'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims
nature.com
nature.com
Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.
There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).
Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.
As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
Swings and roundabouts init.
Drink tea in the pub if you must, though the social lubricant of alcohol is obvious to all.
I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems.
My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great.
Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.
I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.
It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
After my second knee surgery, I asked the surgeon about physio. He didn’t really think it was necessary for the kind of surgery I had, but when I insisted he shrugged, said “sure”, and made a referral to the place on campus (surgery was through the university hospital). Physio folks did an assessment, basically said “you don’t really need anything”, gave me a few stretches and sent me on my way.
Soooooo ok. I could walk. I’d get gentle aching pain in my knee after less walking than I was ok with. I ended up putting together my own physio/rehab plan based largely on the concepts from Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Body book. Before getting strength and endurance back, phase one was to assess and correct strength asymmetry.
Surgery was on my right knee. I’d been limping for a year before the surgery. I start doing “one-limbed” exercises to assess my strength and discovered that (not surprisingly) my left leg is much stronger than my right leg, but my right arm is much stronger than my left arm. I end up putting together a plan where I did:
- sets of 5-10 reps on the weak side, N/2 reps on the strong side. Once I can do 11 reps I increase the weight by 5lb.
- Every 10 days, do another asymmetry evaluation by doing each exercise to failure and tallying how many reps I did in each side. As soon as left and right match for a given exercise, start doing that exercise with both limbs at the same time instead of one at a time.
I do miss being in my 20s with the surging testosterone to help things. I went from limping constantly, to surgery, to getting sore after walking a few blocks, to running a 5km/3.1mi fun run in 24 minutes after 3 months of my homemade physio program, and still had lots of gas left in the tank.
I used to have this insane pain in my right quad. Urgent care and two different doctors kept me on a muscle relaxant that isn't exactly good.
I move and get a new doctor. He gives me two exercises after 3 days the pain was just gone.
I have countless stories like this from friends and families.
My wife and I just came back from the gym and doing a leg day. She did 50,000 pounds of volume. When she started, it was around 15k. I was at 75k and now im at 200k. It just feels so much better being stronger.
The sad thing is that you can't really hire a trainer that will push a wife like a demented husband. But her results are impressive and MS is a very humbling disease, but we are fighting like hell.
Yup, I'm "staggered".
Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)
Personally I have to fight my entire country (and most of Eastern Europe fwiw) that cold weather, drafts, air conditioning, wet hair and cold feet does not cause common cold or flu. Yes there is rhinorrhea, but that's just reaction to change in air's humidity.
Depriving children of calcium is a bad thing that all dieticians agree on.
Both are difficult to achieve as you well know.
The idea I wanted to convey is more that children getting a plant based diet aren’t necessarily deprived of calcium.
Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.
> Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein.
All commonly consumed sources of animal protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) are complete proteins, meaning they provide all essential amino acids. This is not true for all sources of plant-based protein. In addition, "protein" as is often used to indicate a part of a meal (I mean not just the technical definition of a chain of amino acids). Vegans are nearly always advised to supplement with B12 because good plant protein sources like legumes are poor sources of B12.
I understand what the study is getting at with the question, for as far as I am aware there are no studies that show that getting, say, 10 grams of complete protein from animals is any different from getting 10 grams of complete protein from plants. Still, given this question is easily ambiguous for valid definitions of "healthier", I find this study suspect, despite having no problem with the general idea that tons of people believe absolute batshit insane ideas about health and nutrition.
If I may nitpick:
- Human amino acid requirements vary with age, physical condition, and physiological state. PDCAAS and DIAAS use a young child as reference pattern.
- Amino acid proportion also varies across animal foods: eggs closely match the child pattern, while beef is slightly lower in tryptophan.[0]
- Some plant proteins are considered complete above scoring systems: soy, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, hemp, chia, and potato protein, though potatoes themselves are low in protein/carb.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fi...
Just like if one type of food had the perfect proportion of fat, carbs and protein, it doesn't mean it's better than a varied diet of foods that are way off in that proportion, but in different directions. (Obviously a "perfect proportion" doesn't exist and varies from people to people, but I used it for the example.)
> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.
However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.
Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.
[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary:
- Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably.
- Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say.
Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
> whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"
It's the kind of question that's phrased as a gotcha, not one that actually gets insight into population beliefs and behaviours beyond "oh look they fell for my trick"
1) No vaccine is 100% effective.
2) Against something that mutates quickly the vaccine will always be behind. Thus the new variants win out. (The same thing would happen in the absence of vaccines, but it would take longer.)
