Today’s Science is Tomorrow’s Snake Oil
I don’t know what to believe anymore
In the end, it was the eggs that broke me.
I grew up being told that eggs were Satan’s breakfast and that dietary cholesterol was the devil in a yellow dress.
Now, basically out of nowhere because I’m just an (arguably) normal person who’s not privy to the behind-the-scenes workings of the global medical research establishment, eggs are okay.
The Cleveland Clinic even has this article on their website titled Why You Should No Longer Worry About Cholesterol in Food.
I’m sorry, what?
Squeeze me?
Pardonnez-moi?
I have a high school friend on Facebook who documents her fitness journey (I hate using the word “journey” in this context, but the internet has beaten me into submission) at our ripe old age. She can do things now that I couldn’t do even as a teenager.
At one point, she was eating 20 eggs per day. And no, that’s not a typo.
She would post pictures of herself with the eggs, as proof of life, I guess.
My dad ate two eggs every morning his entire adult life and eventually died of heart disease. But he also smoked two packs a day, so you can’t go by that.
My total cholesterol level is not pristine, but I always thought I could rely on the fact that my HDL (or “good” cholesterol) is very high, which is (was) a marker of good coronary health.
I read that good cholesterol bullies bad cholesterol out of your arteries.
Now, not so much:
Very high HDL cholesterol levels don’t give you more protection. Even moderately high levels may not protect you if you have certain health issues or unhealthy lifestyle habits. The good cholesterol can start to act like bad cholesterol and increase your risk of disease in your heart and blood vessels. -WebMD
In the Middle Ages, leeching was all the rage.
And then leeching sort of went away, probably because it’s gross, and also because science tends to think that forward is always better, and therefore the things we thought were true in the past must be bad, even if it turns out that they were, in fact, true.
For example, leeching, which is actually practiced today.
Present-day surgeons occasionally use leeches after reattaching severed body parts, such as fingers, or after tissue graft procedures. — Brittanica.com
Leeches are also used for other conditions and are popular in alternative medicine.
Trust me, you don’t want to see the pictures.
I swam in a friend’s lake once when I was a kid and came out covered in leeches. They were very small, but I’m not sure I’d actually pay money to go through that again.
I don’t know what to believe anymore.
It’s not just the panic and disinformation and conspiracy theories of the COVID age. It’s the sheer speed of medical research and innovation that turns established facts and trust in the medical establishment into so much scrambled eggs, seemingly overnight.
Take autism, for example. This is a condition that didn’t even exist, medically speaking, until the early 20th century, and it has changed and morphed as a diagnosis over the many decades since.
It wasn’t until the invention of the internet, together with more wide-spread screening, that autism became what it is today.
Autism didn’t explode overnight, but that’s the way it feels because of the internet, the flood of information we’re exposed to, and the easy connections made in online groups.
People under stress are looking for answers — any answers. And a brief survey of history makes it simple to equate the rise of childhood vaccination with the spread of autism.
It’s easier to point the finger at a bogeyman, something that can be stopped, rather than accept that autism is simply something that happens — like cancer or MS — we don’t know precisely why, and yes, your family and friends might be next to experience an autism diagnosis and there’s nothing you can do about it.
For more on how conspiracy theories come about, I beg you to read Misbelief by Dr. Dan Wriely, in which he explores the psycho-social origins of conspiracy theories and the spread of disinformation.
The comments about the book on Goodreads are fun because many basically prove his theory.
Yay, internet!
If you need me, I’ll be eating an egg.
In the future we will learn that all the nutritional value in eggs is in the shell. What fools we've been to throw them away.
You nailed it! Every day a new headline can be found that refutes the “study” from the week before. Very few things are breakthroughs. Data depends on inputs and, even more importantly, who does the inputting and how much $$ will be made as a result. I ask myself..Will eating or doing this shorten my life by even one day? If the answer is no…I enjoy it. Moderation in eating those eggs is the key. You can find a study that is pro and con on every subject. 20 eggs a day isn’t moderation. Great piece.