5 ms·

'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

47 points by anigbrowl 6mo ago

dekhn 6mo ago
No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data. Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed. There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).
- foobarchu 6mo ago
  As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies. Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
  - tonyarkles 6mo ago
    > that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems. As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
    - Tepix 6mo ago
      Poison moves this probability towards 100%.
  - sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
    Alcohol is bad for you regardless of the frequency, not “if you consume them too often”. It’s literally a neurotoxin and metabolic toxin aka poison.
    - GJim 6mo ago
      And going to the pub once a week is terrific for your social life and mental wellbeing. Swings and roundabouts init.
      - sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
        It sure is, especially when you can visit one without succumbing to peer pressure to poison yourself.
        GJim 6mo ago
        What a sanctimonious response! Drink tea in the pub if you must, though the social lubricant of alcohol is obvious to all.
        sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
        Drink and be merry my friend!
- aaron695 6mo ago
  [dead]
chungus_amongus 6mo ago
maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics
- phs318u 6mo ago
  Or perhaps “journalists” shouldn’t wildly and sensationally extrapolate from the most nuanced of findings in research to create unrealistic and unjustified expectations, especially when there exists other research drawing somewhat different conclusions. Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    Yeah, most "scientific" wild claims upon investigation are journalists ignoring the nuances. Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake. And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- throwawaypath 6mo ago
  Healthcare professionals: "Gathering in large groups in causing a genocide of the old, infirm, and immunocompromised!" Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
ike2792 6mo ago
They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about. - For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon. - The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this. - The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one. - Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims." Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
- tredre3 6mo ago
  In the first three questions asked I could see reasonable people argue either way, with legitimate papers backing their "side", so I'm happy to at least see an even split. For the autism question I agree with you, people simply believing their government is reasonable. But I am quite worried about the last question. That 25% of people believe vaccines are used for population control is worrisome, no matter how you spin it.
  - jjk166 6mo ago
    Note that while it is not a vaccince, there is an injectable birth control, and immunocontraceptives which would actually be vaccines are in development. Further there have been well documented cases where people were sterilized against their will under the guise of other medical procedures, including receiving such shots. It really doesn't take too much whisper down the lane for that to be misunderstood, and once you get it in your head that a vaccination program could be used for population control I imagine it would be pretty hard to find evidence to convince yourself otherwise.
- chungus_amongus 6mo ago
  "vaccines are used for population control" in practice might as well be "do you extremely dislike and distrust the medical industry." It gives people an opportunity to express hostility at the cost of strawmaning their own disorganized opinions.
yarn_ 6mo ago
>People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field. Yup, I'm "staggered".
gus_massa 6mo ago
Table of question vs country (page 42): https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-04/2026%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Special%20Report%20Trust%20and%20Health_Final.pdf https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-0... Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)
dabbledash 6mo ago
One thing that would help, and that I don't see addressed here is "avoid taking public positions on divisive issues that are not absolutely clear and directly linked to your area of expertise." Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.
scotty79 6mo ago
I wonder what are the stats just for doctors rather than general population so we know what the realistic results to strive for are.
arjie 6mo ago
It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said: > Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position. However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag. Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
- tonyarkles 6mo ago
  You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour. [1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada. [2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
stinkbeetle 6mo ago
It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.
- tonyarkles 6mo ago
  > COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary: - Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably. - Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say. Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - stinkbeetle 6mo ago
    I was not talking about "subtle and nuanced" claims though, just the one I mentioned.
    - tonyarkles 6mo ago
      Right, but the word "prevented" in this is way too subtle and nuanced: > whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"
mathgladiator 6mo ago
The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes. I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems. My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great. Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.
- expedition32 6mo ago
  Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise. I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.
  - mathgladiator 6mo ago
    exercise is beyond important which my wife and I do in spades, but the crazy thing is what happens when you fix the diet at a foundational level. For example, my wife has MS and due to carnivore alone (lion diet specifically), she is off both anti-depressants and generic adderal (common for MS patients). That alone is worth whatever silly risks are associated with lack of vegetables (and having gone over a year on this, I'm not sure what those risks are)
    - tonyarkles 6mo ago
      I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!" It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago
