The List of Health Fallacies Continues to Grow
Being mumble mumble years old, I’ve lived through dozens, perhaps even hundreds of claims about what is or is not good for your health, only to see many of those claims turn out to be blatantly, even ridiculously wrong. The latest is the standing desk. That’s what got this train of thought started.
A few years ago someone had one of those “Aha!” moments. People who have a sedentary lifestyle generally have shorter life spans and poorer health than those who are physically active, they thought. So that must mean that sitting at a desk in an office all the time must be bad for your health, they thought. So we need to throw all of our traditional desks and chairs out and get desks that make us stand up all the time. You’ll burn more calories, get more exercise and generally it will improve your health. And almost immediately many people jumped on the bandwagon, especially the desk manufacturers who saw the opportunity to scam sell standing desks to company managers who dearly love to torment and torture their employees and otherwise make their lives a living hell.
(Sidenote: Even worse is the abomination known as the walking desk. This is a desk where you not only have to stand up, but it also has a treadmill built into it so you have to walk while you’re trying to work. There is a special circle in Hell just for people who come up with this kind of crap. At least I hope there is. Right alongside of the same bunch who came up with the “poverty simulator” the school district I worked at forced all employees to attend where underpaid school employees who were, in fact, already poor, were forced to pretend they were even more poor for an entire afternoon.)
But those of us who have ever worked in the grocery store or retail store environment would have immediately laughed you out of the room if anyone had bothered to ask us. One of the leading causes of workman’s compensation claims by employees at grocery stores and other retail businesses is physical injury caused by… Guess what? Yeah, standing for prolonged periods of time. Lower back injuries, knee injuries, ankle and foot injuries, deep vein thrombosis, other circulation problems… The list goes on and on. New studies indicate that working at a standing desk does nothing to improve cardiovascular health and can even cause significant health problems.
So standing/walking desks join a long list of other nonsense that have made their way into the “it’s good for you” world of nonsense. Here are a few others.
Coffee has long been claimed to cause all sorts of health problems ranging form sleeplessness to cancer. While it will indeed keep you from sleeping, the rest is complete nonsense. We now know that moderate coffee consumption has many significant health benefits. It seems to help to prevent some types of cancers. It seems to prevent or at least delay or make less serious some kinds of dementia.
Stretching before exercising? Doesn’t seem to do any good at all. It might feel good, might seem to make sense in a way, but in actual clinical studies it did not reduce the number of injuries when done before strenuous exercise. In fact, in some cases stretching before doing proper warmups sometimes actually caused injuries.
Milk? All that stuff about how good it is for you? Yeah, well… Sorry, no. Milk does provide a lot of nutrition, but all of that nutrition can be obtained from other sources easily. You don’t need milk. You certainly don’t need it for bone health. In fact, studies have shown that people who consume large amounts of milk actually have more fractures and bone health issues than those who drink little or no milk.
How about cholesterol? Eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on your blood cholesterol levels so avoiding those foods does little or nothing to reduce your blood cholesterol levels. The reason why is that your body needs cholesterol. Needs it so much that it makes its own. There are some exceptions for some people with a particular genetic heritage, but generally speaking dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol. A diet high in saturated fats can increase your blood cholesterol, but except for a minority of people who have that specific genetic situation, eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol.
We all know that a glass of wine occasionally is a good thing, right? Wrong. So many people bought into that nonsense that even my doctor was advising me to have one or two drinks a week even though I can’t stand the stuff. He, and they, were wrong. A more careful examination of the data used to indicate that there was some kind of health advantage to drinking certain types of alcohol like red wine has proven that those benefits were illusory. All that guff about the antioxidants in wine being good for you? Yeah, the problem with that is that for you to get enough of those antioxidants to do any good you’d have to drink gallons of the stuff every day. What it boils down to is that there is no health benefit from even moderate consumption of any type of alcoholic beverage, and alcohol consumption at any level causes an increased risk of cancer.
But enough. I’m getting bored and I’m sure you are too.
Coming Up!
Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I’m still fiddling around with stuff, but I’ve been so busy with gardening and other summer stuff I haven’t had time to do much writing. Plus my laziness index seems to have gone up significantly lately, so there’s that.
I’ve got several projects in the works. I’m building an 8 legged robot because why not.
I’ve also decided I hate my bedroom clock so I’ve decided to build my own clock radio using a clock module I got from Ukraine that uses some kind of Cold War era electro luminescent numeric display salvaged from some kind of old Russian hardware and an AM/FM radio kit that comes as a bare circuit board that I have to put together myself because, well, also why not?
I still need to get my off center fed dipole up before the snow flies. I like the mag loop antenna a lot but I need the OCFD not just for amateur radio but also for short wave broadcast band listening. And to get that up I have to dig a hole to put in a 16 foot post, pour cement and… I did mention I’m lazy, right?
grouchyfarmer 
When I was a kid, we had our own poverty simulator…it was called “Reality”… and we had our own poverty “Stimulator” too … it was called my dad’s job as a shovel-wielding grave digger in a cemetery that earned him a wage that was about 70 percent lower than the prevailing wage at the time ….but we got by by learning to avoid the word, “Buy” as often as possible. (We even “Borrowed chickens and loaves of bread from helpful and more prosperous neighbors.) — I never saw a “Standing” desk but i have seen some desk stands ….I know a really fat preacher man who put in a disability claim from the “damage” done to him from sitting on his rear end expecting other people to provide for his every need for a couple of years —(Frog on a lilly pad waiting for flies to drift by within reach) — never had an inkling of actually doing work ….poor thing….still at it because his disability has been on hold for a long time now —-I never had an off center fed dipole but I am sure that if ever I had one, it would have flown the coop by now.
