I’m not a physician, nor have I played one on TV. Even so, I recognize bad health advice when I see it.
And there is plenty of it out there.
How can I be so sure? Bad advice generally follows a well-established formula.
The article usually opens with a shocking statistic that you will feel applies to you.
Over 75% of the US population have a Vitamin D deficiency.
Sometimes statistics like this – for example, 75% of American males are either overweight or obese – are real, so it’s not an absolute indication that the article is worthless. However, I get more suspicious if the following paragraph lists generic symptoms that most of us experience now and then.
Do you feel tired at the end of the day? Do you need coffee to keep you awake during long, boring meetings? If so, you may be affected.
You should start thinking about turning the page or closing the browser window. Especially if the following paragraph references a ground-breaking advance that is being dismissed by the medical establishment, and backs up this claim by citing a long debunked hypothesis put forward by a Nobel Laureate. For example, Linus Pauling, who didn’t just win the Nobel prize, he won it twice, also believed high doses of vitamin C cured cancer. Unfortunately, there was no prize for that hypothesis. Although, it would be nice if we could replace chemotherapy chairs with orange juice stands.
The really quackish writers will assume that if you’ve gotten that far through the article, they have you hooked. So they hit you with
“Big Pharma knows this is true, but they don’t make money on the deal, so they spend millions discrediting our product/method.“
And there you have it. The sales pitch for pH water, miracle cures, detox programs, diet plans, supplements, . . .
At this point, you might have an example of a friend, relative, or even yourself having been cured by drinking alkaline water and only wearing cotton. And I will say great. Glad to hear it. But, my sneaking suspicion is when they were diagnosed with the disease, the afflicted person stopped hitting the booze and eating fast food. They started getting a full eight hours of sleep every night. And spent time taking stock of their life. It wasn’t the latest ‘superfood’ nor the optimal yoga sequence that cured them. It was adopting the adage of their grandparent’s generation — fresh air, good food, exercise, and being nice to others.