7 Healthy or Unhealthy Things Science Hasn’t Actually Proved
When it comes to our health, we like definitive answers – after all, there’s a lot at stake. We are constant victims of personal bias and should be more skeptical about the things we are most sure of, but we also cannot necessarily seek the truth from others. Crowdsourced conventional wisdom about health does not have a stellar track record—not so long ago, almost all nutrition experts recommended high-carb, low-fat diets for weight loss, for example—and the number of people who abandon health theories based on neither than, too many to count.
We’re usually right in general terms—regular exercise is good for health, being overweight is bad for health, you should get enough sleep—but when you try to be specific, things get hazy. As these seven examples show, our overall health and well-being is a tangled tangle of biological, cultural, and personal influences that are probably impossible to unravel, and many of the things you thought were “healthy” or “unhealthy” turned out not to be.