Don't Do the Dew

I am a recovering Mt. Dew-aholic.

I was drinking 4 or 5 a day, and getting these weird headaches and cold/allergy like reactions to the drink.

There is a combination of slowly creeping up symptoms, denial, and caffeine addiction that allows you to ignore the situation and continue to dose yourself with a concoction that is harming you. At least this is how I would describe my situation.

It's been 9 days since I've had any Mountain Dew. I switched over to iced tea to stave off the caffeine withdrawal, and just have high fructose corn syrup withdrawal.

I do think the sugar was part of what was bothering me, but I did have a friend ask me if it was the Yellow Dye #5.

I saw this strange little story on the web a few days ago, that I could not find again when doing the research for this story. It was a feel-good piece (partly) because while the main story featured how crappy the dental health of these people in rural West Virginia is, the response was that some charity was fixing up everyone's teeth. Typical happy ending: see how pretty they all are with their new smiles! Yea! Not really news, more of a puff piece.

However, the before pictures make it more of a nightmare. These people had huge brown circular holes in the fronts of their teeth. Cavities that had been going untreated for years. I remember thinking, don't they ever brush their teeth?

The other thing I noticed was that the piece casually showed that everyone was drinking Mountain Dew. I mean everyone. They had little kids drinking it, and teenagers having it with lunch, and everyone everywhere slamming it down.

I'm thinking about the fact that these are all Appalachian Mountain people drinking Mountain Dew, and suddenly, I remembered something from my youth. Mountain Dew used to have hillbillies on the bottles. Is this just irony or coincidence that the modern day victims of this drink's sugary side effects are the original marketing tool used by the drink?

I found out that Mountain Dew was originally invented and distributed from the Tennessee mountain regions, and that the hillbilly reference was from the fact that Moonshine used to be called Mountain Dew. It was supposed to be an answer to 7-Up. When Pepsi bought it, they eventually dropped the hillbilly motif, and then became a pioneer energy drink with snowboarding Gen-Xers as their modern theme.

It looks like the drink is getting back to its roots, as well as the roots of the teeth of its fans.