Some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t

Many years ago – if memory serves, and, mostly, it still does (kine-ahora) – the comedian Dick Gregory announced that he was a fruitarian, subsisting on fruit and nuts alone.

Now, much as I love fruit and nuts, I am not likely to go as far as fruitarianism. But it is quite easy for me to envision life as a vegetarian. Especially when I think about animal slaughter, chicken factories, and Mad Cow Disease. I am, more or less, something of a house-vegetarian, anyway. I eat meat when I go out, but seldom around that house.  There are definitely things I’d miss by going veggie: a hamburger, bacon, and chicken paprikash.

Fruit and nuts are definitely staples of my diet, however, and I always have some of both on hand. Sure those nuts are fattening – what isn’t? – but eating them feels healthy, wholesome, almost virtuous. They’re renewable. Don’t create green-house gases. And rounding them up doesn’t require the intervention of Temple Grandin. Nuts  - pistachios, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, cashews - are tasty and satisfying, and munching on them is a real treat. Especially almonds.

But now, alas, we are being warned off of them by the dental biz – or at least one dentist, Shrewsbury, Mass.’s Gerald Berenson, who has noted  “a  ‘mini epidemic’ of almond-driven problems.”

"I have been seeing and treating an unusual number of emergency patients a week due to fractured teeth, cracked teeth, very sensitive teeth as well as temporal mandibular disorders," he wrote in an email "After diagnosing each patient I have found a common denominator: ALMONDS." (Source: Boston.com.)

Well, I’m no stranger to cracked teeth, but I’ve never suffered from an almond-related incident. Make that ALMOND-related incident.

I did once crack a back tooth while chomping on a cashew. Naturally, it was the evening before the Fourth of July, when the Fourth gloriously fell on a Friday, giving everyone – including dentists – a long weekend. I spent the entire weekend on the edge of panic. I got one of those dental emergency kits, and fixed up some kind of wax tooth thing, but my tongue couldn’t resist prodding “it” all weekend. I couldn’t get to the dentist fast enough on Monday a.m.

Ah, baby’s first cap!

I was already the owner of chipped front teeth, but those chips had nothing to do with nut-eating. And everything to do with teeth-as-handy-dandy-all-purpose-tool.

While backpacking in Europe – I believe I was on a remote island in Greece – one of the wire coils that secured my backpack’s belt to the pack’s frame came uncoiled. I didn’t happen to have a pair of pliers on me, but I did have those handy-dandy front teeth available. I did manage to close the coil but, alas, not without chipping my front teeth.

Over the years, I managed to further the damage by my inability to resist using those chipped teeth to cut thread, nibble on cuticles, and unscrew bottle tops. None of which did my teeth any good.

Over the years, my dentist tried bonding, but the bonding never lasted all that long. Probably because I couldn’t resist using those teeth to cut thread, nibble on cuticles, and unscrew bottle tops. Underneath that bonding there was, apparently, a chipped tooth crying to get out.

The final straw came when, after being flooded out of our home by a burst pipe, my husband and I spent a month living in a hotel. While in the shower one morning, I couldn’t get that little bottle of shampoo opened. Fortunately, I had those teeth with me.

I got that bottle open, but not without chipping my teeth further than they’d been chipped in their whole entire little old lives. I looked like the sister of one of the Dead End Kids.

I got me to my dentist, where I confessed my foolish deed. He just laughed and told me that I was one of the few patients he had who ‘fessed up to how they’d chipped their teeth. Most of them, apparently, claimed that they didn’t know, never knew, couldn’t remember.

My chipped teeth getting chippier, I elected to bite the bullet – metaphorically, anyway – and get dental veneers. Eight thousand dollars later, my four top front teeth were just bee-yoo-ti-ful.

Although I don’t think I could chip these suckers, at $2K per I’m not taking any chances. Not only do I not – or 99.99% of the time not – use my teeth as implements, I also warn everyone I see using their teeth as such about the perils of such folly.

But I have not stopped – and don’t plan to stop – eating almonds.

I like them as a snack. I like them in a salad. I like them in green beans. And I like them whole, rather than the dental recommended slivered or sliced, although I admit that slivered or sliced almonds have their purposes. (E.g., in green beans.)

I like almonds in candy bars, and wish that Peter Paul would make an Almond Joy version of its Mounds: dark chocolate avec almond.

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. But I almost always feel like a nut. Chipped teeth, be damned!