June 14, 2022
Under normal circumstances these bars of marzipan chocolate would last for a week and a half. But it has been three weeks since I bought these and I’m not done with even one bar. What happened?
Well .. I went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago. My dentist made several tests and said to me that my tooth died and it needed a root canal therapy. I had several in the past and don’t dread the pain even though I don’t let the dentist use anesthesia. I very much dislike painkillers. I want to know what happens with me and when my situation gets better or worse. In cases like this, I like to make the best of the situation and experiment with pain. How much can I stand? What happens when I concentrate on something else? Can I make the pain move from one place to another? etc.
For years, I was thinking that dental problems are simply genetics related. That some people have strong teeth and some don’t … simple. After all I brush, I floss, I eat healthy (or so I thought), but still have problems with my teeth. And my dentists always would say that there is not much to do apart from that.
I’m wondering why that is so. Other doctors always look at you in a somewhat judging manner when you become ill, as if saying “what have you done to get sick like that, you are not a child anymore, you should know what is good for you”. But with dentists, this is different. They just drill and fill and say to come again in a few months. Not a word about effective prevention besides “brush your teeth after eating candy”.
Well, turns out it doesn’t matter much whether I brush my teeth after eating candy or not. The problem is how blood sugar levels fluctuate and affect the rest of the system. After all, our blood transports all the necessary minerals and vitamins to the various parts, including our teeth.
When we take a look at the common diet of todays people living in the ‘civilized’ world, we see that almost everything we eat raises our blood sugar levels, because they contain processed sugar and flour. High sugar levels in the blood cause the body to try to regain its balance, which takes time and during this time our immune system becomes vulnerable. Here a list of 146 reasons why sugar is ruining your health.
I always heard people saying that sugar and flour are bad. But they always talked about it in relation with body weight. And to be honest, I don’t mind a kilo or two more on my bones, if it means that I can enjoy my ‘sensible’ daily portion of chocolate. If I knew that it affects the body (and the teeth of course), impairing its health from the inside, I would have stopped eating them a long time ago.
Better late than never, right? For more than three weeks now I don’t eat sugar and flour. And I am surprised how easy the transition was. Every two days I take a tiny bite of chocolate, though 🙂 The immediate effects of my new diet, which contains no food from the shelves except milk and yoghurt, has been:
- 1.5 kg weight loss in the first ten days without doing anything else
- stronger teeth: I was very much surprised to see some results so fast
So now my challenge is to analyse my diet and look whether it contains the minerals and vitamins the body needs and then to adjust it to get the required daily amounts (not less and not more).
The second challenge is to find out how different elements of nutrition affect each other, so that I can add good combinations to my diet and avoid bad ones. For instance, calcium seems to affect the absorption of iron in a bad way.
Lots of research to be done on my side.