Tag: myths
Coffee bad, red wine good? Top food myths busted
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Modern nutritional science is only a hundred years old, so it’s no surprise that we’re constantly bamboozled by new and competing information about what to put into our bodies – or that we sometimes cling to reassurin...
Question Time showed that you can’t counter anti-vax myths with cold reason alone
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How do you react when someone politely but firmly tells you that you’re talking nonsense about something that’s important to you? Do you gracefully and immediately give way to their greater expertise? Or do you double...
Common myths about what UK Highway Code changes will mean
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There is, we are told in the Daily Mail, “fury” over changes to the Highway Code. There is “confusion” among road users. Cyclists and pedestrians will, the more breathless news coverage intimates, have carte blanche t...
Fromage fictions: the 14 biggest cheese myths – debunked!
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‘I hate to dictate to people. I don’t like too many rules,” says Iain Mellis, a cheesemonger of 40 years, with cheese shops bearing his name scattered across Scotland. Mellis has spent his life trying to make artisan ...
Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins; Medusa: The Girl Behind the Myth by Jessie Burton – review
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Retellings of classical myths may be all the rage in publishing but, as Charlotte Higgins notes in the introduction to Greek Myths, her own erudite and exhilarating collection, it’s a trend as old as the stories thems...
Food myths busted: dairy, salt and steak may be good for you after all
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Over the past 70 years the public health establishment in Anglophone countries has issued a number of diet rules, their common thread being that the natural ingredients populations all around the world have eaten for ...
Common myths about Covid – debunked
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Wrong. People who never get symptoms from Covid are less infectious than people who get symptoms, but they can still have high viral loads and can pass on the virus. The other thing is the peak infectiousness in tho...
‘They thought Covid only kills white people’: myths and fear hinder jabs in DRC
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Dr Christian Mayala and Dr Rodin Nzembuni Nduku sit together on a bench outside the Covid ward at Kinshasa’s Mama Yemo hospital. They are discussing the health of their father, Noel Kalouda, who contracted coronavirus...
Four unhelpful myths about dementia: ‘Our bleak view is often unjustified’
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A fear of dementia looms large in the minds of many, and understandably so. It is a condition with potentially devastating effects – incurable, progressive and which threatens to rob us of the essence of who we are. I...
Just don’t do it: 10 exercise myths
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Yesterday at an outdoor coffee shop, I met my old friend James in person for the first time since the pandemic began. Over the past year on Zoom, he looked just fine, but in 3D there was no hiding how much weight he’d...
Naomi Wolf banned from Twitter for spreading vaccine myths
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The author Naomi Wolf has been suspended from Twitter after using it to spread myths about the pandemic, vaccines and lockdown. Wolf, who wrote the influential feminist work The Beauty Myth, holds staunch anti-vaccine...
‘A kind of rat with thorns’: the comic book busting myths about the Madras hedgehog
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The brightly coloured panels of Brawin Kumar’s comic book tell the story of how two children rescue a hedgehog from an unlicensed medicine man. The mother hedgehog is delighted to be reunited with her little one, as s...
Do people believe Covid myths?
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Like viruses, false information spreads through networks. In March 2020, more than a quarter of the top Covid-19 related videos on YouTube contained misleading claims and those had more than 60m views worldwide. The W...
But isn’t all wine ‘natural’? Seven myths about sustainable wine – busted
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It might be grown from the earth and bottled in glass, but there are plenty of ways wine can be either more or less sustainable. From what ‘natural wine’ really means to the environmental impact of packaging, here are...
‘It’s about self-love’: the black women busting beauty myths in west Africa
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Women kick the sand from their slippers, and ease into the cool comfort of a natural hair and skincare store in central Dakar. On the shelves are jars filled with handmade supplements of organic shea butter, coconut, ...
Bottle good, box wine bad, biodynamic best? Seven myths about wine and sustainability
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It might be grown from the earth and bottled in glass, but there are plenty of ways wine can be either more or less sustainable. From what ‘natural wine’ really means to the environmental impact of packaging, here are...