the_dunk_tank

If you don’t believe me watch Jimmy Dore

Health scaremongering used to be mostly targetted at women, but now it's muscled gym bros telling you to be afraid of using dryer sheets, and that spinach shrinks your balls.

I guess it's not surprising. Gym bros are suckers for pseudoscience. You can get them to believe anything if you just link a scientific paper that is even tangentially related to the subject, they won't read it.

watch jimmy dore

Hey anything that helps chuds die faster

We should get them to completely renounce modern medicine and chew leaves instead

These fuckers are why a relative of mine that has heart problems keeps quitting their statin.

It pisses me off so much because this kind of shit gets people killed

What's with the rise of "the gubmint is trying to trick you into veganism and they're hiding that burgers are a secret superfood!" types?

but even I know that if someone must have meat: Salmon, skinless chicken, or hunted meat is usually your best bet health-wise. That's not even mentioning that little to no meat is practically a staple of Blue Zones and vegetarianism has been proposed as far back as Plato in Republic.

I hear "sugar bad, cholesterol fine" spiel all the time from reactionaries. Honestly it could be true, as I have looked into it. It's just coming from Joe Rogan types, so I can't be bothered to look into it.

Noted medical specialist Jimmy "im to the left of democrats" Dore

watch Jimmy Dore

Knew an Anarchist who said almost exactly this lmao

Imagine believing that ancient people didn’t have medical problems caused by exposure to the sun. Also, there are aspects to it such as the fact that the majority of melanoma cases appear after the age of 60 and average life expectancy has finally risen above that age. I realize the post just opens up with the one off line about the sun, but it’s really ignorant and I keep seeing this talking point.

I once had a doctor quip that if he had it his way, drinking water would be supplemented with statins.

while i don't doubt a third of americans over 40 are on statins, if a fifth of those were having serious injuries, it would be an undeniable phenomenon. i have only ever heard of people saying a certain formulation worked better than another at controlling their cholesterol.

anyway, sugar is pretty fucked up and the lobby has successfully derailed the most common sense nutrition labeling info in the states. next time you look at a nutrition label in the US, notice which component in the "amount per serving" lacks a "Percent of Daily Value". even though salt, with much lobbying effort, managed to get it's % of DV based on an "Tolerable Upper Intake Level" as opposed to the actual "Recommended Daily Allowance" which is what other components are labeled as, good old sugar is straight up blank. one would imagine there must be a generally recommended intake amount for sugar. couldn't they just do the simple calculation for us like they do with everything else? i mean, didn't the WHO in 2002 say something about excessive sugar intake being a massive problem and recommend doing exactly this? erroneous!

The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.

The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.

anyway, i legit never noticed it or learned about any of this until i was in a human nutrition class and we did a unit on labeling, dietary recommendations, and the regulatory environment. in retrospect, this material seems like the kind of thing that should be taught in elementary school, but a comprehensive understanding being present in younger people developing food habits would probably be devastating for capital. especially in the wake of them pulling so many strings to stay out of the spotlight here. the real legacy of the tobacco lobbying efforts is how the strategy of corruption was refined to perfection and made available as a playbook to other formations (fossil fuel, industrial foods, etc).

anyway, after 4 decades of eating typical, common food in the US, most everybody's endocrine system is sputtering because the pancreas has been getting mule kicked 3 times a day times 15,000 days trying to moderate these incredible spikes. the body is also far less capable of covering over horrible habits anymore, the keyfob for the Lambo has been disabled, please enjoy your life in this somewhat tempermental 1993 Toyota Previa that you take into the mechanic every 3-6 months for routine diagnostics and must-have inputs that you can only buy from them. this sudden dependence makes people very upset and scrambling for a way out for those halcyon days when they could enjoy things they liked and didn't have to take some assortment of pills to not die horribly.

well you see people with high cholesterol who take statins also have a bunch of other issues, which has nothing to do with my pure carnivore fiber-less hamburger (only good plants go on those) slop diet and everything to do with the medication

We're struggling with this kind of shit with my father in law. His friends are complete fucking conspiracy nutters who are trying to convince him that medicine is a scam. Every day is like fighting with a toddler to eat their veggies, because he has some new argument about how the body can fix itself and that his meds are making the problem worse. It's dark, because I know that because of this, we're going to lose him years earlier than we would have otherwise.

There are lots of unpopped kernels of truth to this.

The sugar industry absolutely did do that bribing; sugar is the most common cause of obesity and related diseases; demonizing fats was the main way nutrition fads of the 80s and 90s went down the wrong track; a lot of the adverse health effects of cholesterol are specific to factory-farmed meat; every medication and treatment comes at a cost and it's not a good idea to take them when you don't need them; yet pharmaceutical companies are perfectly glad to expand into new markets; a few hours of sun a day outside of peak intensity is good for you.

Also if more people were and rode bikes, I doubt there would be nearly as much practical use for statins.

who is jimmy dore? There is this one user on the fediverse who keeps having good takes, but gets shit because their username is "jimmydoreisalefty"

Im pretty sure some degree of sunlight exposure is good for you though, it literally cured all the spots of psoriasis I had when I spent last summer tanning

Also I'm pretty sure they are right and sugar has been greatly implicated in heart disease

Also "cholesterol is not a villain" is a 100% correct statement, there's good and bad cholesterol and it's literally something you need to live, they're a vital component of cell membranes

Idk shit about statins, but

what the fuck is a statin

There are grains of truth here.

IIRC (and I may not), statins were once a miracle drug, have been overprescribed to people with low risk, and they will of course not prevent heart attacks in people who aren't at high risk and they increase your chances to get diabetes because they prevent (natural) insulin from working as well. Even in groups that have high risk, you need to give the drug to like 100 people to prevent a single heart attack and even these people are far more likely to get diabetes from them than have a heart attack prevented.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html (https://archive.is/dm0k7)

I'm as critical of western medicine as anyone, shit like this pisses me off so much because it steers us away from returning to a social model that is really what we need

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Rs16lK3_0nU

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=-Qt6RL6XOYw (cw surgery imagery)

Don’t believe me? Here’s an entertainment podcaster reading an article