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Cake day: February 7th, 2025

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  • SeaUrchinHorizon@reddthat.comtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPROTEIN BRO
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    1 month ago

    False. Here’s a short 4 minute video with several referenced studies by a renowned lifestyle medicine doctor debunking this myth: Does Dietary Cholesterol (Eggs) Raise Blood Cholesterol?. TL;DR: Even 90% of egg industry funded studies show eggs raise cholesterol.

    I also wrote the below, on how bad studies funded by industry interests can be cherrypicked by journalists who want to conclude “<unhealthy food> is healthy, actually” such that these myths arise in the first place. I explored this particular example of “dietary cholesterol is good” by scrutinizing the first PubMed study I found on the subject, as an example of what to look for in good study design.


    Saying that dietary cholesterol is good is factually insane, eating dietary cholesterol absolutely raises your cholesterol. However, it’s common to hold these false narratives about nutrition. The issue is that it’s incredibly easy to create a faulty study design if you go in trying to prove “eggs are healthy,” for instance. Take, for example, the egg industry, which has something to gain by convincing people that the massively high cholesterol in eggs isn’t bad for you, and oftentimes funds these biased study designs.

    What does a biased study look like?

    • Some examples of biased study design is taking 20 year olds, having them healthy salads vs massive steaks for lunch, then checking back and saying “none of them have heart disease, so steak is healthy” (because they’re 20, the age cohort was too young to be drawing those conclusions).
    • Read a study that compared the intelligence of kids in Africa who got “meat” via an actual meal or “vegetables” via giving them straight vegetable oil (obviously unhealthy); the vegetable oil group still won despite the handicap. Aka choosing to compare something that is unhealthy with also unhealthy alternatives so you can say there was no difference -Even the traditional “a bit of wine is healthy in moderation” bit came from faulty studies which grouped “people who had to quit drinking after developing liver disease” with “people who have never drunk a single drop” in the “never drinkers” category, which made it appear as if drinking no wine was somehow less healthy than drinking some wine.

    What does an unbiased study look like? The best study design, imo, is a meta-analysis of several randomized double-blind placebo-controlled intervention studies.

    • Randomized = people assigned to the control vs the experimental group randomly
    • Double-blind = both the researcher and the subject don’t know whether they’re giving/getting the placebo or the experimental (otherwise the researcher’s expectations can influence the subject to behave in a certain way)
    • Placebo-controlled = giving a sugar pill with no medication control alongside an actual medicine pill, because oftentimes just the act of taking a pill can make people report less pain, that they feel healthier, happier, etc etc etc. In nutrition studies the equivalent of this may be giving tasteless supplements, shakes or muffins made with or without the ingredient to be tested, etc
    • Intervention study = A study where you give group 1 thing A, group 2 thing B, and group 3 a control

    In this case, I’m assuming you’re getting this false information from studies like this Dietary Cholesterol and the Lack of Evidence in Cardiovascular Disease which right off the bat raises red flags due to being written by a single author, saying ‘eggz are helthy,’ the funding section only being funded by some unnamed “institutional startup,” and finally only being a literature review (very easy to cherry pick bad data), not an intervention study of it’s own

    One of the studies linked in that study, Egg consumption and heart health: A review (yet another literature review with no actual study) is mostly just saying 1) “cholesterol is often high in foods also high in saturated fats,” 2) “saturated fat is unhealthy,” 3) “ergo we can’t just conclude because something has cholesterol in it it’s unhealthy,” 4) “eggs are high in cholesterol but low in saturated fats,” 5) “eggs have all these nutrients that are useful,” 6) “therefore, eggs are healthy.”

    The error in this logic is between 5 & 6. We’re starting with the (false) assumption that cholesterol isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but you can’t go from Maybe Not Unhealthy + Cherrypicked Good Components = Healthy, you have to actually test the food.

    However, because everyone wants to convince themselves eating unhealthy food is healthy, faulty studies like this get reported in “health” magazines until when your doctor says “eating eggs is bad for you” you think “but I saw that study one time that says it wasn’t, maybe science just doesn’t know” (it does) and the egg industry is laughing all the way to the bank for successfully convincing you that the whole thing is too complicated for you to know or care.


  • You would think so, wouldn’t you? I have had the distinct displeasure of viewing Reddit’s r/conservative subreddit though, and to them this is just Trump “trolling.”

    What’s that narcissist’s prayer again? “He didn’t say that. And if he did, it wasnt that bad. And if it was, it’s not a big deal. And if it is, that isn’t his fault. And if it was, he didn’t mean it. And if he did, America deserved it.”