>> "Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized" Oh dear, my very own pet peeve. Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why. It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3]. >> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.” OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word. And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4]. And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway". ___________________________ [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348912?login=false https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348... [3] And I don't even have children. [4] Unlikely.
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
The very first example that this study says is "false or unproven" uses ambiguous language at best: > Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein. All commonly consumed sources of animal protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) are complete proteins, meaning they provide all essential amino acids. This is not true for all sources of plant-based protein. In addition, "protein" as is often used to indicate a part of a meal (I mean not just the technical definition of a chain of amino acids). Vegans are nearly always advised to supplement with B12 because good plant protein sources like legumes are poor sources of B12. I understand what the study is getting at with the question, for as far as I am aware there are no studies that show that getting, say, 10 grams of complete protein from animals is any different from getting 10 grams of complete protein from plants. Still, given this question is easily ambiguous for valid definitions of "healthier", I find this study suspect, despite having no problem with the general idea that tons of people believe absolute batshit insane ideas about health and nutrition.
- aziaziazi 6mo ago
  > complete proteins If I may nitpick: - Human amino acid requirements vary with age, physical condition, and physiological state. PDCAAS and DIAAS use a young child as reference pattern. - Amino acid proportion also varies across animal foods: eggs closely match the child pattern, while beef is slightly lower in tryptophan.[0] - Some plant proteins are considered complete above scoring systems: soy, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, hemp, chia, and potato protein, though potatoes themselves are low in protein/carb. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fig1/AS:733623640662017@1551920914807/Proportions-of-amino-acids-in-selected-foods-across-food-groups-Amino-acids-are-grouped.png https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fi...
  - Worf 6mo ago
    And if you eat a somewhat varied vegan diet, you don't need to care about whether you consume complete or proteins or not, as they complement each other. Just like if one type of food had the perfect proportion of fat, carbs and protein, it doesn't mean it's better than a varied diet of foods that are way off in that proportion, but in different directions. (Obviously a "perfect proportion" doesn't exist and varies from people to people, but I used it for the example.)
dzhiurgis 6mo ago
For me wildest one is vegan diet, i.e. Bryan Johnson stays away from animal products, while levelsio mostly eats meat. Both track their biomarkers and seem to be extremely fit. Personally I have to fight my entire country (and most of Eastern Europe fwiw) that cold weather, drafts, air conditioning, wet hair and cold feet does not cause common cold or flu. Yes there is rhinorrhea, but that's just reaction to change in air's humidity.
- GJim 6mo ago
  > For me wildest one is vegan diet Depriving children of calcium is a bad thing that all dieticians agree on.
  - aziaziazi 6mo ago
    It’s perfectly possible to have a calcium-less non-vegan diet and calcium-full vegan diet, or vice versa. We need nutrients, not a specific diet.
    - GJim 6mo ago
      What an obtuse response! Both are difficult to achieve as you well know.
      - aziaziazi 6mo ago
        I’m sorry you took is as so, but as noted -if I understood correctly?- it’s hard to achieve perfect nutrient intake with any diet. The idea I wanted to convey is more that children getting a plant based diet aren’t necessarily deprived of calcium.
Worf 6mo ago
Staggering number of people believe in weird things. I'm not talking about someone claiming mask mandates were useful, useless or harmful - there's a lot of debate around it and without spending lots of time looking at studies, you might be misled. I don't even know about masks. I'm leaning towards "useful", but wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. I'm talking about superstitions, fortune tellers, homeopathy, anti-evolution, anti-vaxx (not specific arguments against a specific vaccine, but in general), magic, fake healers, obviously fake medical info (bleach, etc.) guardian angels, gods, karma, ESP, ghosts, spirits, quantum bullshit, bad energy, miracles, lizard people, telepathy and all that crap. It makes me incredibly pessimistic about humans. Of course, most people don't believe in all of the above, but I've noticed people either believe in none of the above, or in several the above - rarely just 1 thing. Unrelated, but on page 3 it mentions: > 2023 - Many young people feel the average person can know as much as a doctor Not as BFS knowledge, but as DFS about something specific - sure. I've caught many doctors not knowing basic things about something specific. They know more than me in general, but about that specific things they're read 5 papers over the last 2 years and I've read 20 over the past month. Even accounting for their ability to better extract valuable data from papers, it's still easy to know more than a doctor about that SPECIFIC thing. The inquisitive and humble doctors review the papers and agree with me or they point out what I'm missing or where I'm wrong. The ignorant and arrogant doctors outright tell me that I'm a layman, that I shouldn't roleplay as a doctor and that I should follow their advice blindly. Finally, can some explain: > I will believe a recommendation that contradicts my beliefs from a source I trust with the options being: - After I hear it one time - After I hear it two or more times - I will never believe it is true I wouldn't trust a recommendation based only on the number of times I've heard it. I may be more inclined to consider it the more I hear it, of course, which can lead to more trust, but it's never a direct relationship between number of times I've heard something and how likely I'd be to trust it. And the "I will never believe it is true" option is wild - "never" ever? Who seriously chose that option? Were people tired as it was one of the last questions? Come to think of it, I've heard people say "I will never change my mind on this" no matter how I clarify with "even if you get really strong evidence?". So perhaps it's true. But that whole question makes no sense to me.