The idea that it could actually be stamped out was very wishful thinking. But the vaccine does have a big benefit in reducing death.
But China saw it was probably airborne and reacted as if it were. We had the same data, we could reach the same conclusions, but we didn't want to.
- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.
- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.
- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.
- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."
Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
For the autism question I agree with you, people simply believing their government is reasonable.
But I am quite worried about the last question. That 25% of people believe vaccines are used for population control is worrisome, no matter how you spin it.
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/prenatal...
Some plant proteins are "complete" in the sense of including all essential amino acids, but the ratios are wrong which still leaves at least one amino acid as a limiting factor. It's usually best to mix at least two plant proteins instead of relying on a single one.
Everything in moderation.
While I understand the idea, it lacks to point out the right ratio of others plants. A better generalization would be:
Most plants include all AA acids. Some are "complete" as they include all AA while others are leaves at least one AA as a limiting factor.
I'm talking about superstitions, fortune tellers, homeopathy, anti-evolution, anti-vaxx (not specific arguments against a specific vaccine, but in general), magic, fake healers, obviously fake medical info (bleach, etc.) guardian angels, gods, karma, ESP, ghosts, spirits, quantum bullshit, bad energy, miracles, lizard people, telepathy and all that crap.
It makes me incredibly pessimistic about humans. Of course, most people don't believe in all of the above, but I've noticed people either believe in none of the above, or in several the above - rarely just 1 thing.
Unrelated, but on page 3 it mentions:
> 2023 - Many young people feel the average person can know as much as a doctor
Not as BFS knowledge, but as DFS about something specific - sure. I've caught many doctors not knowing basic things about something specific. They know more than me in general, but about that specific things they're read 5 papers over the last 2 years and I've read 20 over the past month. Even accounting for their ability to better extract valuable data from papers, it's still easy to know more than a doctor about that SPECIFIC thing. The inquisitive and humble doctors review the papers and agree with me or they point out what I'm missing or where I'm wrong. The ignorant and arrogant doctors outright tell me that I'm a layman, that I shouldn't roleplay as a doctor and that I should follow their advice blindly.
Finally, can some explain:
> I will believe a recommendation that contradicts my beliefs from a source I trust
with the options being:
- After I hear it one time
- After I hear it two or more times
- I will never believe it is true
I wouldn't trust a recommendation based only on the number of times I've heard it. I may be more inclined to consider it the more I hear it, of course, which can lead to more trust, but it's never a direct relationship between number of times I've heard something and how likely I'd be to trust it. And the "I will never believe it is true" option is wild - "never" ever? Who seriously chose that option? Were people tired as it was one of the last questions? Come to think of it, I've heard people say "I will never change my mind on this" no matter how I clarify with "even if you get really strong evidence?". So perhaps it's true. But that whole question makes no sense to me.
Oh dear, my very own pet peeve.
Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why.
It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3].
>> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”
OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word.
And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4].
And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway".
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[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/
[2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348...
[3] And I don't even have children.
[4] Unlikely.
The public is going to have to make a semi-to-un- informed judgement call regardless.
If they take scientists at their word, and different groups of scientists are saying different things, the public is going to have to make a judgement call as to which of those groups' credentials they trust more, or which sources they trust re: group-composition claims like "it's not 80% vs 20% of scientists, only a few of those 20% are accredited, so it's more like 98% vs 2%".
And that's an even trickier problem to solve than "scientists need to build trust". Which scientists? How do you determine if an opinion is from trustworthy scientists or from elsewhere? Even if scientists build trust, there will be very well-resourced forces trying to influence the public's answers to those questions.
Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.
Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake.
And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.
Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."
Big gatherings *outdoors*: low risk.
Church is pretty dangerous, a protest is reasonably safe.
Big outdoor gatherings *for right-wing causes*: big risk.
Big outdoor gatherings *for left-wing causes*: low risk.
I do recall worry about right wing things which were "outdoor"--but would have a lot of indoor spillover. Things like that motorcycle thing--the motorcycle part was outdoors but you would have a lot of people going to bars and the like in the evening. The right always tried to portray it as political, but only by oversimplification.
Because you were gas lit or are currently gas lighting.
>I do recall worry about right wing things which were "outdoor"--but would have a lot of indoor spillover.
Don't more the goal posts or attempt to bring in something that never happened. This was about ANY large gatherings outdoors.
> The right always tried to portray it as political, but only by oversimplification.
The left are the ones who politicized the pandemic to unthinkable levels. The country's trust in the government is at all time lows because of it.