Forget the Deep State Conspiracy, Donald. Investigate Why My Teeth Are Cracking!

I agree with Donald Trump. There is a deep state conspiracy in this country, but it is not the one he believes is undermining his administration. 

No, the conspiracy I see is so nefarious that only someone with my uncanny talent of perception has uncovered it. You have to be of a certain age, someone whose parents let them feast on cakes, cookies, candies and sugared soft drinks while young, the better to produce cavities in teeth that have now matured and are susceptible to cracking and needing crowns or implants. 

From personal experience I am convinced the American Dental Association and its members, having forged a bond in the 1950s and 1960s with the sugar industry to sabotage young mouths, is now locked in a comparable conspiracy with nut growers and their related products to chip away at older, more vulnerable, molars. 

Let me explain. My breakfast most mornings is cheese and fruit, along with almonds, walnuts and macadamia nuts. Sounds healthy and is healthy. But crunching down on nuts can be injurious to my filling-laden teeth. 

It is not only breakfast that is dangerous. The nut industry long has been advocating almonds and trail mix-type snacks as healthy alternatives to pastries and candy. 

It is a recipe for disaster encouraged, I am convinced, by a dental profession that fills fewer cavities because of fluoride protection, technically improved toothpastes, flossing, water-piking and electric toothbrushes. 

To maintain luxury lifestyles for its members the ADA has secretly funded the nut campaign. 

I haven’t had a cavity in decades, but I have cracked at least three molars. The crazy thing about each incident—I was not chewing a nut when my tooth made its break known to me. I was eating, respectively, scrambled eggs, bread and couscous. The most recent incident transpired last Saturday evening.

My dentist advised I probably cracked it on harder foods but the sliver of enamel had not separated from the mother lode. Each incident was a crack waiting to be exposed and repaired with a crown or more expensive implant. 

So, Donald, stop fulminating on the deep state conspiracy. Start an immediate investigation into the deep throat, er, deep tooth conspiracy that threatens all Americans, not just those who abuse the office and power of the presidency. 

Biting My Tongue and Making Me Handsome, Again

So there I was in the waiting room of a Mohs surgeon late Thursday morning. Two elderly ladies (and that’s coming from a 64-1/2 year old) were sitting at a table across the room. One was filling out Christmas cards when she turned to the other, apparently a nun because the nurses kept referring to her as Sister Mary, and asked her to pick between two Christmas cards to send to a mixed marriage family with a Jewish father. She refused to compromise and get a Happy Holidays card. The nun scrutinized the cards and said neither would be appropriate. I resisted offering my advice.

They continued talking. The card bearer said the husband was a wonderful man. Sister Mary responded that Jewish people are nice, it's just that they stopped believing in the most wonderful person their religion produced. Again, I bit my tongue. She did, after all, acknowledge that Jesus was Jewish. Too many people don't realize this.

They talked a little longer about the couple’s child, a seventh grader in a Catholic school in Manhattan, a very bright girl who receives three hours of homework every night, six hours over the weekend. The girl was being pressed to take some SAT courses and she's just in seventh grade, but I say nothing, the card lady said. To the nun, however, she worried that all that work might turn the girl off from school.

They retreated into silence. I kept quiet. I’m not sure which was more of a challenge, staying silent or sitting through four and a half hours of Mohs surgery, enduring progressive slicing into my nose. Three times. 

The procedure wasn't painful. Indeed, the total time under the scalpel was probably less than five minutes. The rest of the ordeal was waiting for each slice to be analyzed to determine if any more basal cells resided in my schnozzle. When no more offensive corpuscles showed their colors, the surgeon said it was time to “make you look handsome again.” I thanked him for using the word “again.” 

At Gilda’s prodding I took a selfie of my nose, pre-surgery. I took another after the bandage was put on, along with another bandage in the area between my left ear and sideburn where the doctor nipped off a piece of skin for a graft for my nose. Be thankful the policy of this blog is not to include pictures.

More Medical News: Didn’t tell you about this last week, but I’ve apparently pulled a muscle in my left leg. As I don’t exercise, and didn’t play tennis last Wednesday, I really cannot tell you how I did this. Only thing I know is that after driving into the city last Friday and parking the car, I felt a sharp pain in my left calf within two blocks of walking. After that, until even today, I have been limping along.

In temple on Saturday, concerned congregants (mis)diagnosed me. Do I take statins?, they asked. Yes. Then for sure you have a condition called myopathy and need to take Coenzyme Q10. As I had a previously scheduled appointment with my internist on Wednesday I resisted following any of their advice. 

My internist diagnosed the leg pain as a plantaris muscle strain or pull. There’s dispute about how important the plantaris muscle is, but one thing’s for sure, he said—injury is not related to taking statins.

