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Why do myths persist?
age_is_just_a_number
Posts: 630 Member
in Debate Club
We’ve all heard them, believed them, learned they weren’t true. There are so many diet, nutrition and exercise myths. Why do you think they persist?
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Replies
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Maybe I'm just feeling cynical today, but I think one big one is cultural gnosticism - the idea that there are people with the secret knowledge and it's beyond most of us to know what it is. Unless we fork over the cash, of course. Then we get fed little bits of it until it's time to fork over the cash again. Mysteriously, nothing ever seems to get better!
(This kind of thing applies to a lot more than just diet and exercise myths.)
I think some of it is confirmation bias, especially myths like "set points," which I used to believe. I could believe those things and then didn't have to do anything. Many myths have a tiny bit of truth to them that's then been distorted, but it still seems reasonable as long as you don't think about it too hard.7 -
Some of them are convenient excuses, reasons why we can't lose weight, so why even try. That's . . . convenient, if one wants to avoid needing annoying things like persistence and patience and commitment, maybe even discipline.
Others are convenient for the weight loss and exercise industry. There's a lot of money in keeping people confused, telling them there's a magic solution, convincing them that if they fail they just didn't do whatever-it-is right so it's their own fault and they should buy the NewNEW program or supplement; and money in formulating the product/service so that it can't work long term, so that people keep coming back and spending more money.
There's no one reason that all myths live on, but one can pick apart specific myths and make educated guesses about what keeps that particular one going. Personally, I think the two concepts in the paragraphs above would cover a lot of the myths at a high level of generality, but they don't cover all of them.10 -
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The charitable answer is that we're born without knowledge, that makes it difficult to know true from false, and a small % of people are ready to profit from that. The cynical part of me says people are eating horse deworming paste, because enough people will apparently fall for anything. Maybe that's two ways of saying the same thing.5
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A lot of people, even educated people, get a small amount of science/diet information and never bother to update it. Medical school doesn't teach much about diet, even.4
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Agree with all of the above. Basically critical thinking skills are in short supply amongst the general population. People very easily believe things, are often unquestioning and amazingly trusting. Particularly if it suits them. Easier to believe your weight problem is caused by things outside of your control than to take on a burden of responsibility for it, for instance. Also, people often think of something worked once for one person in a single situation, it can be generalised. People also don’t understand that things which are generalisable a rent universal. Again, lack of critical thinking skills.4
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I agree with all prior comments, but @NorthCascades nailed it.
Take fish antibiotics to prevent illness. Eat sheep dip to cure illness. Take very hot baths to jumpstart your metabolism. Avoid safe, effective, vaccines in order to not become autistic. Drink bleach to cure the autism. Sit in radioactive caves to cure cancer. Stand on a vibrating plate to lose weight. Steam your vajayjay with herbs to…. dang…. I don’t even want to know what Gwyneth Paltrow is on about with that last one.
Guaranteed. Each and every one of these is some level of misunderstood science, woo, and someone somewhere at the bottom of each one raking in the dollars.7 -
Some of them were from aggressive add campaigns and positions in health eduction. Like the dairy industry pushing the importance or breakfast or 'milk, it does a body good' for a long long time5
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Social media.4
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Some of them were from aggressive add campaigns and positions in health eduction. Like the dairy industry pushing the importance or breakfast or 'milk, it does a body good' for a long long time
I do think one reason some myths persist is because things like this - people who are viewed as authority figures change their advice seemingly on a whim, or it's not presented with sufficient nuance, or some information is withheld for some reason (sometimes bad, but even sometimes well-meant reasons.) Or educated guesses are presented as fact. That, perhaps rightly, makes some people suspicious and more willing to accept "alternative" theories - even if the new expert is even less credible than the one who's been rejected!
There are several rather well-known stand-up bits about ever changing dietary advice in the twentieth century. I think sometimes the jokes only work because critical details are left out, but that perspective is probably held by a lot of people. They think how to eat healthily is literally unknowable and the people creating the guidelines have been paid off by lobbyists...and they're not *entirely* wrong!
I'll admit that I am rather skeptical of quite a bit of mainstream news reporting on health issues. When you know a lot about a topic and see how it gets distorted by the average journalist or politician (not necessarily maliciously so, they're just not experts) it can make you skeptical about how they cover a lot of other topics, too. I do hate quackery, so what I often end up doing is going directly to studies and their methodology, etc if I'm highly motivated. But not everybody is trained or has the time available or inclination to do that. I can't really fault people for that, either.
If it seems like I'm jumping all over the place...it's because I am, haha.3 -
penguinmama87 wrote: »-snip-
I'll admit that I am rather skeptical of quite a bit of mainstream news reporting on health issues. When you know a lot about a topic and see how it gets distorted by the average journalist or politician (not necessarily maliciously so, they're just not experts) it can make you skeptical about how they cover a lot of other topics, too. I do hate quackery, so what I often end up doing is going directly to studies and their methodology, etc if I'm highly motivated. But not everybody is trained or has the time available or inclination to do that. I can't really fault people for that, either.
If it seems like I'm jumping all over the place...it's because I am, haha.
