50 Health myths!

Dubai's top docs reveal 50 health myths that you need to know! 2 Comments

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1 Do daily multivitamin pills make much of a difference?
There is no conclusive evidence to support their use routinely for everybody and they should certainly not be seen as an alternative to a healthy well balanced diet.

2 In a normal office-work day, how many litres of water should a grown man really drink?
You should drink somewhere between 1.5 and two litres daily. It flushes the kidneys out and helps prevent stones.

3 Eat after eight, put on weight — surely it doesn’t matter what time you eat?
Sadly it does. We should all have a good breakfast, this provides the fuel the body needs for the day and lunch tops us up for the afternoon. The smallest meal of the day should be the evening meal. If you have a large meal late in the evening and then go to bed shortly after, the food has no chance to be used effectively and the body stores it “as excess to current requirements” as body fat. Similarly in the morning, if you do not eat till lunch time the body perceives this as “starvation” and therefore tries to conserve energy for later.

4 Is too much coffee bad for you and if so, how much is too much?
Most things consumed in excess start to cause problems, coffee drinking is no exception. Three cups per day should be the maximum and ideally not consumed in the three hours before going to bed, as coffee contains caffeine which is a strong stimulant.

5 Overall, what’s the healthiest fruit?
Within reason all fruits are healthy when taken as part of a balanced diet. There are so called “super fruits” which contain lots of antioxidants that help the body remain healthy. Examples of these are blueberries, cranberries, avocados, pomegranates and more recently acai. Which fruit is the healthiest? Simple answer is, whichever one you eat regularly.

6 Are some people really “big boned” or is that just a lie that fat people who eat too much use?
Certainly much of the world’s population over eats by choice, whilst another substantial proportion under eats, not by choice but by circumstance. If we all maintain our body mass index (BMI) in or near the healthy range of 20-25, there would be a lot less “big boned” people.

7 Should I pay attention to the mineral values (dissolved solids) in water?
I see this written on bottles, but does this make any difference? It will actually make little or no difference to your overall health, if you have a normal healthy diet.

8 If you drop food on the kitchen floor, should you bin it or is the three-second rule applicable?
I don’t know the three-second rule — that sounds arbitrary to me! If food falls to the floor I would recommend it is picked up and thrown away.

9 To what extent is drinking a glass of wine or a pint of Guinness each day good for you?
Drinking one or two glasses of red wine per day has been shown to have beneficial effects on the heart. One pint of Guinness on the other hand, containing the same amount of alcohol, is full of iron and is therefore excellent if you are iron deficient.

10 Does smoking a cigarette really reduce your life expectancy by five minutes per cigarette – sounds like a made-up, arbitrary, number to me?
Do you want the bad news? At a recent Gulf Medical Conference the time quoted in ‘lost minutes of life per cigarette smoked’ was actually 11 minutes, nearly double the five minutes that you are worried about. Someone, somewhere has done the calculation. Accurate or not, we know smoking causes lung cancer and is a major contributing factor in causing heart attacks. Get lung cancer and you will lose years of life, not just a number of “five minutes”.