Supporting a Very Lazy Habit This Yuletide Season

What have I been doing, you ask. Aren't you busy enough without worrying what I'm doing with my time? But I get it: you're living vicariously through me. Why not? If you're living vicariously through me, you'll certainly be doing less of anything productive and a lot more things that range from slightly weird to decidedly indolent. 

For one thing, I've spent the last 1 1/2 weeks reading. I've been on a fiction binge the likes of which I haven't indulged in in years. Or months, anyway. There have been one or two non-fiction books thrown in, as well, just to make me feel better and slightly less guilty. But for the most part, during the Christmas break while all the kids and Husband have been home, I've holed up in my room pretty much all day and stuck my nose in a book. I occasionally emerge to cook something or make sure the boys are getting their teeth brushed before going to bed. 

I've read:

The Black Prism, by Brent Weeks.

Then, because I was interested in Weeks' first trilogy, I read The Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge, and Beyond the Shadows. 

We went to the library and Husband found Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer, which is the sequel to her very interesting Cinder (which I read when it first came out). Because Husband was already finishing up another book, I snagged Scarlet and read that.

Then I read Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase. I really enjoyed Stroud's Bartamaeus novels. Very inventive and well written, and I wasn't disappointed with this new one.

Husband, noting that I had put a certain book on our Amazon Wishlist, but also knowing that we had agreed not to get Christmas presents for each other, cheated by ordering another, similar book (he believes in reading reviews, and the one I'd put on the Wishlist didn't have great reviews) and having it arrive a day after Christmas. So I read that book, which is Oil Pulling Therapy: Detoxifying and Healing the Body Through Oral Cleansing, Dr. Bruce Fife. After I read it, I gave Husband a book report. I was very intrigued by the premise of the book, which is that the health of your mouth reflects the health of your body. Having written too many dental articles to count, and having already researched oral health in relation to overall health, I was already somewhat knowledgeable, and Dr. Fife didn't have to do any hard selling to convince me. So I started oil pulling, and Husband decided to try it out as well.

Here's what oil pulling is and does: you stick some healthy oil in your mouth and swish it around for at least 20 minutes at a time. I use coconut oil because I love coconut oil and because it's lighter than other types of healthy oils, such as extra virgin olive oil or sesame oil. Every morning when I wake up and every evening before I brush my teeth before bed, I pull oil. 

Your mouth is a hotbed of microbial civilizations. Bacteria and other microbes populate different parts of your mouth, including between the gums and your teeth, inside your teeth's tubules, in the fold between your gums and your cheeks, and on the tongue. Different areas of the mouth support different microbe growth, and without saliva to help wash them away, you would suffer greatly. (In fact, even if you brush and floss religiously and stay away from sugar, you might still get lots of dental cavities if you suffer from dry mouth of low salivation rates.) 

A Dr. Westin A. Price figured out in the early 1900s that people often recovered from serious illnesses when their bad teeth were pulled, so he decided to try some experiments. He took the decayed teeth he had pulled, washed them, and stuck them under the skin of unfortunate but healthy rabbits. Every time a rabbit hosted a diseased tooth, it developed the same ailments as tooth's former owner, from arthritis to liver problems. Eventually, Dr. Price figured out how to make a bacterial extract from the teeth and injected that into the rabbits instead of using the whole tooth, and the rabbits still contracted the same (or extremely similar) illnesses and ailments as the formerly diseased human owners of the teeth. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, without me re-writing the entire book, Dr. Fife concludes that the ancient Ayuverdic practice of oil pulling is, indeed, incredibly effective in helping to  maintain overall health. The oil attracts the fatty surfaces of bacteria and other microbes as you swish it through your mouth. After 20 minutes of such swishing, the oil, mixed with your saliva, is now a bacterial soup, which is why you spit it into the trash and do not swallow it (you also spit it into the trash to avoid coating your plumbing pipes with congealing grease, which is bad for water flow, a thing I know because plumbing is another frequent topic of my SEO articles). 

The reason you want to remove those bacteria is because they get into your body via your bloodstream or through the tissues and cause havoc elsewhere. Imagine if you have an abscess, which is an infection of the gum. As the infection worsens, nasty bacteria get into your bloodstream and travel to your heart, damaging the muscle and making you more susceptible to a heart attack. Even a little gingivitis can increase your chances of stroke. Cuts or sores in your mouth also allow bad bacteria to get into your bloodstream. I won't even delve into the fascinating world of amalgam fillings and root canal issues. By removing the bacterial threat in your mouth, you allow your body to put its resources toward healing itself. 

Plus, it's easy enough to do and doesn't require any special equipment. That's my kind of weird experiment!

Husband has gone through the Herxheimer Reaction the last couple days, when toxins that are being removed from the body cause you to feel worse for a bit before you start feeling much better. He felt pretty yucky on Sunday and had a bad headache that didn't readily respond to pain medication on Monday. He seems to be rallying nicely, though. As for myself, I haven't noticed any significant changes except maybe sleeping more deeply. I have a pretty strong immune system, I think, as I hardly ever catch "what's going around," but if I'm going to encourage my children to do something weird, I'm going to try it first. They're going through various illnesses at the moment. I suspect more sinus infections, and I took Joseph to the doctor on Monday for a mysterious pain he's been having in his side. I was worried it was his kidney, but his urine test was fine, as were his various blood tests for gall bladder, liver problems, and mononucleosis. He still has the pain, though, and it's not getting any better. If I can teach him how to do oil pulling, I wonder if it would help?

So that's me and how I've spent some of my time lately. 

Sian brought two of her economics books home for me, knowing I would be very excited to read them. As it's time to get back to real life and responsibilities, non-fiction will serve me better than fiction. It is certainly easier to pull yourself away from an economic textbook than from a gripping detective story in order to do laundry or cook meals or manage chore completion or do the grocery shopping or get my paid word finished. I'll soon be diving into Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, by Charles Wheelan, and The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, by Steven E. Landsburg.

Wish me luck!