Soldiers, one might think, have more serious concerns than teeth. More than a century ago, the Army’s first contract dental surgeon, John Sayre Marshall, remarked, “Good, or at least serviceable, teeth are very necessary as a means of maintaining the general health, and consequently the highest efficiency of the Army.” But war is stressful; you forget to floss. “When a soldier goes into the battlefield, he does not have a dentist, or a dental office,” Colonel Robert Hale, Commander of the Army’s Dental and Trauma Research Detachment, told me last week. Enter the Army Institute of Surgical Research, which has spent about seven years and as much as twelve million dollars on a project to alleviate dental neglect. They’re calling it combat gum.

Regular sugar-free gum stimulates the flow of saliva in your mouth—the longer you chew it, the more thoroughly it neutralizes the acids found in plaque. Combat gum is also sugar-free, like Trident, but the Army’s formula involves an ingredient code named KSL-W. A synthetic sequence of anti-microbial peptides mimic defensins, the bacteria-killing molecules naturally found in saliva. “Peptides are very fast acting. They kill bacteria within five minutes,” Hale explained.

The peptides form pores within the membrane of a bacterial cell. Kai Leung, a senior scientist for the Army and the project’s primary researcher, suggested picturing the cell as a balloon: instead of punching a hole and popping it, he said, “you have tiny needles, creating tiny leak points. So it’s a slow leak.” The balloon deflates.

Hale winced at the image. “I’m not sure I would use that as a metaphor,” he said. “That sounds painful. Dentists have a hard enough time.” He proposed what he thought to be a more appealing analogy: the cell membrane blows up.

Domenick Zero, the director of the Indiana University School of Dentistry’s Oral Health Research Institute, has already completed the first phase of human trials. Zero’s team has a year of testing ahead, but for now, he said, “Everything is going well.” Although the mouth may form some resistance to the gum’s active agent, he explained, “the goal of these compounds is not to eliminate bacteria but to prevent pathogens from colonizing our skin, or our mouths, or our defenses.” For the gum to work, soldiers will need to chew for twenty minutes three times a day. He went on, “This is not intended to replace tooth brushing. Getting people to comply with things is always a problem. Maybe soldiers will listen better.”

The gum is designed to be effective only against the disease-carrying bacteria. “It’s deactivated once its ingested,” Hale explained. “If it got into your intestines, that would be another problem—you’re going to end up with some bad diarrhea.”

Hale predicts that combat gum could save the military a hundred million dollars annually. Dental emergencies account for ten per cent of all injuries that cause soldiers to be evacuated from the battlefield (not counting battle itself, of course). There are forty-seven types of dental emergencies, ranging from the mildly uncomfortable (gingivitis, say), moderately painful (pericoronitis), and severe (totally avulsed tooth). When it gets that bad, a soldier might need to be helicoptered into a dental theatre on another continent. The cost of transportation, plus that of the treatment itself, on top of the unit’s lost manpower, adds up to tens of millions of dollars each year. According to Hale, forty per cent of recruits have at least three cavities. “They have developed a decay pattern,” he said. “We diagnose, pull their teeth, and fill them. This is a constant thing for us, because we have tremendous turnover.”

If everything goes as planned—only a few people have tried combat gum so far, in small doses—Hale envisions it being mass produced and sold to civilians, first by prescription, then over the counter. Test samples of the gum were manufactured by Fertin Pharma, in Denmark, where nicotine gum is produced. Leung said his office has been contacted by a couple of venture-capital groups interested in bringing the gum to consumers; the Army has also had some preliminary talks with Cadbury.

“If we can develop an anti-plaque chewing gum and offer it to a company like, I don’t know, Wrigley’s, and distribute that to the general population, then those kids will come and join the Armed Forces with less dental decay issues,” Hale said. He can already picture mothers in Walgreens, drawn to a “Developed by the U.S. Army” label, packing combat gum in the lunch bags of the soldiers of tomorrow.

Photograph: William T. Hoff/Hulton Archive/Getty