Complex Numbers

Not So Facts

Here's the thing: the Doctor Who special is supposed to magically appear on Disney+ at 12:55 pm EST today. Working backwards, then, I'll have to start drinking before that time in order to be pleasantly buzzed when it starts. Sure, it's on streaming, and I can watch it anytime, but it's Doctor Who, so that's not going to happen. Now, then. In order to start drinking before noon, it's necessary for me to get all my daily activities done early. This includes blogging. Not trusting myself to wake up early (i.e., before 10 am), I figured I'd better get this done now.

Apropos of nothing, then, because that's what happens when you pick at random from a list, we have this highly informative article from, of course, Cracked.

    Four Health Fads That Are Just Research Errors  

I'd call any health fad an error, research or otherwise. But okay, let's see which ones they're talking about.

We’re probably about six months from the billionaires finding out about Elizabeth Bathory and bathing in the blood of slain maidens, but the rest of us have to rely on science for our health needs.

I was hoping we'd be about six months from billionaires finding out about the French Revolution, but I've been hoping that for way longer than six months. It's kind of like fusion power, which is 20 years away and has been since at least the 1970s.

Unfortunately, the science is not as, well, scientific as we’d like it to be.

Food science? Rife with errors? Quick, fetch my fainting couch.

4. The ‘French Paradox’ Is Mostly Explained by Death Certification and Time

If you’re thinking what we were thinking, we regret to inform you that the so-called “French paradox” is not a thought experiment involving an evil twin who wears a pencil mustache and striped shirt.

You forgot the beret.

It refers to the idea that French people are all walking around eating bread and cheese, smoking cigarettes and generally being French without the ill health effects that doing any of those things has in other Western countries. This has historically been attributed to their high consumption of red wine, which has been theorized to have mysterious cholesterol-removing properties, which should have been sus from the start because if wine was magical vitality juice, every fiftysomething mom would be Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.

I knew someone who bought into the "red wine" thing, hook, line, and sinker, to mix metaphors beyond recognition. He chugged a gallon of the stuff a day and, as you might imagine, it wasn't the good stuff. No idea if he was buried or cremated.

It turns out, however, that there’s plenty of deaths from cardiac and other cheese-caused events in France — they’re just not reported.

So, I guess no one cœur.

... sigh. One of my other daily routines is learning French. I should stop making puns in that language until I learn more.

Seriously, though, as someone who lives an alcohol-positive lifestyle: drink if you like it, not because you think it's some sort of medicine.

3. The ‘Small Plates’ Guy Was Fired for Fraud

If you’ve ever furtively glanced at the weight-loss tips on the back of a container of low-fat ice cream as you slowly eat the whole thing, you’ve heard of the “smaller plates” theory. It comes from a study that claimed people eat more when using larger dishware, therefore using smaller plates will trick your brain into being satisfied with less food because we’re all apparently some kind of caveman baby person.

I quit eating ice cream (except very rarely in a restaurant) long ago. This wasn't for health reasons, or because I don't like it, but on general principles; they started sneakily reducing the quantity in a container to trick people into thinking the price hadn't gone up. Not to mention using the absolute bare minimum of actual "cream" to be legally called "ice cream." You think (I hate portmanteaux in general and this one in particular, but) shrinkflation is a new thing? Ha.

Eighteen of his papers were retracted, one of them twice, including the one that claimed people ate more pasta from larger bowls. Subsequent research has confirmed that our tummies can indeed tell the difference between 17 and 70 french fries, no matter how big the carton.

Still, I'd guess that eating off of smaller plates is better than the fancy restaurants who put tiny portions on enormous platters. What's up with that shit, anyway?

2. We Think Spinach Is a Good Source of Iron Due to a Scientific Misinterpretation

No, we’re not about to tell you that a misplaced decimal was responsible for the myth that spinach contains tons of iron. (Although we totally have in the past — sorry!)

As I've urged repeatedly, don't get your science from Cracked. Or do, but just don't expect it to all be true.

It turns out there was some confusion in the research of the 19th-century German chemist typically blamed, Erich von Wolff, but it had nothing to do with a decimal point. His data concerned dried spinach, but that wasn’t clear to future nutritionists.

Gotta say, this is news to me. Not that I expect it to be true or anything.

Since we haven’t yet discovered the kind of monster who eats dried spinach, they assumed he measured fresh spinach, whose iron content is pretty well diluted by all that water and flavor and stuff.

What "flavor?"

Incidentally, a competing hypothesis that I've heard is that iron levels in agricultural soil have decreased over time. Iron doesn't just magically appear in spinach (or any plant); it's taken up from the soil like every other element in a plant. Less iron in the soil = less iron in the leaf.

I have no idea if this holds any water, either. (Pun intended, because spinach is still mostly water, which can be observed when you dump six cups of the stuff into a frying pan and it gets cooked down to about a thimbleful.)

1. ‘Blue Zones’ Are Probably Just Areas With Lots of Pension Fraud

For those who aren’t familiar, “blue zones” are both a great nickname for your testicles and pockets of communities around the world that boast an unusually high number of people who live to be 100 or even beyond 110.

Ah, the inevitable dick joke.

If you really want to live to be 100, though, the true secret is to be born somewhere that doesn’t keep good records of such things and/or study up on identity theft. Presto, you’re 100!

I also assume this sort of thing whenever an article pops up about a 35-year-old dog or cat.

Whenever officials start digging deeper into blue zones, a whopping percentage of its oldsters suddenly disappears. And we do mean whopping: Japan lost 82 percent of its centenarians overnight. Okinawa isn’t even the healthiest city in Japan. If you want to adopt some part of the Japanese lifestyle, try their beer. You won’t live longer, but you’ll die happier.

Which is what I've been saying.