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I went to Qdoba for lunch today (mmm…. Qdoba) and they included a sample package of some Eclipse gum. My reaction to seeing this was to be glad that they recognized the unfortunate side effects of their food on my breath.

Anywho, I ate my lunch and finished my Vanilla Coke (why the hell is Qdoba the only place I’ve seen that has Vanilla Coke in their soda fountains?) and shortly thereafter thought it might be in my best interest to go ahead and crack that gum open. Chomp chomp chomp… cool, refreshing breath.

I go to get a refill of cold water and take a drink, and as anyone who has ever taken a drink of cold water while having something minty in their mouth has experienced before, the water felt much colder in my mouth than it normally would, which got me wondering why that happens. This seems like the sort of useless knowledge I would already be able to rattle off if someone asked me, but I didn’t know, so I just looked it up. Pretty interesting stuff:

That feeling of coolness isn’t just in your mind; in fact, you’re going mental over menthol–a powerful essential oil in mint. Menthol acts as an anesthetic, which puts it in the same category as novocaine and laughing gas. Anesthetics can muffle your nerve endings’ ability to detect pain without making you lose consciousness. Other essential oils have a similar effect on people. For example, oil of clove can help reduce minor pain in certain areas of the body and was once prescribed by dentists to soothe toothaches and sore gums. But you won’t see dentists giving Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers to patients in need of root canal! That’s because the menthol in your candy is just a very mild anesthetic that acts on nerve endings in your mouth. Some of these nerve endings act as hot receptors, while others detect things that are cold. Since mint oils have the ability to put your mouth’s hot receptors to sleep by making them less sensitive to heat, the signals normally sent to the brain by your cold receptors start to stand out a lot more in comparison. The brain then interprets these signals as a cold sensation.

So now you know, if you didn’t already. By the way, it’s this exact sort of process that has enabled me to learn so much of the aforementioned useless crap in my head. I get curious about something, look it up, and more often than not, it sticks.