According to the federal government, more than 50 million Americans live in areas officially designated asDental Health Professional Shortage Areas, and must travel hundreds of miles to get help. MADISONVILLE, Ky. Nurse LeAnn Todd-Langston and nurse-midwife Sarah Almon had long known their rural west Kentucky county faced a crisis, but it was getting worse. In fact I did photograph a young man giving his baby Mountain Dew at Pats house. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. All last fall I resisted reading J.D. Anyone who did not abide by the prevailing pattern of consumption was ostracized. For 10 years, Otto researched and conducted interviews about oral health in America, traveling across the country attending beauty pageants and clinics, talking to dentists and patients alike. Old recipes passed down keep traditions alive, but more coveted. Premature births are a growing problem nationwide now estimated at 10 percent of all deliveries pushing up the costs of care and the subsequent risk of autism and lifelong illness. February 15, 2009 More than a third of Americans do not have dental coverage, according to aWashington Post article. Something known as "Mountain Dew Mouth" is rotting children's teeth in poor regions of the country, especially Appalachia. The latter, simply titled "Mountain Dew," was composed in 1920 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, an attorney in Asheville, N.C. We told them dont put Mountain Dew in a baby bottle, dont put that baby to sleep with juice, dont let people kiss that baby, to prevent bacteria being transferred, Almon said. Part 1 covered diabetes in Appalachia. My own happy and stable Appalachian childhood does not make for an exciting book. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. (This story has been corrected since it was originally published.). To get a sense of what that looks like, check out this picture. Nobody ever told them not to. While you may think of " Appalachia " as a region of the southern United States, the full Appalachian Mountains have a massive (not to . We use cookies to help better serve your experience. Its not just a beverageits a portable sense of home. Central Appalachia is No. "It makes no sense to be paying for these things twice.". At 10.4 percent last year, the county's . The Appalachians are among the oldest mountains on Earth, born of powerful upheavals within the terrestrial crust and sculpted by the ceaseless action of water upon the surface. Mountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared will tickle your innards in a 1966commercial, has long been a staple of Appalachia. Exploring it was simultaneously deeply cathartic and like sticking my hand in an emotional meat grinder. However, this poses a significant problem because, in the eyes of the American health care system, the mouth is separate from the rest of the body. Germs collect, white blood cells accumulate, pus escalates, and suddenly a swelling, debilitating dental carbuncle has taken residence in ones mouth. Many people don't help the people in the Appalachians because the poverty often goes unnoticed. The journal comes out twice a year and has been a tradition of inspired writing since 1876. In December, when my boss urged me to read it hes from Appalachia just like you I did not read it. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as Mountain Dew-mouth. The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay. It was during this time that Christian Missionaries first spoke of the Appalachian region as ignorant and impoverished. 9K Likes, 328 Comments. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. Ally Hartman claimed the recipe was his brother's. 1958 Mountain Dew bottle. Vance grew up in an Appalachian ex-pat family in Ohio with rough-talking relatives who thought nothing of trashing a store until they got what they wanted, and who regularly communicated by screaming at each other. 3. 16 2013, Updated 11:19 p.m. I havent read it yet; if I do (and thats a big if when there are so many other better books to read) it will be only so that I can answer academic pinheads who persist in decrying negative stereotypes for every group except white Southerners. This narrow and extensive mountain system parallels the eastern coast of North America for nearly 2,000 miles. On pages 228-229, Vance writes about instability in working-class families, due to relationship instability. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. ", Beneath all the systemic diseases linked to bad oral health, Ebersole argued, is a disastrous healthcare system in which oral health is considered a luxury. The Appalachian Mountains stretch from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador to northern Alabama and Georgia. "We are using taxpayer dollars to buy soda for the SNAP program, and we are using taxpayer dollars to rip teeth out of people's heads who can't afford dental care and are on Medicaid," says Dana Singer, a research analyst at the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department in Parkersburg, W.Va., who wants to see stricter regulations on sales of all sugary beverages in the region. You dont have to work to read this book. They confer the stigma of economic and even moral failure. Last week, my tiny county announced the statistics for heroin busts so far in 2015: nine deaths and 76 overdoses in three months. He is the author of, among other books, "A Queer Geography" and "Apples.". "Mountain Dew" is a centuries-old mountain slang term for moonshine, which Tennessee-bred creators Barney and Ally Hartman found fitting because their bubbly elixir was initially crafted as a mixer for whiskey in the early 1930s. He mentions the law school mentorship of Amy Chua, who went on to write a book about Chinese tiger mothers. 1. Nothing great will ever come from consuming yellow dye #5. Stay informed by following Appalachia on Twitter at @AppalachiaJourn. My first daycare was just a few doors down. Singer says she would like to see West Virginia and other states in Appalachia try this approach. The meaning of the name is "mountain thrower" and it has a Sanskrit origin. January 15, 2021. Back in 2009, Priscilla Harris, an associate professor at the Appalachian College of Law, issued the first battle cry in the war against Mountain Dew mouth with a legal brief titled " Undoing. Its also a dramatic story. 