There’s something about health and nutrition folk wisdom that’s resistant to truth.
Common health “facts” include the ideas that MSG will build you sick, that a juice detox is just what you need after a few weeks of indulgence, and that sports drinks like Gatorade are wholly fine since you need the electrolytes.
None of these things are true. They, like many other folk sayings and tips-off, fall into the category of health myths that are totally or at the least largely wrong.
Here’s the truth behind some of those health asserts you’ve heard all your life, but might not hold water at all.
1. MSG in Chinese food will build you sick .
The myth that MSG is bad for you comes from a letter a medical doctor wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, where he coined the term “Chinese restaurant syndrome” to describe a variety of symptoms including numbness and general weakness.
But though medical doctors blamed these impressions on monosodium glutamate, MSG, the research doesn’t back it up. The scientific consensus according the American Chemical Society is that “MSG can temporarily affect a select few when eaten in huge quantities on an empty belly, but it’s perfectly safe for the great majority of people.”
And this stimulates appreciation MSG is nothing more than a common amino acid with a sodium atom added. The placebo consequence is more than strong enough to account for its negative effects sometimes associated with MSG.
2. Coffee stunts your growing .
There isn’t a whole lot of indication on this, but most research observes no correlation between caffeine consumption and bone growing in kids.
In adults, researchers have seen that increased caffeine consumption can very slightly restriction calcium absorption, but potential impacts is so small that a tablespoon of milk will more than adequately offset the effects of a beaker of coffee.
Interestingly, advertising think this is largely responsible for this myth. A breakfast cereal producer named C.W. Post was trying to market a morning liquor called “Postum” as an alternative to coffee, so he ran ads on the “evils” of Americans’ favorite hot liquor, calling it a “nerve poison” that should never be served to children.
3. Bundle up or youll catch a cold .
Being physically cold isn’t what gets you sick; exposure to a cold virus does. There’s no proof that going outside with wet mane when it’s freeze will build you sick by itself you avoid hypothermia.
But there are some scientifically sound explanations for why people catch more colds in wintertime. Because we expend more time in close quarters indoors, it is more likely that we’ll cross routes with a cold-causing virus spread from another person during the winter. And for several reasons, we may have a harder day fighting off cold and flu virus particles in winter.
But being cold itself isn’t what stimulates sick, and some argue that cold exposure can actually improve your health.
4. The substance tryptophan in turkey stimulates you sleepy .
Who doesn’t love the post-Thanksgiving nap? We frequently consider those sleeps inevitable, since turkey contains tryptophan, an amino acid that is a component of some of the brain substances that help you relax.
But plenty of foods contain tryptophan. Cheddar cheese has even more than turkey and cheddar is never pointed out as a sleep inducing meat. Experts say that instead, the carbs, alcohol, and general size of the Turkey-day feast are the cause of those delicious holiday siestas.
5. Taking your vitamins will maintain you healthy .
Vitamins sound like a great suggestion. One pill that can provide you everything you need to be healthy!
If merely they operated. After decades of research on vitamins, most reviews don’t find any reasons for our multivitamin habit, and in a number of cases, vitamins have actually been associated with high risk of various cancers. Malnourished people might benefit from some supplements, but most of us should just get our vitamins naturally from food.
6. Beer before alcohol, never sicker; liquor before brew, youre in the clear .
We’re all heard it: “beer before alcohol, never sicker; liquor before brew, you’re in the clear.”
But while it’s very true that overdoing it with booze might leave you praying to the porcelain gods, there’s no need to place the blamed on the order you devour the beverages in alcohol is alcohol, and too much of it will make anyone feel sick.
However, there are some strange behaviors this piece of advice can make sense. People who switch from brew to mixed drinks( with senses and judgment already dulled) may be less likely likely to monitor their alcohol consumption and thus drink more.
And some research shows that your body metabolizes mixed drinks faster than higher-concentration alcohol( a shot of whiskey, mention ). So adding alcohol to a stomach-full of brew could, in theory, create a sort of mixed drink that would metabolize faster than one or the other on its own.
We’ll call this one partly true-life, but chalk up the “never sicker” proportion largely to bad decision making.
7. You lose 90% of your body heat through your brain .
Not necessarily. You lose body heat through anything uncovered, according to Dr. Aaron E. Carroll and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman, authors of “Don’t Swallow Your Gum !: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health.”
Your head is not special in that way it’s just more likely to be exposed.
“Most of the time when we’re outside in the cold, we’re clothed, ” Richard Ingebretsen, MD, PhD, told WebMD Magazine. “If you don’t have a hat on, you lose heat through your brain, just as you would lose heat through your legs if you were wearing shorts.”
