Health scaremongering used to be mostly targetted at women, but now it's muscled gym bros telling you to be afraid of using dryer sheets, and that spinach shrinks your balls.
I guess it's not surprising. Gym bros are suckers for pseudoscience. You can get them to believe anything if you just link a scientific paper that is even tangentially related to the subject, they won't read it.
Gym bros are mostly very insecure men who think that being strong and looking healthy will make people like them and women attracted to them. They are very vulnerable to being sucked in by pseudoscience.
The problem is that these talking points have the ability to be repackaged and recirculated by people who appear to be less insufferable and more trustworthy.
What's with the rise of "the gubmint is trying to trick you into veganism and they're hiding that burgers are a secret superfood!" types?
but even I know that if someone must have meat: Salmon, skinless chicken, or hunted meat is usually your best bet health-wise. That's not even mentioning that little to no meat is practically a staple of Blue Zones and vegetarianism has been proposed as far back as Plato in Republic.
Not to mention the vegan industry is a fledgling compared to the meat industry. Climate change industry is full of grifters and even headed by oil companies because it’s more profitable to appear like you’re progressing while stripping the copper wires before rebuilding the same house. The government is in no rush to promote anything that goes against the existing industries so long as the donations keep coming.
but even I know that if someone must have meat: Salmon, skinless chicken, or hunted meat is usually your best bet health-wise.
Reactionaries are against Big Pharma but will gulp down meat that’s injected with 500 preservatives and steroids. Most americans buy guns as consumption and don’t hunt
The number needed to treat for cardiovascular benefit is pretty high, so it's a pretty marginal difference for your relative.
1 in 50 for higher risk and 1 in 150 for lower risk individuals, over five years of treatment.
However at the population level, applying that two percent reduction means for 10,000,000 people you're looking at 200,000 less heart attacks (and similar events) over five years.
I think it's important for information to be communicated transparently - if your doctor tells you that taking statins will reduce your risk of dying from a heart attacks by half, and elsewhere you see that only 1 in 50 people over five years benefits, then a normal response would be to lose trust in the conventional medical establishment (even though both those statements can be true).
I hear "sugar bad, cholesterol fine" spiel all the time from reactionaries. Honestly it could be true, as I have looked into it. It's just coming from Joe Rogan types, so I can't be bothered to look into it.
Some people have an issue producing the enzymes that break down excess cholesterol, most people don't. Even on a zero cholesterol diet your liver will synthesize a shitload of it because it's a critical molecule within cell membranes. Obviously if you can't break it down then it will accumulate naturally and that's going to be bad. If you don't have any issue with those pathways then it's fine to intake a lot, you'll just recycle it into something else.
Yeah, this is how a lot of conspiracy grift shit works. They give you something true (sugar industry propaganda exists, medications aren't perfect) and then feed you their bullshit (cholesterol isn't even bad) so you'll buy something from them (fake medication that will probably kill you or rocks or something idk)
Refined sugar is bad for you. Foods high in cholesterol are associated with negative health outcomes, it probably isn't actually due to the cholesterol, but avoiding cholesterol and therefore those foods is a good thing.
There are lots of unpopped kernels of truth to this.
The sugar industry absolutely did do that bribing; sugar is the most common cause of obesity and related diseases; demonizing fats was the main way nutrition fads of the 80s and 90s went down the wrong track; a lot of the adverse health effects of cholesterol are specific to factory-farmed meat; every medication and treatment comes at a cost and it's not a good idea to take them when you don't need them; yet pharmaceutical companies are perfectly glad to expand into new markets; a few hours of sun a day outside of peak intensity is good for you.
Also if more people were and rode bikes, I doubt there would be nearly as much practical use for statins.
Also that extra 3-4 days (if a true statistic)is averaged across the whole population. In fact, it’s more like a bunch of people get no extra time and a handful get years because they aren’t dead from a heart attack (this is a good thing and how population based interventions work).
Even if it doesn't extend your life, it could prevent a heart attack that doesn't kill you but does damage your quality of life.
Same idea as people who say smoking or drinking just takes off the last worst years of life without acknowledging that your overall health will be worse. Really it's just making the worst years come faster
Imagine believing that ancient people didn’t have medical problems caused by exposure to the sun. Also, there are aspects to it such as the fact that the majority of melanoma cases appear after the age of 60 and average life expectancy has finally risen above that age. I realize the post just opens up with the one off line about the sun, but it’s really ignorant and I keep seeing this talking point.
Imagine believing that ancient people didn’t have medical problems
Honestly this seems like a big thing with these quacks, they assume everyone Pre-industrialization was some sort of Adonis Chad. Clearly modern medicine must be a load of shit cuz wouldn't have humanity all died out if were really this fragile?
Yeah let's ignore the high rates of infant mortality and how many historical figures died of diseases that can be cured with over the counter drugs now. There probably are SOME aspects of ancient living that are healthier than today but let's not ignore the accomplishments of modern medicine.
My mom dated this ultra conservative religious former cop. A conversation came up where we talked about how parts of Genesis don't make sense, specifically people's ages. IIRC, its something like Noah being 300 when he died. He said "it's because people were healthier back then."
I've hear similar stuff like how before the flood, more water in the atmosphere caused people to live longer. This cuckoo shit is all up in protestant discourse so they can rationalize a literal interpretation.
I know this would deeply upset the X (the everything app ™️) people to learn, but human skin pigmentation, the thing they use to determine worthiness of life, is basically tied directly to adaptations to protect us from sun burns and DNA damage caused by them. Damage that can lead to... cancer.
I dunno, I just find that amusing. They're denying the sun causes cancer, meanwhile humans separated across continents literally adapted, changed skin color, as a result of the thing they don't believe is real.
