Is Chocolate Good For Me?
One of my first thoughts upon hearing of the university trip to Brussels was "Belgian chocolates"! I make no apologies for being a chocolate addict. It's better than cigarettes anyway. Maybe not for my waistline, but my lungs are healthy.
In most of the places I visited in Belgium (Brussels, Bruges and Ypres) there are chocolatiers everywhere you look. Yet I resisted. I didn't set foot in a single one until the last day we were there and I needed to get some gifts to bring back to England. Even then I didn't eat any of what I had bought.
UNTIL ...
On the coach trip back to England, I got a bit hungry when we were only a couple of hours away from Sheffield. I opened a pack of chocolates: white chocolate, plain chocolate, milk chocolate, all with raisins, walnuts and macadamia nuts on them. I shared them around, and I only ate one myself.
One was enough. I bit down on one of the nuts and felt a bit of pain in one of my lower right molars. I've had problems with that tooth for years, and the dentist has always said one day I would need a root canal, but for the time being I'd had it filled. I also felt a bit of a gap in one of my upper left molars. It turns out the nut knocked a filling out, which I promptly swallowed.
By Saturday my lower right jaw was really sore. By Sunday morning the pain was worse than anything I'd ever felt before -- and I've given birth naturally to an eight pound baby! Sunday night I was in the emergency room, and Monday morning I looked like Marlon Brando.
Thankfully the antibiotics did their job, and this morning I had the inevitable root canal. It hurts, but nothing like what I was feeling last Sunday.
My dad said this just proves that chocolate isn't good for you. But I got to thinking. It wasn't the chocolate that did the damage. It was a nut. My faith in chocolate is intact.
In most of the places I visited in Belgium (Brussels, Bruges and Ypres) there are chocolatiers everywhere you look. Yet I resisted. I didn't set foot in a single one until the last day we were there and I needed to get some gifts to bring back to England. Even then I didn't eat any of what I had bought.
UNTIL ...
On the coach trip back to England, I got a bit hungry when we were only a couple of hours away from Sheffield. I opened a pack of chocolates: white chocolate, plain chocolate, milk chocolate, all with raisins, walnuts and macadamia nuts on them. I shared them around, and I only ate one myself.
One was enough. I bit down on one of the nuts and felt a bit of pain in one of my lower right molars. I've had problems with that tooth for years, and the dentist has always said one day I would need a root canal, but for the time being I'd had it filled. I also felt a bit of a gap in one of my upper left molars. It turns out the nut knocked a filling out, which I promptly swallowed.
By Saturday my lower right jaw was really sore. By Sunday morning the pain was worse than anything I'd ever felt before -- and I've given birth naturally to an eight pound baby! Sunday night I was in the emergency room, and Monday morning I looked like Marlon Brando.
Thankfully the antibiotics did their job, and this morning I had the inevitable root canal. It hurts, but nothing like what I was feeling last Sunday.
My dad said this just proves that chocolate isn't good for you. But I got to thinking. It wasn't the chocolate that did the damage. It was a nut. My faith in chocolate is intact.
posted by Melinda at 3/07/2005 12:53:00 pm
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