My colleagues at work show interesting attitudes towards health. Some always need to be right and make others wrong (not prove wrong, just make wrong), others always spread their doubts everywhere and at the same time are very fatalistic about health - saying it's all in the genes and that everything is or can be unhealthy, so you might as well smoke.
It's funny. When I say that I take a lot of vitamins, they try to make me stop it because they heard bad things about vitamins. But at the same time, these are the people who eat unhealthy food at McDonald's and drink alcohol almost every weekend until they get silly. Who talks about those health risks?
At some point I got reminded of my grandmother when one colleague said:"Too much vitamin consumption causes soft bones". Okay... that is the argument killer there. Once you hear such a sentence, you can basically walk away because nothing is going to stop the other one from thinking what they want to think. It's not like you can say "okay, who said that and what's your source?".
And why does it remind me of my grandmother? Because my grandmother also had her "wisdom words" ready all the time. You got a headache? That means you must eat (and nothing else). Oh yeah... I'm not surprised actually that most people in my family are overweight... or wait, isn't that just the genes' "fault"?
These are the things I noticed when it comes to potentially healthy things in a society that is the fattest in the whole of Europe:
-it's always important to voice concerns about changes, even if people's health deteriorates year after year
-you must always come up with something to prove the other person wrong to boost your ego and bring the other person down to the ground to your own level, especially if the other person is reporting improvements with his/her way of doing things.
-you must always believe the media while proving your point even though you know they have reasons for what they say and are not seeking the truth necessarily.
When I weighed 15 kilos more than I do now, I made all the typical mistakes I was taught to make by this society. I did the jogging and drank a glass of grape juice right after that. I ate the whole grain noodles because they are soooo healthy and all the famous sportsmen eat them (or don't they?). Yeah, and of course I never lost weight because all I ran off my body came back to me in the form of sugars. And furthermore, my parents never protected me from bad food when I was a kid.
Here are some questions to consider:
-Why would I not consume extra vitamins in a country that fails at health science?
-What makes factory-produced noodles better or "safer" than the stuff that is in fruits?
-Why is the recommended vitamin intake so drastically different from one country to another?
-Why does the mythical creature called eskimo never die of "carbohydrate insufficiency (sugar deficiency)" although they only eat meat and fish, and why does that eskimo not know heart diseases?
-Why is it always dangerous in the media to consume vitamins and lose weight fast, but it's never dangerous to eat fast food, smoke or drink?
-Why do we as a species even exist today if our ancestors in the stone age had 20-30 times the amount of (dangerous!!!!) vitamin intake that we have today?And how could they survive without flour, noodles, processed rice and potatoes in most areas?
By the way, there are stories of success that I read about online. Like the story of a female doctor with multiple sclerosis who came back from the wheelchair and was able to ride a bike again. All because of healthy living.
But of course, only good stories are not enough, otherwise every religion would claim to be right... oh wait, they already do that. No... there are also scientific results that document the health benefits of vitamins. Lots of them. But of course, if you only use the ones where things went wrong and not analyse what went wrong and why, then of course you could say that vitamins are dangerous.
And to put things right, some vitamins can be dangerous. On Wikipedia, I read about a guy who drank himself to death with several litres/gallons of carot juice every day. Or some polar expedition guys who ate polar bear liver. Yeah, they actually died and it was the vitamins' "fault"...so shame on me and my satanistic attempts to convince you otherwise.
What it always comes down to is that every single person or company in this world always has a reason besides the truth to say something.
-Ego boost
-profit
-fears of an industry getting extinct
Such industries might be: Sugar industry, flour industry, pharmaceutical industry.
Now sit down somewhere and think about who writes the news stories and how it's all connected. And one more thing: Think about who funds whose campaigns, what those campaigns might be and who these people are who need campaigns... it has something to do with democracy, to give you a hint.