On another note, daughter-in-law Allison reminded me that not everyone should ingest nuts. Those with allergies, such as OUR GRANDSON FINLEY, should avoid all things nutty. Yeah, I forgot to update y’all that his allergy tests revealed he’s allergic to nuts. 

Nuts to You

Tonight’s poker game at my house has been postponed because of the snow and late scheduling conflicts by three players who previously committed to show up. If I were a vindictive man, I’d name names. But in this time of Mandela inspired forgiveness, I’ll follow Madiba’s example and not hold a grudge.

Which brings me to the real reason behind this post, inspired by the time a few years ago during another hosting of my group’s poker games when a friend got up to get a beer and was stunned by the vast quantity of nuts arrayed across the second shelf of the refrigerator. He joked about our house being inhabited by squirrels. 

Truth is, on that second shelf we have regular almonds and dry roasted almonds, slithered almonds, cashews, pecans, shelled and unshelled pistachios, pine nuts, brazil nuts, sunflower seeds, peanuts, chocolate covered peanuts, and trail mix packs. A true squirrel heaven. We have such a wide array of nuts because most mornings my breakfast consists of almonds and cashews combined with assorted fruit, all smothered in whipped cream. Gilda usually takes dry roasted almonds, brazil nuts and some pecans for snacking during the day. 

You might be scratching your head wondering if we’re eating the wrong stuff, but you wouldn’t be if you read Jane Brody’s column in Tuesday’s NY Times (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/snacking-your-way-to-better-health/?ref=health&_r=0). Once considered bad for you, nuts are now a first line of defense against such illnesses as cancer, heart and respiratory disease. 

Despite their high fat content nuts are said to reduce bad cholesterol. They also can lower triglycerides. Unfortunately, I started my nut regimen way after my triglycerides topped the four digit level. They’re under control now, most notably from a changed diet along with a supercharged omega-3 fish oil capsule, Lovaza. You have to be careful with Lovaza, or any fish oil capsule, for that matter. If one of the pills leaks, the others in the bottle are infused with an overwhelming fish smell. That apparently happened with my most recent Lovaza prescription. I couldn’t get the fish oil smell off my hands despite repeated washings with soap and water and a spritz of Purel. It got so bad I had to call the mail order pharmacy to complain. I suspect I wasn’t the first to do so as the pharmacist was quite apologetic and accommodating, agreeing to send out a replacement order ASAP.  

Cracked Teeth

I’d like to blame AARP for my cracked tooth, but I can’t.

Let me explain. Thursday evening I was leafing through the December 2011/January 2012 issue of AARP The Magazine and came across a nutrition article entitled, “Go Nuts!.” It extolled the virtues of eating various nuts to lower “bad” LDL cholesterol. Almonds, in particular, also were said to reduce insulin resistance, a quality important to someone with borderline high blood sugar levels, as I am.

Friday morning I cracked my tooth on an almond. I can’t blame AARP, however, because almonds have been part of my breakfast regimen for more than 15 years. Almonds, cashews, raisins, red grapes, an apple, a banana, some cheese or Trader Joe’s O’s, with an ample helping of whipped cream—ambrosia of the gods, I call it—have nourished me most mornings.

So you see, it’s not as if I can blame AARP for turning me on to almonds. AARP should have be a little more circumspect in its suggestions, though, considering its age-based membership of 50-plus adults is prone to deteriorating dental work. Perhaps I should have taken a clue from the table of contents teaser copy for the story. It read, “Get Cracking.”

The first time I cracked a tooth on some food was slightly more than 20 years ago. I went to Los Angeles to meet with the president of Vons Supermarkets early one morning at a new concept store, Tiengas, targeted toward the expanding Hispanic community. It was a beautiful store, with lots of food preparation stations, including a tortilla maker in the middle of the store and more fresh food and meat cuts than I’d ever seen (you wouldn’t believe parts of a pig I saw displayed there that I’d never imagined people ate).

Anyway, at the conclusion of the store tour, I was invited upstairs to the manager’s office for some breakfast. As my cholesterol was pretty high back then, I deferred the offer of rancho huevos, essentially scrambled eggs. My host persisted, however, saying it would insult the cook who had come in early just to prepare the breakfast.

On my first bite I felt a crunch. I jumped back asking if the cook had left egg shells in the mix, only to realize I had cracked my tooth on the softest of foods. How embarrassing! How upsetting that I might incur a $550 dental bill for a crown, the going rate at the time.

Talking over my predicament several days later with a friend who headed our company’s human resources department, we agreed I would submit a worker’s compensation claim. After all, the only reason I put the eggs into my mouth was because the Vons president insisted. It was clearly a work-related claim, I reasoned.

The compensation board agreed. I received full reimbursement for the crown.

The same happy result cannot be related about the fate of the Tiengas experiment. Management closed the stores after determining Hispanics preferred shopping in traditional stores with enlarged ethnic offerings rather than their own supermarkets.