When it comes to knowing your facts in health, the Internet makes it easy both to stay informed or to get misled. It all depends on where you get your health information. If you get it from your friends and relatives and out of forwarded e-mail messages, you’d be surprised to know how often the truth can get hopelessly misinterpreted and distorted as it passes from one person to the next. Being weighed down by health myths, legends and rumors in place of health facts, is more than just an inconvenience, often. It can distract you from doing the right things for your health and get you to do. What is wrong? Let’s clear the air a bit now shall we?
Let’s start with a particularly annoying myth – the one that says that you should stay away from frozen vegetables because they are preserved in chlorine. Now nothing could be farther from the truth. Baby carrots and other frozen proteins are certainly rinsed in chlorine solution to help kill E. coli, salmonella or other disease-causing bacteria. They do this with all pre-cut vegetables and fruit salads. This doesn’t mean that they are preserved in them. That makes them perfectly safe to eat. Come to think of it, the FDA requires that all meat that arrive at the supermarket be treated the same way.
People who have a real thing for losing fat, somehow believe that if they go out for a good stiff round of exercise every morning before they have even eaten, that they will burn fatter that they would after a meal. There actually is a certain amount of truth to this. When you do something like go out for a jog, your body gets its energy by burning fat calories and carbohydrate calories. People who collect their health facts rather casually, look at this and wonder if burning fat calories a lot more may help them slim down faster. Running on an empty stomach, for instance, your body would simply turn to burning fat and carbohydrates, since your empty stomach has no carbohydrates. However, that’s not going to make you any thinner. What matters for losing weight is that you burn calories. You really don’t need to differentiate between one source of those calories and another.
Some people, when they buy a nice box of chocolates for their mothers, find them protesting that they are afraid the chocolates will send them closer to diabetes. And of course, the children who buy the chocolate, feel unappreciated. Surely, it can’t be such a simple connection that can be made between sugar and diabetes, is it? It isn’t like alcohol and liver trouble or fat and heart trouble, is it? It may not be that direct a link; but new research that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that women who have a lot of sugar in their diet, whether or not they are overweight, really do seriously bring themselves closer to diabetes. Sometimes, that health rumors really do turn out to be health facts.