Listerine’s slogan is, “For a healthier mouth, use Listerine,” but is this really the case? Listerine has claimed for years that it kills germs and helps to cure bad breath, and at one time, it claimed that Listerine could cure a cold or a sore throat. When it first came out, it was alleged to “Kill Millions of Germs on Contact”. Since then, Americans have bought it by the gallon.
Listerine was created by Joseph Lawrence, a Missouri physician, in 1880 and named after Sir Joseph Lister, a nineteenth-century British surgeon. At that time, surgeons operated with bare hands and in street clothes. They permitted spectators to gather around the operation table. And as surgical dressings, they used pads of sawdust, a waste product from mill floors. Sir Lister was appalled at the horrible conditions, and medical journals debated his ideas hotly. When Joseph Lawrence had the idea for Listerine, he knew that naming it after the man who created “Listerism” was a good idea. It was the perfect product for its time, and it came with the perfect name.
For many years, dentists have wanted to know whether it was the active ingredients or the alcohol in Listerine that killed bacteria. Alcohol is listed as an inactive ingredient on the label. It kills bacteria by denaturing proteins in the bacterium, whatever that means. Even though water is the most common ingredient in Listerine, swishing with water for 30 seconds does not kill bacteria. Some dentists wonder whether the active ingredients are put into Listerine simply for marketing purposes; advertising a product that contains 78.2% water and 21.6% alcohol will not sell well. If it were true that the active ingredients in Listerine have little or no impact on killing bacteria, then it would be cheaper for a customer to buy a bottle of mouthrinse that contains 21.6% ethanol and no other ingredients except water.
I recently did an experiment to find out whether Listerine really kills germs. The scariest thing was, it did. But brushing my teeth killed almost no germs at all! So why do we brush our teeth at all? And why isn’t Listerine more widely worshipped and adored?
One answer may be that it stings like holy heck. A mouthful of that cool, refreshing liquid will start to feel like a mouthful of scorpions after about five or so of the thirty seconds that you are required to rinse.
These statistics of germ killing, however, are encouraging. So keep on rinsing!

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