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Yes, it works rather too well, in fact. So much so, that people subject to it will likely be slathering up, no matter what science finds out. Again: Science ch

Yes, it works rather too well, in fact. So much so, that people subject to it will likely be slathering up, no matter what science finds out. Again: Science changes; emotions do not; the job of public health comms is to generate emotions that roughly match science; but then science changes again, but the emotions do not. The net result is that everyone's fear-compass is randomly pointing to findings from fifty years ago, which, incidentally, is why my last roommate couldn't cook. The 31yo rock climber was terrified of salt. Why? His father had had a heart condition --- in nineties. There are few things that could have brought the poor man more joy than ruining his dinner every night, which likely had the opposite effect than intended. It's easy to spam links on this topic -- I went searching for this excellent summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-th... And found these two as well; I'm sure you can dig up plenty more https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/a-low-salt-diet-may-be-bad-for-the-heart/?searchResultPosition=2 https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/2... https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/health/research/04salt.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/health/research/04salt.ht...

undoware 4y ago
And I'll quickly duck back in to say that while there is an abundance of recent examples, including the early 2020 attempts to limit public use of n95 masks(!), there isn't a solution to the health-comms predicament per-se. You still have to communicate what you're assigned and, yes, the better you do your job, the worse the next person will have it, when (not if) the science changes. Such is life.

undoware 4y ago

And I'll quickly duck back in to say that while there is an abundance of recent examples, including the early 2020 attempts to limit public use of n95 masks(!), there isn't a solution to the health-comms predicament per-se. You still have to communicate what you're assigned and, yes, the better you do your job, the worse the next person will have it, when (not if) the science changes. Such is life.