(And yes I know skin pigmentation also causes changes in vitamin D synthesis. It's kind of a balancing act between synthesizing vit D and protecting cells from UV radiation. But these dingdongs probably don't understand or accept any of this, so, 🤷♂️ )
while i don't doubt a third of americans over 40 are on statins, if a fifth of those were having serious injuries, it would be an undeniable phenomenon. i have only ever heard of people saying a certain formulation worked better than another at controlling their cholesterol.
anyway, sugar is pretty fucked up and the lobby has successfully derailed the most common sense nutrition labeling info in the states. next time you look at a nutrition label in the US, notice which component in the "amount per serving" lacks a "Percent of Daily Value". even though salt, with much lobbying effort, managed to get it's % of DV based on an "Tolerable Upper Intake Level" as opposed to the actual "Recommended Daily Allowance" which is what other components are labeled as, good old sugar is straight up blank. one would imagine there must be a generally recommended intake amount for sugar. couldn't they just do the simple calculation for us like they do with everything else? i mean, didn't the WHO in 2002 say something about excessive sugar intake being a massive problem and recommend doing exactly this?erroneous!
The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.
The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.
anyway, i legit never noticed it or learned about any of this until i was in a human nutrition class and we did a unit on labeling, dietary recommendations, and the regulatory environment. in retrospect, this material seems like the kind of thing that should be taught in elementary school, but a comprehensive understanding being present in younger people developing food habits would probably be devastating for capital. especially in the wake of them pulling so many strings to stay out of the spotlight here. the real legacy of the tobacco lobbying efforts is how the strategy of corruption was refined to perfection and made available as a playbook to other formations (fossil fuel, industrial foods, etc).
anyway, after 4 decades of eating typical, common food in the US, most everybody's endocrine system is sputtering because the pancreas has been getting mule kicked 3 times a day times 15,000 days trying to moderate these incredible spikes. the body is also far less capable of covering over horrible habits anymore, the keyfob for the Lambo has been disabled, please enjoy your life in this somewhat tempermental 1993 Toyota Previa that you take into the mechanic every 3-6 months for routine diagnostics and must-have inputs that you can only buy from them. this sudden dependence makes people very upset and scrambling for a way out for those halcyon days when they could enjoy things they liked and didn't have to take some assortment of pills to not die horribly.
Does a recommended sugar intake make sense? The source of sugar is going to make a big difference in digestion and metabolism, even the difference between eating a whole fruit and juicing that same fruit even though the sugar amount and type is identical. Metrics based dieting can easily mislead.
We're struggling with this kind of shit with my father in law. His friends are complete fucking conspiracy nutters who are trying to convince him that medicine is a scam. Every day is like fighting with a toddler to eat their veggies, because he has some new argument about how the body can fix itself and that his meds are making the problem worse. It's dark, because I know that because of this, we're going to lose him years earlier than we would have otherwise.
If he’s american, then he’s slightly correct because American sunscreen is outdated and exaggerate their protection claims. It’s better than nothing, but if you actually want to spend your money on working products, look into sunscreen developed in EU countries, Japan, Korea, and Australia.
Crimethinc published a book that claimed you could totally treat diabetes dietarily with no insulin. They didn't go into any details on HOW to do this, or provide any resources for further study, but claimed you totally could.
And I mean, maybe yeah, but it's probably hard as fuck and you maybe shouldn't be telling 14 year old crust punks to give it a go without any further information.
Im pretty sure some degree of sunlight exposure is good for you though, it literally cured all the spots of psoriasis I had when I spent last summer tanning
Also I'm pretty sure they are right and sugar has been greatly implicated in heart disease
Also "cholesterol is not a villain" is a 100% correct statement, there's good and bad cholesterol and it's literally something you need to live, they're a vital component of cell membranes
Cholesterol IN FOOD is ok. Cholesterol in your bloodstream is often not depending on quantity and type, LDL: bad, HDL: good. Sugar can be converted into LDL in the liver. High levels of cholesterol can lead to inflammation and then calcification and thickening of arterial walls.
Given the obesity statistics and average US diet everything the poster said was technically correct but they just fumble and blame it all on statins. Lol I bet if you're on statins you've probably been eating too maby treats all your life. Although, in some cases people just naturally over produce LDL in the liver.
Essentially, "fat free" is and was a health exaggeration. Just maybe not for people without a gall bladder lol
well you see people with high cholesterol who take statins also have a bunch of other issues, which has nothing to do with my pure carnivore fiber-less hamburger (only good plants go on those) slop diet and everything to do with the medication
Thanks for the answer comrade but Im still rather new around these parts and I dont know who he was before he turned into anything and that larouche is a fed that incites others to attack leftist orgs
IIRC (and I may not), statins were once a miracle drug, have been overprescribed to people with low risk, and they will of course not prevent heart attacks in people who aren't at high risk and they increase your chances to get diabetes because they prevent (natural) insulin from working as well. Even in groups that have high risk, you need to give the drug to like 100 people to prevent a single heart attack and even these people are far more likely to get diabetes from them than have a heart attack prevented.
The person who typed this has to be like 45...50+ years old. I suppose they could be potentially younger with rare, for the age, heart conditions, but if they were, based on their apparent total ignorance of medicine and rejection of it, they'd probably be dead already. Like imagine having type 1 diabetes and rejecting insulin in your teens or 20s because you watched too much RFK Jr or Jimmy Dore (lmao. at watching them, not the medical condition). You'd just die. So, probably some boomer or old gen Xer having a tantrum. And all the other boomies are smashing keyboards making grug noises in agreement.
I'm as critical of western medicine as anyone, shit like this pisses me off so much because it steers us away from returning to a social model that is really what we need