2. The Appalachian Mountains range southwestward from Quebec and Newfoundland in Canada to Alabama in the southeastern United States.The central and southern highlands of this ancient mountain range, consisting of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountain ranges, the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus . At this point, I should probably make this clear: Im no Mountain Dew apologist. Great Britain. Even if you might not crack open a bottle in your lifetime, I encourage you to take a moment and imagine a highly carbonated, nose-tickling bubble and a tart-sweet, citrusy flavor thats similar to a church picnic punch on steroids. Old woman smoking a pipe, Appalachia, USA, c1917. Poor Law Commissioners. Poor Law Amendment Act, 1841. Did he really just tell me what to drink? Glimmering pearly whites have long been a symbol of social and financial success in America. Drinking more than a soda a day raises the risk that acids found in many soft and energy drinks will eat away at your tooth enamel and its pearly white color. Lunsford is an attorney, however, he is very fond of folk songs. Nearly half said that their most recent toothache had caused them the worst pain possible and interfered with many aspects of their daily lives. It is a regular reminder that youre not just reading about a kid in Ohio with a druggie mom oh no. He concluded that Appalachia could not be fixed because its people were broken. Forty-seven thousand people reside in Madisonville-Hopkins County. His mother became a drug addict with a series of husbands or boyfriends. (function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';fnames[3]='MMERGE3';ftypes[3]='dropdown';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true); Stacy Kranitz Mountain Dew is mountain slang for "whiskey"; the phrase appears in Irish folk songs from the late 19th century and in an American folk song protesting Prohibition. ------------------------------------------, Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America. "What Mountain Dew has going for it is that it's high in caffeine and high in sugar," Harris says, adding, "Students tell us it tastes best, and it's a habit.". Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. Once a month, a University of Kentucky dentist also joins the group for oral treatment. They offer the services they can, provide prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics, and recommend a dental clinic for a follow-up. On our way down the daylight faded and we navigated the terrain of the trail from our ATVs headlights. I said I hadnt really noticed as he shook his head. Figuring out how to chip away at problems so deeply embedded in a region is astronomically much more complicated than a micro lens shot of a single caffeinated beverage. We continued up the mountain and at the very top we caught an incredible view of the Ohio River snaking across the land separating Ohio from West Virginia. For the 379 women enrolled in the study, pre-term birth rate, or PTB, was 6.6 percent against 14 percent for Hopkins County generally in the preceding years. My dada gentle, 30-year lawyer who likes to describe himself as an "old steady sheepdog"called me a couple of months ago to describe the scene unfolding near his office in my hometown. Bad oral hygiene could be significantly remedied through the American health care system; that is, if the United States adopted a holistic approach to health care. While Medicaid, as the medical safety net for the poor, should provide help for those with dental needs who cannot afford to pay, only 15 states offer full dental benefits and five states offer nothing at all, as reported in a study byPew. It also seems that along the way, he had already been writing something for the conservative outlets like the National Review (whose editor has a glowing blurb on the back cover, as does Chua) that helped promote him and make him the hillbilly whisperer for more mainstream publications. I remember . But what is "Mountain Dew Mouth?" It was, in his eyes, a more intimate, longterm partner than he had become. Before being bought by PepsiCo, Mountain Dew was invented in Tennessee in the heart of Appalachia. At one time, the town was the center of a booming coal mining culture. Thus, patients leave the ER with no long-term solution for treatment. The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans, he writes, then proceeds to cite exactly one piece of academic literature, a paper three sociologists published in 2000 about how hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them., We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves, Vance writes. But what exactly did that mean? Then, I look outside, and those guys next door were walking their bobcat out on a rope to go piss in the snowa fucking bobcat!" You get a group of 10 or 12 women, theyre going to say things, like one woman I remember, I cant believe that youre still smoking. Dentists have also found that the effects of soda on teeth are strikingly similar to the effects of methamphetamine or crack on teeth, as I reported in May. With limited benefits through Medicaid and no benefits through Medicare, in order to receive insurance, people must purchase private plans or employer-provided plans. Grease a baking dish with olive oil or butter, then pour on the Mountain Dew sauce mixture until about two inches high. When, in 2006, Todd-Langston got a call from Jeffrey Ebersole proposing to establish a full dental service for pregnant moms, she said it was like a gift from heaven. (Note: I have made a couple of minor edits since this piece was first posted.). By now, we've all heard of the health risks posed by drinking too much soda. When we got back to Pats house, I was given a crushed up Loratab to snort for the pain. For me, this photograph is valuable because it shows us how little we actually know when viewing this image, any image. It is not dense, it does not use large words or complicated concepts. Here are three more in-depth reviews of Hillbilly Elegy. Dew Baby". So millions of Americans go without dental insurance. He came to believe that Appalachias gene pool had been watered down by inbreeding among what he called dullards who lived on welfare in remote mountain hollers (1). Nonetheless, the factors that contribute to poor dental health are not simply Mountain Dew; they are not even specifically linked to Appalachia. Cherokee Indians were the main Native American group of the Southern Appalachian and Blue Ridge region, but there were also Iroquois, Powhatan, and Shawnee people.. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. The taste of Appalachia . Becoming a parent can be scary. Sixteen percent of the women had abscessed teeth. 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