Trying to Brush Up on Current Beliefs Can Get You Down

A few weeks ago, a young dental hygienist, after communing for 45 minutes with my teeth, asked me if I brushed up and down, or sideways. I knew the answer to that one, and when I proudly told her “up and down”--which I have done religiously for five decades--she chastised me for doing irreparable harm to my gums.

I was crushed. If there is any single code by which I have lived all these years, it is the certainty that nothing too bad can befall me if I brush up and down. So when the dentist came in for his post-cleaning check, he noticed I was crestfallen and asked why. I told him, and he chuckled a little, saying that the young are sometimes a little brusque in chastening patients, but that she was right in what she said.

How could that be, I asked him, since I have always been told just the opposite? He explained that by brushing up and down, I was pushing my gums up into my forehead and destroying the protection for my teeth. Or something like that. When I asked why no one had told me sooner, he said that this was simply part of the technical progress being made in dentistry. And besides, I was pretty old and my gums weren’t all that sturdy. Then damned if he didn’t give me a soft toothbrush and tell me that the stiff brush I’ve been using all these years to get all the extraneous matter out of my teeth was as damaging as the up-and-down brushing. It was a difficult moment, and I had to go sit on the beach and think it through. All those years.

While I was thinking, it occurred to me that many of the things we lived by for so long have been given feet of clay by modern technology. And I’m not talking about lying making your nose grow long. I’m talking about real things like brushing up and down.

The most obvious change, of course, is the cholesterol madness that has made suspect virtually every food I was raised on. I grew up being told--and believing implicitly--that red meat and gravy, mixed with an occasional vegetable and a large slab of American cheese with apple pie, are the staff of life.

And that a day couldn’t start properly unless it was launched with two eggs, over easy. I lived that way blissfully until someone took my cholesterol count and told me I was threatening the Guinness record. I haven’t really enjoyed eating since then, either because I didn’t like what I was eating or felt guilt because I did. Now all this revisionist stuff is coming out about cholesterol, and I’m faced with the possibility that I wasted three years of my life eating turkey meat loaf and fake eggs.

Milk is another case in point. It used to come with cream on top, and we would either ladle off the cream for our cereal or shake it up into the milk. Parents cajoled kids to drink lots of milk and often had a cold glass, themselves, before going to bed. Now we have this bluish, watery stuff that passes for milk because most of the contents that made milk good have been deemed dangerous, thereby giving kids--including the 11-year-old in my household--a scientific excuse for avoiding milk.

We used to be saturated with all the health qualities of proteins. Athletic teams were always fed fat, juicy steaks before going into the fray. Now we are saturated with carbohydrates, and athletic teams are more than likely to be fed spaghetti. I was always told not to drink while I was into heavy exercise. Now Gatorade is a staple along sidelines, and it has become de rigueur for a tennis player to bring a jug of some sort of liquid to the court.

Jogging we were told was good for the heart. Toughen it up, build resistance, live forever. Then Jim Fixx, the guru of jogging, dropped dead of a heart attack. And all of a sudden joggers discovered they were getting shinsplints and flat feet and traumatized bones from the pounding they took while jogging. Thank God I never fell for that one. I like to get my exercise in competition with another human being, so jogging is at least one habit I didn’t have to kick.

You can add endlessly to this list. We were once told when I was a small child that tomatoes were poisonous. And just a few months ago, we had the Great Apple Scare--when schools were banning apples from their cafeterias and otherwise rational adults were dumping applesauce from their refrigerators until cooler heads prevailed and apples were restored to respectability.

The poor consumer, of course, is caught in the middle of all this technical expertise, not knowing which way to turn. Although this is an extreme example, I once spent back-to-back days talking with scientists Linus Pauling and Edward Teller about atomic testing in the atmosphere. One said it would kill us in a few decades, the other said the danger was badly overstated--eminent scientists with opinions at opposite poles. In desperation, I asked Pauling who I was supposed to believe, and he smiled and said, “Who do you like the best?”

That is what the consumer is finally reduced to--that and following his own instincts. The other day, I asked a doctor friend who had been on my case about my eating habits how he felt now that the current line on cholesterol was under attack. He said he believed most of it was still true, but genetics had not been factored in sufficiently and we still had a lot to learn in this area. And then he added: “I guess the best answer is moderation in all things. Maybe that’s the best principle to live by.”

I’ll drink to that--not excessively, of course. But I’ve nevertheless changed my teeth-brushing habits. I’m not going to face that dental hygienist again telling her that I’m still brushing up and down.