Pitting paranoia-inducing health news

I’m not really sure I want to pit the medical researchers or the news media. Maybe both.

Two days ago I read an article with a headline much like this one: “Eating half the recommended amount of salt per day could increase the risk of heart attacks, scientists warn”

Link: Eating half the recommended amount of salt per day could increase the risk of heart attacks, scientists warn

So I thought “Well great, if I eat too much salt I suffer from heart disease, if I eat too little I suffer from heart disease”. Actually I’m not worried about heart disease, at least not at my age. I’m not even sure if the study makes biological sense. Too little salt and too much salt can both cause the same condition? It might actually be possible though, since they’re both messing with the kidneys or red blood cells or … look, I just don’t give a crap. I just can’t be bothered to push the old brain cells to think about it, for the same reason the cells quit when I read or hear other health news advice.

This health advice is nearly impossible to follow anyway. Most people in the First World eat too much salt, but unless you’re home cooking every meal you can’t avoid it. If you do home cook every meal you will still have trouble avoiding it. And now there’s some unsafe lower limit too. Are we supposed to carefully measure the salt intake of every single meal we have, every day, for the rest of our lives? Perhaps we need special salt screening so we know what the upper and lower limits are based on your age, sex, weight, ethnic group, genetic profile, blood type, IQ and astrological sign.

This is far from the first time I’ve read something like this. When the West Nile virus came to Canada, in the summer, we were all told to put on sunblock (to avoid skin cancer) and put on mosquito repellent (to avoid being bitten by infected mosquitoes). Sounds alright so far? When you put on sunblock, it opens your pores, making you more vulnerable to poisons on the skin, such as … mosquito repellent. Following both pieces of advice literally made the situation worse! It took a while for someone to report on this, needless to say. (I’m pretty sure the risk of mosquito repellent poisoning is low. Then again, so was the risk of West Nile!)

It’s this kind of health paranoia that is making food less appealing. I don’t drink milk anymore (health condition, validated by an actual doctor and not a newspaper article) but when I did, I would constantly try and fail to find whole milk. I couldn’t find milk that had cream on top that I used to have as a kid, the closest I could find were skim milk (so no cream, and low fat) or 2% homogenized milk (meaning they took half the cream before mixing it up because they want it to be low fat) because customers aren’t allowed to make their own decisions. I can eat yogurt (I should have some milk products) but not yogurt with fat in it. It’s not because the doctor said I need to lose weight (I’m very skinny, actually, and not in a studly way) but because I literally cannot find any yogurt that is not fat-free at my grocery store. That’s not even an exaggeration, it is literally the truth. I could probably find some if I Google a specialty yogurt store, but not only would that require more travel and money, but I’d have to spend a lot of time avoiding the Greek yogurt fad, and the organic fad, and…

Yes, I called organic food a fad. I see it as a choice, and not always the better one. I can buy reliably pesticide-laden (pesticide is a poison) fruit, or I can buy organic fruit. Most of the time the organic fruit will be healthy, but on occasion it will be infected by insect-borne diseases that harm humans that could have been avoided by spraying it with pesticides. Or just E. coli. So I guess I can choose between slow poison and random spikes of dangerous disease.

There are three major nutrients that we use for energy. I’m not counting vitamins, because while your body uses them, they’re not generally used as a fuel. I’m just talking about fat, sugar and protein.

You don’t want to take in too much fat. It might cause you to … I’m not even sure, exactly. Since apparently fat that’s taken into your digestive system does not directly clog your arteries. The health authorities have been screaming about avoiding fat for decades though, so best to avoid. If you can.

You don’t want to take in too much sugar. You might develop diabetes. All kinds of health problems there. Blindness, amputations, etc. There’s health risks for taking in fake sugar too. You can’t eat fruit, that has sugar in it! Only this sugar won’t give you diabetes because it’s shaped like a hexagon instead of a pentagon. Except you find both types of sugar in fruit. And in natural corn syrup.

You don’t want to take in too much protein. When you break down protein for energy you get ammonia, which is incredibly poisonous. (It’s also quickly turned into the less poisonous urea, but that means you might be exposed to tiny amounts of ammonia for a tiny amount of time. Can’t be having that!) Also there’s a risk of ketosis.

The body can actually transform some nutrients into others, so no matter what you eat, you’re screwed.

So there’s a way to avoid all these problems. Eat nothing at all! Unfortunately that will cause an even more severe health problem that will kill you over the course of a few days. (Maybe a few weeks if you drink a lot of water.)

Oh, I am so with you on this, and not only about food. I recently read some scare mongering report about how people with a slow walking pace are more likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease. I didn’t use to care that most people walk faster than I do. Now, I notice it all the time with faint sense of foreboding. Thanks assholes. Is there anything else you’d like to ruin for me? Maybe you can announce that women with deep voices are more likely to get throat cancer, or something like that?

I’m waiting for the day when scientists say, “We were wrong about fast food–it’s actually good for you.”

I feel the need to point out that organic food is not necessarily healthier or more nutritious. They use pesticides and herbicides as well, just not the same pesticides and herbicides. It’s really just more expensive.

While it would be cool to live to see humans on Mars, my primary desire to live long:

I want to see the news that, for your health, you must consume:

16 oz of “well-marbled” (remember that one, kids?) beef
A fifth of rot gut bourbon

and smoke 2 pack of unfiltered Camels
All this pussy-footing around about salt, fats (saturated, poly unsaturated, up your butt semi-saturated) and sugars (with late newsflash: your body converts starches to Gasp! Horrors! sugar!) is crap - cut to the good stuff, you twits!

