True guidelines for common beliefs....Today's post:  Wednesday, 6-6-2018

There are many beliefs about many things that influence health.

Some things that are commonly thought to be harmful are not or there is a way to do them or eat them safely.

Many things thought to be safe or even beneficial are actually harmful and even deadly.

This story appeared online:

11 ‘bad habits’ that are actually healthy, according to science

https://www.businessinsider.nl/bad-habits-healthy-according-to-science-2018-5/ 

Some of their coverage I thought well of and some I didn’t.  I also noticed they left out some of the more important topics.

This is my list some of which includes things they included and my comments on those from their list.

(I thought they did well on some and much less well on others.)

A.  As you may have seen, the makers of MSG have funded a disinformation campaign on Facebook that has at least a dozen people saying that the furor over MSG is based on iffy or incorrect information.

The actual research on MSG finds it is so harmful it should be illegal to add to foods –

 or at the very least illegal to put MSG in foods without informing the person eating or buying it that it’s there and abundant research shows it’s quite harmful and fattening!

My complete post on this was on Tuesday, 5-29, last week, with far more detail.

B.  They didn’t include smoking.

Roughly half the people who smoke believe smoking is harmless.  No need to inform them since they believe their lives are so messed up and out of their control they might as well smoke. So whether it’s harmful or not they really don’t care.

The other half though believes that the only significant risk of smoking is from lung cancer and most smokers escape it.

While it is true that even in heavy smokers only about a fourth get lung cancer, the other part of that saying “the only significant risk is” is SO false if there was an alarm for false statements your computer or smart phone would be vibrating so hard you’d have trouble reading this!

Two thirds of smokers get Alzheimer’s disease.  We know why. It’s no accident.

Even second hand smoke triggers heart attacks, sometimes fatal ones, in people who would otherwise not have had them for years.

Tobacco itself is radioactive; so using tobacco products or breathing its smoke sends cancer causing radioactivity to go everywhere in your body.  So it’s no surprise that half of all cancers and half of all cancer deaths are from tobacco use, smoking, or second hand smoke.

Nicotine itself is harmful to your heart and tends to cause cancer.  And vaping systems expose your lungs to other harmful compounds to we now know.

Also, most people who smoke use lighters instead of matches.  This makes the smoke much more effective at causing lung cancer and other cancers because of the short lived hydrocarbons in the hotter smoke.

So, if you smoke or use tobacco another way or are exposed to second hand smoke or vape, using a way to stop nicotine addiction completely without a substitute and staying away from second hand smoke as close to 100% of the time is the safest way to deal with it.

C.  They didn’t include soft drinks or diet soft drinks.

*Gradually over the past 70 years we have gone from no one knows what soft drinks are to most young people drink soft drinks at least a few times a week to a few times a day.

Since they see other people their age do the same and they get to see the ads for soft drinks that make them seem fun every time they go to the movies, they believe soft drinks are fun, harmless, and normal.

This is another so false the alarm would blow up your computer or smart phone deal.

Something like 30 different kinds of research shows that drinking ANY soft drinks is about as harmful as smoking heavily.  Doing so causes osteoporosis, fatty liver, and helps cause cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Drinking soft drinks is also a near perfect fattener!  Drinking one or several does nothing to turn down hunger but DOES deliver calories in a way that tends to cause those calories to become fat.  Worse the blood sugar surge causes you to become hungry for sugary foods when the rebound effect hits later.

Drinking soft drinks seems safer than smoking. The reality is that it may be worse for you!  And THAT’s not yet well known,

**Millions of people drink diet soft drinks and some nurses and diabetes educators with out of date training and believe that they get to drink a soft drink that doesn’t fatten them.

In fact, because they believe this, they often drink more than people who drink regular soft drinks.

Is this belief true?

Nope. Diet soft drinks and the artificial sweeteners used in them fatten quite a bit MORE than regular soft drinks! 

Worse, the artificial sweeteners themselves cause some cancers and other health problems as much as or more than as regular soft drinks using free fructose high fructose corn syrup.

[To me an article on false beliefs having to do with health that leaves out MSG; tobacco, smoking, and nicotine; and leaves out soft drinks and diet soft drinks is like an article about cars with nothing in it about engines or safety.]

D.  Many people still believe that eating, 

fats and oils and saturated fat, and egg yolks are bad for you.

Many nutritionists and diabetes educators with outdated educations still believe these things.

The article does rather better on these topics! 

It says this about eating eggs:

“Eggs – an animal product high in cholesterol, fat, protein, and several key vitamins and minerals – have been vilified for years. But as it turns out, eggs are actually pretty healthy. And ordering just the whites, a practice that low-fat food advocates say is a way to shave off calories, fat, and cholesterol, is completely unnecessary.

Whole eggs are high in a handful of key vitamins and minerals that you can’t get from many foods like vitamin B12 and phosphorus. They’re also rich in muscle-fueling protein and satiating fat, which makes them filling and unlikely to be overeaten.

Plus, the cholesterol eggs contain does not appear to lead to high cholesterol levels in healthy people. Just as eating fat does not translate into being fat, recent

research has shown that eating cholesterol doesn’t necessarily translate into having high cholesterol.“

Not bad!  Certainly closer to accurate than the old advice was.  Egg yolks DO have many nutrients you need and in highly bioavailable forms.  Ovo or lacto ovo vegetarians do not need to take the long list of supplements that vegans do to stay healthy. Eating a few eggs a week can solve that problem.

However, eggs can be from chickens fed pesticide and herbicide sprayed grains.  This makes such eggs have some pro-inflammatory omega 6 oil and a surprising amount of concentrated pesticides and herbicides.

So eating those kinds of eggs is still something that should be limited.

The much better news is that eating eggs from chickens that really are fed on pastures they walk around on from insects and earthworms and some organic additions are now available.  Whole Foods now stocks those.

You can eat at least a whole egg a day including the yolk from such chickens.

There are still some possible upgrades.  But this kind of eggs ALSO has more of the nutrition you eat the eggs to get!

[I’m out of time today so we will continue this in part two next week. There is more to say about eggs and there are several other topics we’ll cover then.]