47 points by anigbrowl 6mo ago

dekhn 6mo ago

No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data. Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed. There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).

foobarchu 6mo ago
As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies. Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
- tonyarkles 6mo ago
  > that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems. As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
  - Tepix 6mo ago
    Poison moves this probability towards 100%.
- sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
  Alcohol is bad for you regardless of the frequency, not “if you consume them too often”. It’s literally a neurotoxin and metabolic toxin aka poison.
  - GJim 6mo ago
    And going to the pub once a week is terrific for your social life and mental wellbeing. Swings and roundabouts init.
    - sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
      It sure is, especially when you can visit one without succumbing to peer pressure to poison yourself.
      - GJim 6mo ago
        What a sanctimonious response! Drink tea in the pub if you must, though the social lubricant of alcohol is obvious to all.
        sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
        Drink and be merry my friend!
aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]

chungus_amongus 6mo ago

maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics

phs318u 6mo ago
Or perhaps “journalists” shouldn’t wildly and sensationally extrapolate from the most nuanced of findings in research to create unrealistic and unjustified expectations, especially when there exists other research drawing somewhat different conclusions. Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.
- LorenPechtel 6mo ago
  Yeah, most "scientific" wild claims upon investigation are journalists ignoring the nuances. Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake. And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
throwawaypath 6mo ago
Healthcare professionals: "Gathering in large groups in causing a genocide of the old, infirm, and immunocompromised!" Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."
- LorenPechtel 6mo ago

ike2792 6mo ago

They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about. - For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon. - The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this. - The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one. - Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims." Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."

tredre3 6mo ago
In the first three questions asked I could see reasonable people argue either way, with legitimate papers backing their "side", so I'm happy to at least see an even split. For the autism question I agree with you, people simply believing their government is reasonable. But I am quite worried about the last question. That 25% of people believe vaccines are used for population control is worrisome, no matter how you spin it.
- jjk166 6mo ago
  Note that while it is not a vaccince, there is an injectable birth control, and immunocontraceptives which would actually be vaccines are in development. Further there have been well documented cases where people were sterilized against their will under the guise of other medical procedures, including receiving such shots. It really doesn't take too much whisper down the lane for that to be misunderstood, and once you get it in your head that a vaccination program could be used for population control I imagine it would be pretty hard to find evidence to convince yourself otherwise.
chungus_amongus 6mo ago
"vaccines are used for population control" in practice might as well be "do you extremely dislike and distrust the medical industry." It gives people an opportunity to express hostility at the cost of strawmaning their own disorganized opinions.

yarn_ 6mo ago

>People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field. Yup, I'm "staggered".

gus_massa 6mo ago

Table of question vs country (page 42): https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-04/2026%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Special%20Report%20Trust%20and%20Health_Final.pdf https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-0... Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)

dabbledash 6mo ago

One thing that would help, and that I don't see addressed here is "avoid taking public positions on divisive issues that are not absolutely clear and directly linked to your area of expertise." Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.

scotty79 6mo ago

I wonder what are the stats just for doctors rather than general population so we know what the realistic results to strive for are.

arjie 6mo ago

It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said: > Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position. However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag. Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.

tonyarkles 6mo ago
You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour. [1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada. [2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.

stinkbeetle 6mo ago

It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.

tonyarkles 6mo ago
> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary: - Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably. - Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably. - Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say. Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
- LorenPechtel 6mo ago
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- stinkbeetle 6mo ago
  I was not talking about "subtle and nuanced" claims though, just the one I mentioned.
  - tonyarkles 6mo ago
    Right, but the word "prevented" in this is way too subtle and nuanced: > whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"

mathgladiator 6mo ago

The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes. I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems. My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great. Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.

expedition32 6mo ago
Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise. I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.
- mathgladiator 6mo ago
  exercise is beyond important which my wife and I do in spades, but the crazy thing is what happens when you fix the diet at a foundational level. For example, my wife has MS and due to carnivore alone (lion diet specifically), she is off both anti-depressants and generic adderal (common for MS patients). That alone is worth whatever silly risks are associated with lack of vegetables (and having gone over a year on this, I'm not sure what those risks are)
  - tonyarkles 6mo ago
    I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!" It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.

YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago

>> "Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized" Oh dear, my very own pet peeve. Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why. It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3]. >> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.” OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word. And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4]. And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway". ___________________________ [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/ [2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348912?login=false https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348... [3] And I don't even have children. [4] Unlikely.

hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago

The very first example that this study says is "false or unproven" uses ambiguous language at best: > Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein. All commonly consumed sources of animal protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) are complete proteins, meaning they provide all essential amino acids. This is not true for all sources of plant-based protein. In addition, "protein" as is often used to indicate a part of a meal (I mean not just the technical definition of a chain of amino acids). Vegans are nearly always advised to supplement with B12 because good plant protein sources like legumes are poor sources of B12. I understand what the study is getting at with the question, for as far as I am aware there are no studies that show that getting, say, 10 grams of complete protein from animals is any different from getting 10 grams of complete protein from plants. Still, given this question is easily ambiguous for valid definitions of "healthier", I find this study suspect, despite having no problem with the general idea that tons of people believe absolute batshit insane ideas about health and nutrition.

aziaziazi 6mo ago
> complete proteins If I may nitpick: - Human amino acid requirements vary with age, physical condition, and physiological state. PDCAAS and DIAAS use a young child as reference pattern. - Amino acid proportion also varies across animal foods: eggs closely match the child pattern, while beef is slightly lower in tryptophan.[0] - Some plant proteins are considered complete above scoring systems: soy, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, hemp, chia, and potato protein, though potatoes themselves are low in protein/carb. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fig1/AS:733623640662017@1551920914807/Proportions-of-amino-acids-in-selected-foods-across-food-groups-Amino-acids-are-grouped.png https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fi...
- Worf 6mo ago
  And if you eat a somewhat varied vegan diet, you don't need to care about whether you consume complete or proteins or not, as they complement each other. Just like if one type of food had the perfect proportion of fat, carbs and protein, it doesn't mean it's better than a varied diet of foods that are way off in that proportion, but in different directions. (Obviously a "perfect proportion" doesn't exist and varies from people to people, but I used it for the example.)

dzhiurgis 6mo ago

For me wildest one is vegan diet, i.e. Bryan Johnson stays away from animal products, while levelsio mostly eats meat. Both track their biomarkers and seem to be extremely fit. Personally I have to fight my entire country (and most of Eastern Europe fwiw) that cold weather, drafts, air conditioning, wet hair and cold feet does not cause common cold or flu. Yes there is rhinorrhea, but that's just reaction to change in air's humidity.

GJim 6mo ago
> For me wildest one is vegan diet Depriving children of calcium is a bad thing that all dieticians agree on.
- aziaziazi 6mo ago
  It’s perfectly possible to have a calcium-less non-vegan diet and calcium-full vegan diet, or vice versa. We need nutrients, not a specific diet.
  - GJim 6mo ago
    What an obtuse response! Both are difficult to achieve as you well know.
    - aziaziazi 6mo ago
      I’m sorry you took is as so, but as noted -if I understood correctly?- it’s hard to achieve perfect nutrient intake with any diet. The idea I wanted to convey is more that children getting a plant based diet aren’t necessarily deprived of calcium.

Worf 6mo ago

Staggering number of people believe in weird things. I'm not talking about someone claiming mask mandates were useful, useless or harmful - there's a lot of debate around it and without spending lots of time looking at studies, you might be misled. I don't even know about masks. I'm leaning towards "useful", but wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. I'm talking about superstitions, fortune tellers, homeopathy, anti-evolution, anti-vaxx (not specific arguments against a specific vaccine, but in general), magic, fake healers, obviously fake medical info (bleach, etc.) guardian angels, gods, karma, ESP, ghosts, spirits, quantum bullshit, bad energy, miracles, lizard people, telepathy and all that crap. It makes me incredibly pessimistic about humans. Of course, most people don't believe in all of the above, but I've noticed people either believe in none of the above, or in several the above - rarely just 1 thing. Unrelated, but on page 3 it mentions: > 2023 - Many young people feel the average person can know as much as a doctor Not as BFS knowledge, but as DFS about something specific - sure. I've caught many doctors not knowing basic things about something specific. They know more than me in general, but about that specific things they're read 5 papers over the last 2 years and I've read 20 over the past month. Even accounting for their ability to better extract valuable data from papers, it's still easy to know more than a doctor about that SPECIFIC thing. The inquisitive and humble doctors review the papers and agree with me or they point out what I'm missing or where I'm wrong. The ignorant and arrogant doctors outright tell me that I'm a layman, that I shouldn't roleplay as a doctor and that I should follow their advice blindly. Finally, can some explain: > I will believe a recommendation that contradicts my beliefs from a source I trust with the options being: - After I hear it one time - After I hear it two or more times - I will never believe it is true I wouldn't trust a recommendation based only on the number of times I've heard it. I may be more inclined to consider it the more I hear it, of course, which can lead to more trust, but it's never a direct relationship between number of times I've heard something and how likely I'd be to trust it. And the "I will never believe it is true" option is wild - "never" ever? Who seriously chose that option? Were people tired as it was one of the last questions? Come to think of it, I've heard people say "I will never change my mind on this" no matter how I clarify with "even if you get really strong evidence?". So perhaps it's true. But that whole question makes no sense to me.