I’m not a physician, nor have I ever played one on TV. Even so, I’m confident I can recognize bad health advice when I see it.
Quck
How can I be so sure? Simple. Bad advice tends to follow a well-established formula. The article usually opens with a ‘shocking statistic’. You know the sort of thing:
75% of the US population have a Vitamin D deficiency.
Sometimes statistics like this - for example, 74% of men in America fall between overweight or obese fn- 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 could cancer. Unfortunately, there was no prize for that hypothesis. It would be nice to replace chemotherapy chairs with orange juice stands.
The really quackish writers will assume that if you get that far through an article, they have you hooked, more or less. So they set the hook by pulling the big finish — “Big Pharma knows this is true, but they won’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.