The problem is that you’re getting your health news from the Telegraph.

For reliable information, you should be reading the Daily Mail.

I read a report associating walking speed with lifespan. I presume fitter people walk a little bit faster, but there’s no reason someone with a knee injury should live a shorter lifespan. I’m seeing no connection at all between fitness and Alzheimers.

That would explain why one particular brand of organic grapes I bought were so good. I never saw any bug bites, fungus, or anything like that on these particular grapes. Despite the advertising I didn’t believe they were organic. (I bought them because they were cheap and good.)

So I get poison and no disease, then? Literally no different from having non-organic food.

My manager believes every food-related scare story that comes along. GMOs are bad. HFCS is bad. Added sugar is bad. Honey, however, is good even though it’s pure sugar (including fructose!) because it’s “natural.” Salt is bad. Fat is bad. Dairy is bad. Meat is bad. Processed anything is bad. Carbs are bad. Gluten is bad. Caffiene is bad. Artificial is automatically bad.

So she tries to follow these hellishly restricted diets consisting of whole grains, organic vegetables, and gross herbal tea (again, herbs are natural and therefore wholesome. You know, like monkshood, water hemlock, jimsonweed, nightshade both deadly and common, poke, poison hemlock, yew, foxglove, poison ivy, castor bean, just to name some I could find within a mile of here) and preaches for a while about 'eating clean" and how great she feels, then one day she walks in with an iced latte from Dunkin Donuts.

Scientific studies are generally, well, scientific. They are certainly influenced by research pressures, including provenance of funding and “publish or perish” pressure, and those also influence how the results are presented, by whom, and in what way. And some are simply shit.

But an awful lot of this is our own damn fault. We want easy answers, simple findings, clear statements supporting what we want to hear or what we want to be angry about. We consume–and believe–mass media “science reporting” because we are stupid fucking monkeys and actual understanding takes effort that we are unwilling to expend.

I cannot recommend strongly enough this recent piece from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It’s the best summary of the utter bullshit that is “health news” I’ve seen.

I like to think that I’m ahead of the curve.

Better not tip her off to the elevated arsenic levels in rice, ergot in rye and other grains, and the natural radioactivity of bananas.

However, I do take one issue with your list of poison herbs - you can render poke safely edible, and I’ve even had it. Crapload of work to do it, though, and quite understandable why it’s fallen out of favor.

Oh, gave up up on talking sense into her ages ago, right about the time she told me I was wrong about gluten intolerance not causing her seasonal allergies. I’ve got a degree in biochemistry, which included courses on immunology, but I don’t have a blog, so I guess I lose :smiley:

Yeah, I’ve seen recipes for preparing poke. I think you have to boil it in 5 changes of water first. Maybe it was worth it before stores were able to carry fresh produce year round, but what a PITA.

Nope, “only” 2 changes. My mother-in-law’s recipes was as follows:

clean pok
put in large pot with lots of water
boil 1 hour
drain poke
put in pot with lots and lots of water
boil 1 hour
drain poke
squeeze poke to reduce amount water in it
fry up in bacon fat like turnip greens

For something boiled for 2 hours it has a surprising amount of flavor, sort in the spinach/bok choy/chard family of flavors, not as bitter as turnip or mustard greens. Then again, no small part of the flavor may have come from the bacon fat.

Phaw … People has the more in-depth coverage IMEIO

Here’s another crazy story: Coffee isn’t cancerous, but hot drinks ‘probably’ a cause: WHO

There were reports that coffee was a carcinogen. (So are peanuts. And mustard. And teddy bears.)

Now they’re saying that no, coffee does not cause cancer. Hot drinks cause cancer. I’m not a fan of coffee, but that’s because I can’t stand the taste, not because I’m terrified of getting stomach cancer, or however that’s supposed to work.

I’ve never heard of cimarron, but is it possible there’s an ingredient that’s… carcinogenic? I think that’s a bit more likely than hot water causes cancer, but I’m leery of blaming cimarron without someone actually studying it.

It’s not good for you but I rather suspect that those who are laid back and take life as it comes and eat a little junk food every once in a while and don’t obsess about it probably have a healthier and less stressful overall state of mind than stuck-up assholes who are obsessive about every single thing they eat. The less obsessed might even live longer, and they’ll quite likely live better. To me, “justice” is a sanctimonious asshole walking down the street carefully reading the ingredients list on his organic granola bar and getting run over by a bus.

Wait, what?

Do you have an example of this, or is this just extemporaneous bullshitting?

There have been occasional stories of infected fruit, such as Guatemalan berries. Or this one: Cross-sectional survey of indicator and pathogenic bacteria on vegetables sold from Asian vendors at farmers' markets in northern California - PubMed although this one seems to counter it: Are organic foods safer or healthier than conventional alternatives?: a systematic review - PubMed

Well, they found no cancer link when it was drunk cold, so probably not.

It doesn’t surprise me, actually. Anytime you’ve got cellular damage, and therefore cellular division to repair damage, you’re risking a mutation that’s going to cause a cancerous cell. Scalding your esophagus sounds like a good way to damage it and trigger more cellular division than possible. It also promotes inflammation, which cancerous cells find quite hospitable, because inflammatory immune cells promote tumor development .

Enjoy your coffee; they found no link there…but we don’t drink coffee north of 150 degrees.

Whoa … I’ve been drinking coffee all these years because it prevents cancer … they just now discovered it doesn’t cause cancer !?!

Damn …