h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's the things you *think* you know that ain't so.

Or something to that effect.

I've been there too, many times. The most recent episode came when I read on the Internet that I could raise my *good* cholesterol by drinking X numbers of fruit juice very day. My doctor chided me for believing such nonsense. My good cholesterol stayed low, but my blood sugar skyrocketed.

Dieticians have screwed up. In the 1990s, I was told to avoid nuts. Then they turned around and told me I needed to eat nuts. I disregarded the original instructions anyway, and kept doing so.

Read your history, and you'll find some shockingly bad advice given by respected doctors. In 17th century Paris, a doctor said that cleaning up the streets would reduce the incidence of infectious diseases. The other doctors laughed him out of town. So, garbage and chamber pots stayed in the streets, and people continued to die from infections.

Nowadays web have consumer magazines that trumpet the virtues of any numbers of foods as superfoods that will make you live longer, lose weight, yadda, yadaa, yadda. "Prevention" has some provocative articles, but I would never take their word as proof of anything.

Watching US network news has become one of my favourite
sources of inane comedy as they bounce from one health
scare to the next and then later reverse the news.

Every few weeks a new study comes out to contradict all
previous reports regarding the pros/cons of just about
everything - from coffee to mammagrams.


~jwf~

I try to use common sense and observable results as a basis for evaluating the onslaught.

Obesity and lower life expectancy? I had some obese teachers in grammar school. All but one of them lived beyond the age of 85. To the news that obese men can't live to be 80, I point to Charles Durning, Alfred Hitchcock, and Burl Ives.

As for coffee, you'd think at some point scientists would realize that it's been overstudied already. Why not give it a pass? How many billions of people have ever drunk coffee for most of their lives? Coffee is part of the background. Anything that would have come out would be obvious by now.

But some things are not so easy to figure out. If a product is new enough, there may not be enough data to work with. Transfats are beginning to show how awful they are, mainly because they've been around and in wide use for 20 or 30 years. Some of the newer sweeteners are too new, though. I make a practice of not taking a chance with them. I find ways of sweetening cakes with apple juice, orange juice, fruit [dried, fresh or canned] and spices. All of these things have been around for hundreds [if not thousands]of years. I avoid Crisco and other shortenings by grinding nuts in my blender and then adding them to the batter when I bake. How many thousands of years have people been eating nuts? Probably a lot! And anyway, what else is there to eat? Ya gotta eat something!

Speaking of conflicting information I just found this.
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/no-clear-evidence-vitamin-d-supplements-reduce-death-from-disease
It's hard to know what to believe anymore.


~jwf~

Vitamin D has to interact with other substances in order to have any useful effect. Plus, it gets manufactured in the body if the sun's rays are strong enough. Boston is about the northernmost place where winter sun is at all useful in stimulating D production.

Most of the vitamin studies that I've seen have concluded that standard multivitamin supplements do at least some good, and probably don't do any harm, except to the wallets of the people who pay for them. And anyway, what are you measuring them against? Lifespan? Cancer risk? Heart disease risk? Stroke risk? Depending on what you've used as a yardstick, you might be barking up the wrong tree anyway.

Some things are arranged in inverse relationships. Take alcohol use. Regular moderate use of alcohol has been repeatedly shown to confer some protection against heart disease. That's the good news. It also *increases* your risk of cancer, according to my doctor. So, if cancer is a bigger problem than heart disease in your family tree, it would be best not to drink. But if heart disease is the big issue, then drinking might be right for you. There are similar tradeoffs with peanuts which, like red wine, contain heart-healthy resveratrol. peanuts tend to have minute traces of aflatoxin, a carcinogen.

See how complex it all is? Again, you still have to eat and drink *something.*

>> might be barking up the wrong tree anyway.<<



~jwf~