Almost Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong
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As one grows up, there are certain nuggets of wisdom passed down from parent to child. Don't eat the yellow snow. Wait a half hour after eating before entering the pool. Look both ways before crossing the street. Outside of fad diets and snake oil cranks there seems to be this assumed core of Life Best Practices that we all just kind of accept.

That is, of course, until today when a series of headlines might have you questioning everything you've come to know as decent ways to function as a human. Let's walk through these staggering revelations.

Young People Don't Use Bar Soap Anymore

This morning, CNN reported on some shocking new market research: Bar soap sales declined some 5 percent over the past five years. Not exactly alarming, right? Well, some 60 percent of 18-24 year-olds (millennials!) think that bar soap is very gross, just sitting there accumulating germs which you then rub on yourself. Conflate that with 55 percent of consumers — for those keeping score at home that's everyone who buys things — who think bar soap is just kinda inconvenient. It can slip out of your hands, it's hard to get a lather going and then there's that aforementioned germ problem — three things that make the bar of soap look very stupid now.

[CNN]

Humans Aren't Designed To Exercise All The Time

Ever since the industrial revolution brought about the invention of "free time," humanity has struggled with determining the best way to exercise. But what if we were never destined to work out? What if we aren't supposed to subject our bodies to the constant grind of trying to stay fit?

As Jonathan Shaw argues in Harvard Magazine, early hunter-gatherer humans did not need to work out. Sure, in order to survive they needed to chase down prey, walk around gathering berries and what not. But thanks to the body's ability to adapt to stress, they only got as much exercise as was needed to survive.

Spend a few weeks chasing down a wooly mammoth and eventually you are your fellow hunters will be strong enough to eventually kill that thing. Boom, you're done. Getting any stronger just means your body needs to expend more energy to keep itself going. Ideally this is how your body wants to work: Just chill in a weak-but-energy-efficient state; when it's time to eat the stresses involved in trying to find food will make you strong enough until your find food; resume chilling.

Today's humans operate at extremes: either eating too much with little activity, or working out too much and having to eat a lot to "maintain" fitness.

[Harvard Magazine]


Smiling Won't Make You Happy

"Fake it until you make it," might be a bland platitude peddled by frauds everywhere, but at least you could point to the work of psychologist Fritz Strack and definitively say that, yes, if you pretend long enough then anything is possible. It's one of those bedrock findings like gravity or the germ theory of disease.

That is, of course, until today. In Daniel Engber's mammoth examination of the current reproducibility crisis surrounding Strack's work there is one simple, alarming fact to pull from all of this: Smiling when you are sad will not make you happy. Simply put, researchers followed Strack's experimental design down to the letter — they literally used the same pens — and could not reproduce his results.

But read deeper into Engber's story and you'll come across a more alarming prospect: That one of the core tenets of science — that one researcher should be able to conduct your experiment and get the same results — is not exactly black and white? Even with eight different labs unable to reproduce Strack's results, the influential psychologist still has faith in his findings. Instead, he snipes at small inconsistencies. Which begs the question: If multiple research labs can't reproduce one of psychology's most famous experiments, who do we even believe? I suppose we'll just have to grin and bear it.

[Slate]


And You're Probably Doing Something Wrong With Your Teeth

Dental care is probably the area most ripe for Bad Received Wisdom. The New York Times's Aaron E. Carroll dove into some of the most commonly-accepted tooth care guidelines, and found that they're mostly all wrong and don't even matter.

Daily flossing? Doesn't do squat. Yearly dental X-rays? Pretty much useless if your teeth are fine. Brushing your teeth isn't important, but using fluoride toothpaste is. Electric toothbrushes are better but by so little it almost doesn't matter. As far as the studies have shown, the only thing seeing your dentist every six months is pad his bottom line. 

In fact, the only definitive thing Carroll found was that there is a shocking lack of evidence for the basic things your dentist recommends. Which isn't the worst thing in the world. Flossing more, using a fancy toothbrush regularly and seeing a dentist twice annually isn't going to hurt your teeth. It seems no one has really questioned if we really need to, though.

[The New York Times]

 

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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