Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2515

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Quit looking for a miracle cure
The Telegram (St John's Newfoundland Canada) 2005 Sep 15
http://thetelegram.com/news.aspx?pname=Lifestyles§ion=Lifestyles

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments: Here is a good bit of advice about health fads.

Full text:

Thursday, September 15, 2005
Quit looking for a miracle cure
By The Telegram

Walnuts. It’s walnuts now, the latest food that may help prevent cancer. Scant months ago, it was red wine – in moderation – that might do something for your heart. Because the French, see, the French have rich diets and red wine and an apparent paucity of heart conditions.
There was a scientific paper that once suggested that hard cheeses might actually be good for your teeth – not because the calcium would strengthen them by coursing through your blood, but because tiny particles of calcium could adhere to the surface of your teeth and sacrifice themselves to whatever decay might otherwise attack your enamel.

We are surrounded, day after day, by an ever-increasing amount of health information. It bleeds out of the Web, drools out of television and regularly erupts from newspapers and news services across the country. Many outlets have reporters completely dedicated to health reporting, and those reporters are regularly on the hunt for the latest scrap of information.

And it’s not just reporting: on American television, especially during the evening news, you can see a dizzying array of products and drugs to improve the quality of your life, followed by an even more dizzying array of possible side-effects – and isn’t it just downright amazing how many drugs “may cause nosebleeds, nausea and dry mouth?”

The fact is that, as a culture, we spend an incredible amount of time worrying about our health, and not near enough time doing anything about it. We eat the things we like to eat, smoke if we want to, exercise when we feel like it, and then lean on pharmacological solutions – or a host of last-ditch solutions – to solve many of the problems we have created for ourselves.

Sure, we’re overweight and have high blood pressure and don’t exercise enough – but then again, scientists have found out about walnuts, and who knows what they’ll discover next?

One thing that they are bound to discover is that there is no easy answer, no miracle pill that will make up for all of our excesses. And excesses there are – despite all the scientific and medical discoveries there have been in the past decade, we’re larger and heavier than ever, and facing a very different old age than the last generation.

In the end, you do have to live life – but the better you live it, the better it will be.

We live in a magnificent and beautiful province, surrounded by an outdoors that’s without parallel in much of this country. We have to make the most of that, every single day. Walk some, or run, or at least get outside and breathe the air. And don’t expect that a scientist will be able to solve all your sins with his or her next scientific paper.

There is a simple piece of advice, and one that has nothing to do with walnuts. All things in moderation – simple words, and an adage worth living by. You’ll be doing yourself a favour.