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The whole poverty simulator thing was blatantly insulting from the get-go. Only the support staff, people like the custodians, food service staff, secretaries, etc. were required to attend, which meant that most of them were being paid little more than poverty level wages to begin with. Walker had just got done gutting the public sector unions and I was the union president at the time and all I could do was file a protest letter with the school board, pointing out to them that what they were doing was forcing these people to basically simulate what their lives were already like. There was a huge stink. My letter of protest conveniently was “mislaid”, no one would tell us who actually came up with this brilliant idea or how much it cost the school district to put it on. Basically the whole thing was buried fast and buried deep.
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I wrote a comment but it disappeared.
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It showed up but was attributed to “anonymous”. Word Press strikes again. Sigh…
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Don’t forget eggs….that was my favorite thing to ‘avoid’….never did bacon or coffee or well you get the idea….and I made it to 77 and still going…..Ukraine and luminescent…..Chernobyl? Have a good day chuq
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Ah, yes, eggs. I did forget about those. That is indeed another one we were supposed to avoid, needlessly, as it turned out. Now I’m just waiting for them to find out bacon is really good for us!
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We can only hope….with enough bacon I could eat a bowling ball…..chuq
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Ok, so I have some difficulty with these assesments and data points. I remember when I was around thirty years old I read an article about a study done in Germany that concluded that men that kiss their wives while leaving for work tend to live longer and liver healthier lives. But I have always thought of those studies as somewhat commutative; do men live longer by kissing their wives or are men with that particular genetic proclivity to live longer and they happen to kiss their wives before leaving for work?
Do sedentary people die earlier because they are sedentary – OR – are they genetically predisposed to a sedentary lifestyle and therefore die earlier? Is a standing desk going to change that? I don’t believe so.
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(Grin) You’ve just illustrated how difficult it is to do accurate studies like this. There are often so many different factors to take into account that it is difficult to come up with “clean” data on which to base the studies.
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Hey! I’m mumble mumble years old too!
There are so many things for sale out there, that we had no idea we really really needed. But seem to do just fine doing without them. After watching a stupid commercial the other day, I looked at the wife, and asked her “when was the last time you remember, a commercial prompting you to buy their product?” She thought about it for a sec, she couldn’t remember that happening. Last time I really wanted something I saw on TV, it was the toy in a box of damn cereal. So that’s mumble mumble years since it’s actually worked on me.
Which makes me wonder how and why advertising is as successful as it seems to be.
I can appreciate doing things, just because you can! I have the same problem from time to time. I also share that lazy problem too, here and there. I’m doing that lazy thing today, if I can get away with it.
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I wonder about that kind of thing too. I can’t remember ever being influenced to buy something by advertising alone. In fact I have a mental list of products that I *won’t* buy simply because I find their advertising to be so annoying.
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About T.V. The ads are Subliminal brainwashing:
https://partneringwitheagles.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/media-brainwashing-t-v-subliminal-messages-and-the-advertising-bomb/
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Modern advertising is insidious. For decades they’ve partnered with psychologists and even universities to come up with ways to not only increase the chances of selling things to us, but to even make their products addictive.
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I knew and know sendentary people who have lived a long life and didn’t have much health problems. Genes! Who knows..probably
I believe in doing and eating what you like..just moderation being the key.
I do think obesity is a real problem to avoid and illegal drug use and lots of alcohol and I’d say smoking, although I’ve know people in their 90s who smoked until their last day.
And we all know stress and worry can also affect our health, but I’m not about to give up coffee, chocolate, an occasional steak and a glass of wine(I do like it😊).
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“I’m not about to give up coffee, chocolate, an occasional steak” Good for you! Neither am I.
Genetics plays a huge role in health and longevity. Back in the 70s I knew a guy who smoked unfiltered Chesterfields and started drinking about 8 AM and didn’t stop until about midnight and lived well into his 90s. And I know people who lived the most healthy lifestyle imaginable who dropped dead from heart attacks in their 30s and 40s. I’m 71 and still in reasonably good health and figure that by this point in my life every day I wake up in the morning and I’m not underground I’m doing pretty good. I have no family history. I was adopted as a child and my paperwork seems to have been lost, so I have no idea what my ancestor’s health was like. I did have medical genetic testing done where they looked for markers for potential genetic problems for something like a hundred different possible conditions and that came back negative across the board, thankfully. But who knows?
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agreed –my new (and distressingly young) doctor is convinced that my cholesterol is going to take me out any day now. My previous doctorette had me on three meds to lower my cholesterol, and I can no longer stand without making funny noises, and my memory has somehow walked off without me. My new doctor keeps suggesting I should really really take Crestor (sounds more like toothpaste to me) for my dangerous cholesterol. I just stare him down and tell him a polite but firm “no.” I’m within breathing distance of 80, and still upright and moving, and from what I’ve read cholesterol hasn’t gotten worse, but the medication has…big Pharma has a lot to answer for, and when Im not sure I now google the answers.
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My most hated health fallacies:
1. Naturopathy. I looked into this and wanted it to be true. But it’s a complete fraud with no meaningful health benefits.
2. Homeopathy. A cousin of naturopathy and also complete fraud.
3. Any weight loss/workout device advertised on TV.
4. “Body positivity” movement: A poorly dressed excuse to be fat & out of shape.
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