Consuming diet products will give me diabetes! Fried food is cancer in a meal-shape disguise! MSG (monosodium glutamate) causes Alzheimer’s! Gluten rich foods are the cause of obesity! Sugar killed my relative! Food coloring and other additives in my kid’s food gave them ADHD… It is so tempting to keep reading after a headline like that. What was the thing that did this and is it a potential threat to me, or the people I love?
Everyone who starts studying science is taught to question everything they hear. For a lot of people, this is counter-intuitive. While growing up, our parents had all the answers. You asked them why leaves change colors in the fall, why the sky is blue or why we eat.
Your parents probably said something about photosynthesis and chlorophyll, how light is made up out of colors and that we get energy from our food. All these answers are perfectly fine but at the same time did not encourage us to question further. Because our parents (obviously) knew everything, we did not ask them; ‘how do you know this?’ ‘Show me the research that says this is how it works’ and ‘Are there any recent discoveries that might question the knowledge that we thought undisputed and correct?’.
Later on, you go to school, study all the things in your books and you try to make that knowledge your own. You learn about history, current affairs and you watch the news and read articles that you find on the internet. Media at some point take over from your teachers and becomes an important source of information and knowledge.
Media
There are so many different sources of news that are competing for our attention. Titles and headlines have to get your attention first before you read the rest of the article. After you decide that the headline is intriguing enough, you continue to the actual article. You read it, assume the information is correct and form an opinion about what you just read. But how much did this piece of information tell you? Was everything you just read true? Was the information complete or was this just a small part of a large puzzle? How do you decide if this news item was a snapshot or if it is all there is to it?
Two sides to every coin
It is very hard to filter all the snapshots that come across your paths through your news feeds. You cannot know everything about every subject, so you trust researchers and scientists to figure things out and the media to keep you updated on what is going on in the world. The flow of information between the scientists, media and yourself is not always without bumps in the road.
An often used (and my favorite) example of how misleading a certain way of formulating information can be, is the information on DHMO (Dihydrogen monoxide).
Through this flyer and the website on the subject (www.dhmo.org, created several years after this flyer was released), there was a clear call for action to ban DHMO, which is portrayed as a dangerous substance. A large number of people joined the cause that called for a ban on DHMO. When reading the flyer, it is not unreasonable to take a closer look at the mentioned substance. If you would, however, you would learn that DHMO is better known as ‘water’ which, as we all know, is essential to our existence and should not be classified as dangerous. The same hoax was revived on several occasions and every time there are uninformed people making statements about the issue that showed they did not know what they were dealing with and yet took it upon themselves to voice their opinion publicly. (If you would like to read more about this, click here)
Obviously, the people who supported the ban of DHMO did not question what they were told. If they did, they would have opened a book or checked online what the chemical properties of DHMO are, and they would have found out that they were reading about water.
However, there are also several cases where things went the other way. We were told that substances were safe to consume, even good for us and years later this turned out not to be the case.
Another example is Thalidomide, which was prescribed as a painkiller, sleeping pill or a drug for pregnant women to help them get rid of their morning sickness. The drug turned out to cause deformations in the children born from women who had taken the drug during pregnancy. (If you would like to read more, click here)
So what is the solution?
All over the world scientists are trying to find solutions to problems and answers to questions. They verify each other’s work and share the information they find with the world. Experiments are not done in one day, especially when it comes to figuring out what happens to our bodies when we eat certain foods or use products for a longer period. The results of the experiments have to be analyzed, checked and analyzed again. Scientists who do this research know how important it is to be thorough because of things that happened in the past (like with Thalidomide), and they do not want similar situations to happen again.
While we wait for definite answers, it is hard to make choices when it comes to what products to use, what habits to adopt and especially what to eat. The media often give us with conflicting information leaving us to decides what to do when you could get diabetes from consuming sugar, but eating and drinking sugar replacements might also cause illness.
In my opinion, a good plan is to stick to life with a lot of variation, especially when it comes to the things I have heard some rumblings about. If there are unhealthy habits, products, and foods that I am integrating into my life, at least they will not end up in my daily routine. I will continue to read all the articles that look interesting without blindly believing everything I read. Most importantly; I will google dihydrogen monoxide before I start a petition to ban the substance from my shopping cart.
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Featured Image of Apple by: U.S. Department of Agriculture. For more pictures https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/
References
Anneloes Silvertand says
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