Skip to main content

Healthier, Whiter Teeth

One of my goals is to die with all 32 teeth in my head. So far, I've met the all-32-teeth part. Up until around age 35, I'd had only one cavity. It was so small that the dentist, with my permission, drilled without anesthetic. I brushed twice a day, and usually didn't floss. Being without insurance and low on funds during many of my younger days, I'd go years without seeing a dentist, and have only a tiny bit of tartar on the rare visit. And no, I didn't drink lots of milk. Yuck!

At 34, I started on a low-fat, high-carb diet plan that I followed for six years. (At around 180 grams per day, it was high-carb compared to what I'd been eating.) In those six years, I got eight cavities. I had lots of plaque. I got an electric toothbrush, brushed for two and a half minutes morning and night and flossed every day. The cavities and the plaque kept forming--and my teeth were becoming dingy-colored. Around Christmas last year, I found myself in the worst pain of my life: one of my teeth was infected. A root canal followed.

I was eating what many consider a healthy diet: lots of fruit, yogurt, and complex carbohydrates. But what are those full of? Sugar! Starch! And when my blood sugar came crashing down an hour later, what did I eat? More sugar and starch!

I got off the sugar train in February and started a low-carb diet. (As you probably know, a low-carb diet is, by definition, low in sugar and starch--in my case, less than 50 grams a day.) Results: I have very little plaque on my teeth. When I floss, there's little or no gunk to clean out. My teeth are whiter. And on my last visit to the dentist a few weeks ago, I didn't have any cavities. It was one of the few experiences from my younger days I was happy to repeat.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Why I've stopped eating fermented foods

I'm finally getting answers about weird health problems that have kept coming and going over the years for no reason I could ever explain: pounding heart, bloating, insomnia, heat intolerance, intolerance of high-fat meals, and getting winded easily even though I'm physically fit. These health problems all came roaring in at once this spring when I did a huge landscape project, pushing through it even while I had a cold. The yard looks fabulous, but I ended up with A three-week cold Post-viral syndrome for another few weeks An ongoing cough  Insomnia (tired but wired late at night) A puffy face, especially in the morning and after eating foods I’d previously tolerated (including SIBO yogurt) 6 pound weight gain TATT (tired all the time) Being easily winded Having a hard time cooling off Being sensitive to sunlight Grok (X’s AI feature) said this could be mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). Mast cells are immune system cells that put out pathogen-fighting and other substances ...
Post a Comment
Read more