Popular Myths

“The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement”
Karl R. Popper

Examples of contemporary myths in my opinion are ( in no particular order) :

Too much Vitamin E is dangerous

by Dr. Allan Spreen : …. Miller’s conclusions were based on data gleaned from 19 different clinical trials. He found that men and women who took 400 IUs or more of vitamin E over a seven-year period had a greater chance of dying as compared to non-vitamin E takers.

Most experts take this kind of research—called a meta-analysis—with a grain of salt. It’s very different from a placebo-controlled clinical trial. In a clinical trial, patients would have been selected based on uniform criterion (such as age, overall health, gender, etc.). They would have been randomly divided into groups and given identical amounts of vitamin E or a placebo for a standard amount of time.

But in Miller’s analysis, nothing was standardized. Each set of patients came from studies with different protocols (meaning they took different amounts of vitamin E for differing lengths of time). They even took different types of vitamin E. Some took natural vitamin E (far superior) and some took synthetic vitamin E. Lastly, many of the patients Miller used in his analysis suffered from different types of chronic ailments, such as Alzheimer’s disease and high blood pressure.

Milk is healthy : In one 12-year prospective study published in 1997 in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers studied 77,761 women ages 34 to 59 and found no evidence that higher intakes of cow’s milk reduced fracture incidence. They actually found the opposite: Women who drank two or more glasses of milk daily actually had a significantly higher risk of bone fracture when compared with women who drank less than one glass of milk per week.

Another study compared diet and cancer rates in 42 counties. It showed that milk and cheese consumption are strongly correlated to the incidence of testicular cancer among men ages 20 to 39. Rates were highest in places like Switzerland and Denmark, where cheese is a national food, and lowest in Algeria and other countries where dairy is not so widely consumed …. Butter, meat, eggs, milk, and cheese are implicated in higher rates of hormone-dependent cancers in general, she said. Breast cancer has been linked particularly to consumption of milk and cheese …

Because the dangerous hormones reside in milk fat, drinking fat-free milk is one option.

AGW ( Anthropogenic global warming ) i.e. man-made global warming. What can be stated about the “greenhouse” effect without a doubt is, it increases the planet’s heat capacity (i.e. it holds more energy and thus takes longer to heat up and cool down) and thus makes the climate more gentle and hospitable. Nobody mentions that O is as toxic as CO2 to humans, it only depends on the mixture resp. concentration of these gases.

CLIMATE SCIENCE CORRUPTED

This document is from 2009, but imnsho nothing has happened in the Global Warming discussion that made it less important or obsolete:

climate_science_corrupted  PDF
How the IPCC’s sponsor, the UNEP, and key IPCC individuals have misled Governments into supporting the notion of manmade warming
by John McLean | November 20, 2009

 

The Sun Causing Skin Cancer Myth :

Study: Many Sunscreens May Be Accelerating Cancer

People living closer to the equator suffer the lowest cancer rates. In Europe the Mediterranean Diet certainly also helps.

The Cholesterol Myth :

Statins are not as harmless as THEY want us believe.

From the Cholesterol Skeptics Network:

Have you had any side effects from statin treatment?
If you would like to share your experience on statins with researchers at the University of California in San Diego ,
please email at statinstudy@ucsd.edu
and/or complete an online (paperless) survey at
http://www.statineffects.com

Dietary Fats and Heart Disease

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Big Brain equals High IQ Myth :

British neurologist John Lorber concluded that the loss of nearly all of the cerebral cortex (the late evolutionary part of the brain that gave humans their vaunted mental powers and superiority over other animals) does not necessarily lead to mental impairment. One student at Sheffield University, who had an IQ of 126 and won first-class honors in mathematics, had virtually no brain from a condition called hydrocephalus.

John Lorber Is your brain really necessary? PDF download A colleague at Sheffield University became aware of a young man with a larger than normal head. He was referred to Lorber even though it had not caused him any difficulty. Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and had a first class honours degree in mathematics, he had “virtually no brain”. A noninvasive measurement of radio density known as CAT scan showed the boy’s skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness. The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has no brain.