10 Famous Everyday Health Tips That Actually Don’t Work At All

Health tips today are available freely, everywhere. Every health site is filled with these “expert tips” and everyone “knows” them to freely distribute this knowledge.

But the truth is, the science related to health and nutrition is extremely complicated. Hundreds of research programmes are going on around the world to find out what makes a human body safe and healthy. Many of this research is right for a long time until another one claims to dethrone and prove another one wrong.

Here are the popular tips, sourced from popular research that are sufficiently bullshit.

1. Antioxidants are extremely good for your health

Everything comes with antioxidant these days. Green tea, chocolate, and even juices. People even take antioxidant pills to kill the “oxidants” and the “toxins” in their body.

In reality, when your head in above the advertisement clouds, you realize that antioxidants are actually over-hyped. They do not flush out any toxins – that is the liver’s job. They do help in eliminating oxidants or free radicals, but oxidants are not really harmful to you unless they are in abnormally large quantities.

One research actually proved that some antioxidants increase the chances of prostate cancer.

Substitute the pills with real veggies and fruits and you will be okay. Do not pop pills just for the heck of it.

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2. Storing food in the fridge is better than storing food outside

Keeping food cold so that bacteria does not grow does help. But most of the everyday products we keep in the fridge are actually harmful to the food and to you.

The best example of this is bread. When you store bread in the typical fridge temperatures of 3 to 8 degrees, the starch inside the bread crystallizes, and it spoils 6 times more quickly. If you have ever taken a slice of bread out of the fridge and tried to put butter on it, you may have noticed that it starts crumbling.

Other food you should keep out of your fridge are potatoes, tomatoes, fruits, sauces, onions and garlic.

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3. Dark chocolate is an awesome health food!

Dark chocolates are a rage for the health nuts today. Everyone is bragging about its awesome antioxidant properties and how it improves brain function.

There is a reason that research has proved the above claims right – the researchers used actual chocolate and not the commercial variety.

Flavanol – the ingredient that makes chocolates bitter and nutritious, is painfully missing in most of the commercial chocolates out there because all the commercial processes destroy the beneficial compounds in them. Dark chocolate, therefore, is just a bitter version of regular chocolate.

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4. Washing meat before cooking it

Washing your vegetables and fruits before using them in food is always a good idea. But meats are a whole new territory altogether. Raw meat almost always contains lethal bacteria like Salmonella.

When  you wash, say, chicken meat, and put it on the kitchen counter, you are effectively transferring Salmonella everywhere in your kitchen. Then you wipe your hands on the apron and then you handle the knife – and it is everywhere.

The best solution to this is awareness – clean your hands properly after washing the meat, and put the cleaned meat in a bowl away from the rest of the kitchen, so that you do not spread the contamination any further.

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5. Sugar causes diabetes, don’t eat it at all

Sugar by itself is not a cause of diabetes at all. You get diabetes when your pancreas stop producing sufficient insulin to process the sugars you consume in your diet. Sugar by itself doesn’t cause anything at all.

But if you are one of those people who eats a lot of everything and loves the sweets out there, you are probably obese and obesity is definitely a reason for Type 2 Diabetes. But that is because you are overweight, and not because of sugar – per se.

Type 1 diabetes is just something you get in your genes and sugar has nothing to do with it.

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6. Diet soda is better than regular soda

No it is not. Scientists have found that people who drank diet soda didn’t lose weight at all. The logic and science behind this is the same as that of midnight snacking. When you suddenly stop drinking sugar and eating sweets, your body absorbs sugars from other food sources.

This is the reason that artificial sweetener users often gain weight rather than lose it.

Another disadvantage of a diet soda is that people tend to overcompensate – they will eat more in other departments just because they feel good that their coke had no sugar at all.

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7. Eating at night makes you fatter

Dinner before 8 pm and off to bed is a mantra everyone swears by to get thin. Turns out eating a carb rich diet in the evening is good for you.

It directly affects the secretion of Leptin, a hormone that controls how much hunger you feel. People who have a heavy dinner were found to be less likely to be hungry during the next day, and hence eat less too.

And here is the whopper – a large carb rich dinner can actually reduce your risk of diabetes and heart attack.

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8. Alcohol in moderation is good for your heart

Alcohol does help your heart – if you are one of the 15% who benefit from it. For the rest, any quantity of alcohol is bad for your heart.

And the research where they said that alcohol actually added years to your life is also total bullshit. Alcohol is bad for you. Period.

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9. Eating small meals more times helps you get thinner

The concept behind this health tip was metabolism. Nutritionists believed that having a lot of small meals could increase your metabolism, and hence, end up burning more calories.

But it turns out that scientists back then didn’t really capture what metabolism meant. They still do not have a concrete concept of it, because metabolism is unique to every person.

And for people who ate many small meals ended up eating more calories than they usually did.

If you want to get healthy, you just need to employ simple arithmetic – burn more calories than you consume.

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10. Consuming salt causes high blood pressure

People used to enjoy salty food at one time, and then came this rumor wafting through the air that salt was actually causing all the high blood pressure in everyone.

This was because of the research by Lewis Dahl who proved the salt – high blood pressure connection by pumping salt into mice. Yes, in mice. He pumped 15,000 times the regular sodium intake of a normal human being.

Of course, that amount of salt is going to kill a mouse!

The real fact is that science is still trying to figure out if salt actually increases blood pressure or not. Until then, you can enjoy salty food – no problem.

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There are so many of these shitty myths we need to get rid of, because they really are stupid and make you eat horrible stuff and punish your body unnecessarily.

Keep reading, we will bust some more myths in this space.

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