I enjoy keeping up on the latest in health and nutritional news. It’s in my nature to always keep learning. Because I always try to stay on top of new developments in health and nutrition, I find that I learn some of the new developments ahead of others. Sometimes, there are things that providers in the natural healthcare field have known about a healthy lifestyle for years—or even decades—that Western medicine is just catching up on. The unfortunate part of this is that some of what we’ve known for years, such as the harmful effects of seed oils and synthetic dyes, were initially met with skepticism and doubt. The good news is that now, much of this is finally being realized.

Here are a few examples of health tidbits we’ve been told for a long time that are just plain wrong. Let’s look at a list of health care wisdom from 20 years ago and see how they have aged.

• Seed oils like corn oil, canola oil are healthy and heart-smart.
• Red meat causes cancer.
• Corn syrup is healthier than sugar.
• Breakfast cereal is a healthy start for your kids.
• Fruit juice is good for your kids.
• Diet pop helps you lose weight.
• A calorie is a calorie; it does not matter what you eat.
• Eating before bed is no different than eating in the morning.
• Eggs are bad for you.
• Butter is bad, margarine is healthy.
• You don’t need a multivitamin; you get all the vitamins you need by eating a typical American diet.

Unfortunately, none of these things is true. Hopefully you already knew some of them! Even more unfortunately, all of these thoughts were considered medical wisdom or healthy lifestyle truths at the turn of the century. Many continue to be endorsed by healthcare professionals. I did just have a patient tell me recently that her husband’s cardiologist told him to avoid all fats and to use margarine instead of butter. Not only is that an incorrect piece of advice, it’s actually an unhealthy one.

Let’s look at a few of the bullet points above a little closer. For example, the one about red meat causing cancer. If you’re including processed meat, e.g. lunch meats, the line becomes minimally true—as in four more deaths in 1,000 people over 11 years . However, that’s considered statistically insignificant, so you can’t really say research has confirmed this either. But actual red meat? On the contrary, it appears that there is actually a protective effect. Research has shown that those who practice a vegetarian diet have 49% higher instance of colorectal cancer. There is some evidence that charred meat has some carcinogenic chemicals, but that is a far cry from saying that red meat directly causes cancer.

How about the one about corn syrup being healthier than sugar? Corn syrup is typically high in fructose, which has far more negative effects than plain old glucose. Fructose signals to your body to store fat. It also has negative effects on energy, health, and brain function. Fructose is more likely to induce a condition called metabolic syndrome, which is when a group of conditions occur together that increase your risk for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. Metabolic syndrome is also tied to obesity, liver damage, and insulin resistance. This is not to say that sugar is healthy, but it is abjectly false to say that corn syrup is healthier.

Now let’s move from the research to ones that can be explained through more common sense. Let’s use the idea that a calorie is a calorie, no matter what you eat. If that was true, then eating a Twinkie (280 calories) would be the same as eating nine cups of broccoli (31 calories per cup). I don’t think anyone would actually believe that these two things have the same effect on the body. This is a more extreme example, but remember that it’s what comes with those calories that makes a difference.

There are 4 calories in a gram of sugar, the same as protein. But again, no one would actually believe that those things fuel your body in the same way. Fats have 9 calories per gram. But remember this: you can’t actually eat enough fat to get fat. You get far too full eating healthy fats to eat too much of them.

Thankfully, many of these outdated words of “wisdom” have been discredited through research and common sense. No one thinks eggs are bad for you anymore. I think most folks not understand that butter is far healthier than margarine. And once you realize that soil deterioration over the years has led to a decrease in vitamins and minerals in our fresh produce, it’s easy to see how a multivitamin is necessary to account for that.

Now, let’s look to the future. Here are a few things that providers in the natural healthcare fields are already saying, but that haven’t been fully recognized yet by the media or Western medical sources.

1. Cholesterol does not cause heart attacks. In fact, people with high cholesterol tend to live longer.
2. Chiropractic adjustments cause beneficial changes in your brain.
3. Probiotics can have an impact on mental health.
4. Alzheimer’s is curable (it has actually been done before!) and occurrence will fade as people recognize that healthy lifestyles reverse dementia.
5. Ozempic and other GLP-1s are really bad for your health and lead to worse health outcomes.
6. HRV (heart rate variability) will become a much more well-known measure of heart health.

Watch out for my articles 10 or 20 years from now and we’ll hopefully see even more research and universal acceptance of some of these points about living a healthy lifestyle. Until then, trust the research, change your mind, and you can change your health!

References
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-0655
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/89/5/1620S/4596951
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M19-1621?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2017/tale-two-sugars-fructose-glucose-cause-differing-metabolic-effects
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39595887/

Dr. Burtis, D.C., M.S., CFMP, DACBN, has been providing natural healthcare to the Fairmont area at Burtis Chiropractic Center for over 35 years. He uses a combination of chiropractic, nutrition, and functional medicine to help individuals restore and maintain health and healing through individualized care plans. The mission of Burtis Chiropractic Center is to provide transformational healthcare that takes an individual’s life to the next level. We strive to be a solution for families to experience transformational healthcare and help create vibrant and resilient lifestyles that can be passed to future generations.