8. Wait an hour after feeing to swim or you’ll drown .
Some parents say no swimming for 30 minutes after eating, some mention an hour, but many of u.s. may remember waiting out the clock before returning to the pool or beach. The hypothesi behind this seems to be that digesting meat will draw blood to your belly, means that less blood is available for your muscles, attaining them more likely to cramp.
But there’s no indication to assistance this claim. In fact, many sources say there are no documented cases of anyone ever submerge because they’ve had a cramp related to swimming with a full stomach.
Cramps do happen frequently when swimming, but they aren’t caused by what’s in your belly. If you do get one, the best policy is to float for a minute and let it pass.
9. It takes 7 years for gum to digest if you swallow it .
When it get out that Trump press secretary Sean Spicer chewings and swallows two and a half packs of chewing gum by noon every day, many people had the same question: Couldn’t that maybe do some impairment?
Probably not. Gum is mostly indigestible, meaning that it usually passes through your intestines and exits the other side, like the majority of members of what your body doesn’t require and can’t digest.
“On rare occasions, large amounts of swallowed gum combined with constipation have blocked intestines in infants, ” Dr. Michael Picco of the Mayo Clinic writes. Still, he tells swallowing gums generally isn’t harmful.
10. When you’re drunk on gin, you get mean .
There are plenty of alcohol-related myths out there, and the idea that different boozes have different impacts on you is a big one. Some people claim wine stimulates them sleepy while whiskey stimulates them want to argue.
In short, experts say this is bunk. “Alcohol is alcohol whichever way you slice it, ” pharmacologist Paul Clayton, a fellow of Oxford’s Institute of Food, Brain& Behaviour, told The Guardian.
So why do people insist that tequila stimulates them crazy?
One very strong possibility is that we experience the effects we expect when we booze( or devour most substances ). Scientific research going back to the 1960 s demonstrate that we “learn” how to behave while drunk, and that our actual drunken behavior is a direct reflection of our expectations.
Although many people may become violent while intoxicated, people who have never associated drunkenness with conflict don’t show the same behavior. So by that same token, if we expect that vodka will build us want to sing karaoke, we can perhaps turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
11. A juice cleanse will ‘detox’ you after an unhealthy eating orgy .
The myth of the juice cleanse is a stubborn one and one frequently promoted by celebrities but it’s both wrong and unhealthy.
First of all, your body naturally removes harmful substances through the liver, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract there’s nothing about juice that they are able to hurry that process along.
Secondly, juicing is largely a way of removing helpful fiber from fruits and vegetables many sugary fruit juices are as bad for you as sodas. You’re attaining the fruit less healthy by “juicing” it.
12. Everyone should drink eight glass of water a day .
Hydration is very important, but the idea that eight glass of water is essential is a strange one.
In healthy people, researchers haven’t observed a connection between liquid intake and kidney cancer, heart disease, sodium levels, or skin quality.
People get a lot of their water from foods and other beverages in the first place, but there is a good reason to drink more water. It’s a calorie free alternative to other beverages( especially sugary ones ), and people who drink water instead of those beverages devour fewer calories overall.
But in general, drink when you are thirsty you don’t need to count the glasses.
13. It’s fine to eat something if it’s been on the storey for less than 5 seconds .
It’s the worst when something you really wanted to eat falls on the storey. But if you grab it in five seconds, is it okay?
Sorry, but the five-second-rule isn’t a real thing. Bacteria can pollute a meat within milliseconds. Moist foods attract more bacteria than dry foods, but there’s no “safe duration.” Instead, safety depends on how clean the surface you dropped the meat on is.
Whether you eat it or not after that is up to you, but if the people that stroll on that storey are also walking around New York City, for example, we wouldn’t recommend it.
14. Inoculations can be risky .
This idea comes from a now thoroughly-debunked( and retracted) investigate of 12 infants that appeared in 1998 in The Lancet and claimed there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
It turned out that investigate wasn’t merely flawed, it also contained false information that was necessary to make its point.
Since then, numerous studies that have analyzed data from more than a million children have shown that there’s no connection between vaccines and autism.
But anxieties about that connection have persisted, partly spurred on by public figure attaining false asserts about vaccines. This contribute to scary illness like measles coming back.
15. Yogurt will help put your digestive system back in order .
This is one of our modern health myths. Yogurt is frequently marketed as having advantages for digestion and as something that’ll keep people slim because of probiotics, or the “good bacteria” that’s living inside it.
