#925 Dues and Don’ts of Diet

Lately, I’ve been troubled with hunger pangs. Sharp, painful, hard-to-avoid-except-by-eating-something hunger pangs.
I first figured it was another in the annoying changes brought on by age: crumbling teeth, achy joints, fading eyesight, occasional memory lapses, repeating yourself, occasional memory lapses, repeating yourself.
Great, I thought, another discomfort to endure for thirty years until I die. Just paying my dues for living. Turns out, they’re the dues I’m paying for the don’ts of my diet.
I found out it may be because of my gum. Not my gums, although they are receding as well, contributing to the confirmation of that phrase often uttered about old people, he’s sure getting long in the tooth.
No, the gum I recently started chewing. It all goes back to my dry mouth. For years I’ve be salivarily challenged. For some reason my mouth always feels dry. So to compensate I would suck on mints. Eventually, like all addictions, I increased the dosage and frequency. I advanced to the strongest mint there was. The Altoid. I became an Altoid addict.
My teeth finally started to crumble. A brittle honeycombed molar. An incisor breaking off like a termite infested two-by-four. All that sugar, all that acid, weakened my teeth and made them as fragile and porous as hummingbird bones.
So I switched to sugarless gum. And according to this article I just read, hunger.
Scientists have recently determined that artificial sweeteners may cause you to gain weight. The blast of sweetness of a calorie-free sweetener detected by your tongue tells your system that a bunch of calories is on the way. Your body, finely tuned chemistry set that it is, responds by injecting all sorts of hormones and what not, preparing it to digest and store all those calories.
Then it doesn’t get them. Because you had a Diet Coke. Or a sugarless piece of gum. So your body sends out hunger pangs to get those promised calories—and slap you around a little for fooling it.
You cave in and eat food. Artificial diet sweeteners turn out to be real appetizers.
Maybe it’s time I tried an old-fashioned sugar-free remedy for dry mouth.
Water.
America, ya gotta love it.