To the bolded - would that that were the case for more people! IME folks are more likely to, for some reason, draw the opposite conclusion. You watch a 60 Minutes episode or listen to a podcast or whatever about a topic you're familiar with, you'll see all the parts the hosts get wrong or misrepresent. You might even call or write in to tell them so. But you don't have nearly so critical an ear or eye when they're covering something you don't know anything about, and people tend to defer to authority (or even just information presented authoritatively). So, if you're a professional llama groomer, your takeaway from the 60 Minutes episode about grooming llamas will not be "well heck, these guys don't know *kitten* about *kitten*," it'll be "well, obviously they don't know anything about llama grooming, but they probably know what they're talking about when it comes to [NFTs/rice sculpture/geopolitics/baking/something else you're not an expert in]."
And it's well-documented that whatever information you encounter first, you're (1) more likely to believe and (2) more likely to continue believing even after being corrected and shown proof that the original information was wrong. Check out the vast Wikipedia archives about cognitive biases that exist and how they work.2 -
The diet and fitness industry is a multi-billion $$ industry and people are willing to fork over $$ for a magic bullet that will solve everything.7
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Thinking on the diet/fitness aspect only.
Because some myths have a grain of truth in them somewhere, and so it's possible that some aspect of the myth has been seen in oneself or friends and confirms the whole myth.
(Improved health markers by doing IF or keto and when they lost XX pounds - attributing the improvement to the diet type, not the weight loss)
Also, there may be an oversimplification in the myth, but the factors that allow it are pretty specific and not as generally easy to get/cause - but some do.
I'll give a nice controversial example - starvation mode.
That used to be the term for Adaptive Thermogenesis, which is a studied known effect. Old literature was specific with old term.
No - it can't stop fat loss, if you keep eating less and less to compensate for it.
But then some effects were tied to it - you'll stop losing weight, you'll gain fat, happens if you skip breakfast (heard in an advert), ect foolishness - myth effects.
But the concept was thrown out with the claimed effects.
Some of those effects could effect people in specific situations.
There are case studies, and even here on MFP you get someone to fess up and they duplicated the situations.
Extreme diet for awhile.
Adaptive happened to some extent and their TDEE lowered below what would be expected for weight lost.
Likely stress from extreme diet and gained water weight.
No scale loss for long period of time.
They eat a tad more daily (perhaps carbs specific) and get water weight whoosh and lose 5-6 lbs in 1-2 days.
Confirms the myth in their mind, though there is reason for it.
Related in same situation - person finally admits to binging because of the extreme diet.
So now this lowered TDEE, and much easier to eat over it on a day here and a day there.
Excess food is never enough to get whoosh effect because infrequent - but is enough to wipe out a weeks worth of calorie deficit and go over.
Confirms myth you eat too little you gain fat weight, which happens slowly.
So now starvation mode is the term given that includes the myths.
Though the effect is real, and the myths could appear to happen in specific cases, but there are reasons there too.
But ya, still doesn't happen if breakfast is skipped, wish I could remember what the commercial was for.
ETA:
Beyond the great points already mentioned - I think the general push to fast and short info causes people to stop being willing to expend much time or brain power to delve into details - which sometimes isn't even that detailed.
The number of times at work I'll be included on emails between 2 people where neither is obviously reading past the 1st short paragraph or couple of lines to see rest of the details they are actually asking for. So sad.7 -
Because not matter how wild, there is often a shred of truth (even if something only worked for a small group or very specific situation) in any myth?
The "miracle" get spread and depending on how effective the media spreading it is, becomes sort of a fact.
Plus as mentioned above by @cwolfman13 people love a magic bullet and will try hard to believe it if it offers any ray of hope.0 -
I think everyone above is right. The answer why is long and convoluted and multi layered.
But the short and simple answer is .... because myths are easy to believe.6 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »I think everyone above is right. The answer why is long and convoluted and multi layered.
But the short and simple answer is .... because myths are easy to believe.
The bolded as well as - people *want* to believe6 -
Money is the reason they're born, but the danged internet is the reason they persist. (Irony: I'm posting this on the danged internet )
As far as I recall, the set point theory was a bestselling book at one time. So was the blood type diet, and the one about Gluten is the Source of All Evil and Everything That Ails You. So these theories/myths have found champions, or people who figure enough time has passed that people will have forgotten about it and they can pass it off as original, maybe with a little modern twist, and they get posted up somewhere. Where they attract a whole new band of followers who have come in search of a magic solution.
Then it gets repeated over and over again because plagiarism is not a dirty word on the internet. I've seen entire paragraphs copy/pasted from one site to another, bad grammar intact.
So I guess we're back to money because views = ad revenue.1 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »I think everyone above is right. The answer why is long and convoluted and multi layered.
But the short and simple answer is .... because myths are easy to believe.
I 👍'ed this post, wanted to add that the wrong answer is that there's one answer. 🙂 (As is usually the case with people making decisions.)2 -
There were no myths about dieting before the Internet. /s3
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I just went down the rabbit hole of googling weight loss methods in the past, out of curiosty.
Some of these are just...
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20695743
Humans are just hardwired to look for quick and/or easy fixes?
I mean, I've lost 65lbs myself by calorie counting and even I still get twinges of curiosity when an ad on Facebook tells me there is an easier way to lose weight, because 'hormones not exercise' or whatever they're claiming.5
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