Researchers have found that the bacteria in our torsoes are very connected to our metabolism and obesity rates, among other things, so it seems like there’s a logical connection here.
But we don’t yet understand how the trillions of bacteria in our torsoes work well enough to manipulate them in this way. Despite the fact that the probiotic business was worth $23.1 billion in 2012, we can’t build yogurt that they are able to repair our inner bacterial balance.
That’s not to say that yogurt is unhealthy, just that its benefits are oversold. Plus, a lot of yogurt is packed with carbohydrate, which we do know contributes to obesity and other troubles so if you enjoy yogurt, find a version that isn’t full of additional unnecessary calories or it might have the opposite of the intended effect.
16. An apple a period keeps the doctor away .
Apples are good for you, packed with vitamin C and fiber, both of which are important to long-term health, but they aren’t all you need.
And if certain viruses or bacteria get into your system, an apple will unfortunately do nothing to protect yourself. So go ahead and get that influenza shoot, even if you feed apples.
17. Eating ice cream will build your cold worse .
If you’re home sick with a cold, you can totally go ahead and convenience yourself with some ice cream.
The idea that dairy increases mucus production is very fortunately not true, according to researchers and a medical doctor at the Mayo Clinic, who tells “in fact, frozen dairy products can allay a sore throat and furnish calories when you otherwise may not eat.”
Praise be.
18. Cracking your knuckles will give you arthritis .
Fortunately, this isn’t true-life either.
Cracking your knuckles may bother the person or persons around you, but even people who have done it frequently for many years aren’t any more likely to develop arthritis than the individuals who don’t.
19. Starve a fever, feed a cold .
There’s a good reason you may have heard this said multiple behaviors, either “starve a cold, feed a fever” or “starve a fever, feed a cold.”
Despite a slew of headlines claiming that depriving a fever wasn’t a myth in response to a tiny and largely misinterpreted investigate in 2002, there’s no real indication to back this up. Limiting your caloric consumption may actually hurt your immune system more than helping it, and it would certainly be a bad suggestion to not feed during the 6-8 period duration of a cold.
Instead, doctors say to go ahead and feed if you are able. The more accurate face, as Scientific American notes, would be “feed a cold, feed a fever.” And make sure to get plenty of fluids.
20. It’s fine to drink sports drinks to rehydrate .
We all know that soda and similarly sugary drinks like lemonade are bad for us( right ?), but what about sports drinks like Gatorade or Powerade? Sports-focused advertising has successfully convinced a whole lot of people that downing a bottle of this stuff is penalty, especially if you’ve run for a jog lately it’s replacing electrolytes, after all.
But actually, for most people the amount of carbohydrate in these drinks is far more than is needed even if you’ve been exerting. Lower calorie options, which many of the same corporations have created in recent years, are much better options. Or just drink water.
21. Coffee and brew dehydrate you, since caffeine and alcohol are diuretics .
In sufficient sums, caffeine and alcohol can have a diuretic consequence. But the amount of caffeine in a typical beaker of coffee or alcohol in a brew isn’t enough to really have this consequence, according to one recent investigate. A moderate sum of either coffee or brew hydrates people just about as well as water does.
22. Milk does a body good( and safeguards your bones )!
This is an incredibly successful bit of advertising that has wormed its way into our brains and policies the US Department of Agriculture tells us that adults should drink three cups of milk a period, largely for calcium and vitamin D.
However, multiple studies show that there isn’t an association between drinking more milk( or taking calcium and vitamin D supplements) and having fewer fractures.
Milk is fine, but it’s not a magical health booze. Amazingly, nonetheless, milk is particularly hydrating similar to pedialyte, both even more hydrating than water.
23. You shouldn’t eat too many eggs, since it’ll elevate your cholesterol .
Eggs have lots of cholesterol in them. For the majority of members of us, that’s not an issue, since a developing body of research shows that dietary cholesterol( from foods you feed) doesn’t actually have much of an effect on blood cholesterol in the great majority of people.
Thank goodness.
24. Eating fat will build you fat .
The tide has started to swaying back the other way on this one, but recommendations for low-fat foods remain common.
The decision to demonize fat for its caloric density and heart-clogging impacts was largely the result of shady science influenced by a carbohydrate trade group. It turns out that the society-wide decision to cut saturated fat from diets led to increased consumption of carbohydrate and processed trans fats, all of which were most likely less healthy overall.
We require a moderate sum of fat especially healthy fat in our diets.
Read the original article on Tech Insider . Copyright 2017.
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