twentieth of an ounce. He waited five minutes, took the glass tube in his mouth, exhaled one-tenth pint of air. Then he stuck his tongue into the tube to cork it, took a breath, exhaled again into the apparatus. This procedure he repeated until the gas meter indicated that he had breathed and exhaled five quarts of air. Of the one-twentieth of an ounce of garlic which Dr. Haggard had chewed and swallowed, every quart of air he exhaled carried away only one ten-millionth of an ounce of garlic oil (diallyl disulfide).

Six hours later Dr. Haggard again breathed into the machine, which showed that each quart of his breath then contained one two-hundred-millionth of an ounce of garlic oil. This amount "was easily detected by the sense of smell," declared Drs. Haggard and Greenberg last fortnight when they announced the results of their investigation in the American Medical Association's Journal.

Four hours after eating a big slice of "an ordinary culinary onion of domestic growth, of medium size and fairly pungent.'' every quart of Dr. Haggard's breath contained one-billionth of an ounce of onion oil (allyl propyl disulfide). "The odor was still detectable by the sense of smell."

Drs. Haggard and Greenberg washed their mouths with soap & water but could not get rid of the smell. They rinsed their mouths with 30% solution of alcohol in water, with no better results. Then "by washing the teeth and tongue and rinsing the mouth with a solution of chloramine" they "immediately and completely rid" themselves of the odors. Last week they advised: "It is probable that many cases of foul breath from other causes would be amenable to the same treatment."

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