    I legitimately cannot get out of this country fast enough. I already have a plan in motion to escape, as a minority I can’t escape the constant anxiety that something terrible is going to happen to me here…


  • SeaUrchinHorizon@reddthat.comtoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comOne day
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    2 months ago

    I read somewhere that interpreting things like a clean sink or a clean room as a sign of success is actually counterproductive. You might think by thinking this way, that you’re motivating yourself to clean, but you’re actually just shaming yourself for not cleaning. It’s easy to think “cleaning is so simple, it should always be done” when in reality it should be “cleaning is such an optional task it’s okay if things build up a bit.”

    By shaming ourselves for not cleaning, we’re really shaming ourselves for having a hard day at work, or going through a hard time, or being depressed. And let me tell you, more shame is not going to make any of those scenarios any better.


  • SeaUrchinHorizon@reddthat.comtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldFriends who have babies
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    2 months ago

    I mean, to play devil’s advocate, there are some subjects in which the person vouching for something being biased because they’re “too close” isn’t a concern: whenever there’s an objective benefit to whatever they’re doing

    For instance, a person who runs marathons and has experienced runner’s high might say running is super fun once you get good at it and you should try it, and maybe you will and maybe you won’t, but trying to get good at running wouldn’t be a permanent life changing decision like having a child, and it would benefit your health rather than harming it like drugs

    There are lots of thrills in life outside of drugs and instinctual hormone soups. Admittedly runner’s high is the healthiest example, but stuff like video games, sports with minor risk taking like snowboarding or mountain climbing, etc also fit the bill


  • As with many things, the underlying problem creating conspiracy theorists is the mediocre high school dropouts need to feel superior to others in a world that values you for your skills and education. American Psychological Association: “The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.”

    If you can’t develop a sense of pride by working hard to create actual merit, why not just fake it by grouping together with a bunch of other flunkies to be like “actually, we’re all better than you, because you’re all just sheep who believe what the government tells you!”

    Bonus points if you combine this line of thinking with some other forms of discrimination, but even traditionally marginalized groups can fall prey to this trap. I’m not sure how to solve it, perhaps a stronger social safety net would prevent people from losing their grip on reality just to feel safe from perceived threats. Then again to quite a few people “black people” and “women” and “people from other countries” and “trans people” are threats so perhaps nothing we do can make them feel safe enough to stop being annoying online





  • This election in particular was very suspicious. Not the inordinate amount of bomb threats, not only the statistically impossible high numbers of bullet ballots only in swing states just enough to push the vote counts over the ‘automatic recount’ limits, not only the guy who lost the popular vote twice winning all the swing states and the popular vote, not only Elon knowing the results hours beforehand, and not only how much Trump & Elon openly bragged about how easy the election was to hack:

    “[Elon] was very effective. He knows those vote counting computers very well, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide.” - Donald Trump (https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comments/1i5bnpp/trump_praising_elon_for_well_he_knows_vote/)

    Even still, the point does remain that a good plurality of our society is openly fascist even if you factor out those ridiculous bullet ballots, I guess. It’s frustrating how it seems like everyone is just ignoring all the improbabilities just because Republicans have gaslighted us into believing that any and all election skepticism = stupid conspiracy theorist.



  • They should’ve, but… it seems a lot of Americans just aren’t compelled to perform their civic duty. I personally could never understand it, I obviously voted Harris, but in my experience (With Examples!) the average American is not:

    1) solution-oriented

    • “I can’t eat healthy to improve my health, it costs too much money! Oh, beans are incredibly cheap? But some people (not me) are allergic to soy!”
    • “Everything costs too much money, I have no savings for retirement! Oh, I can dedicate even just a small portion of my income ($50 or so) to a retirement account, just to get into the habit of saving? But I’m already being as frugal as I can and it’s just not possible!”
    • And of course “Politicians are all evil and corrupt! Oh, since I live in a democracy I can vote for candidates who aren’t or, if there’s truly no good candidates, run for office myself? But that’s too much effort and I’m too tired from work!”

    2) interested in learning

    • “I don’t think I can vote, since I don’t understand politics (never mind the fact it takes maybe max 4 hours to research which candidates you like)”
    • “I can’t go to a climate rally, because I don’t understand the issue enough (never mind the fact I hold the Library of Alexandria in the palm of my hand)”

    3) capable of caring for others in their community at potential cost to themselves (even if that cost is just “effort” or “time”)

    • “Communism is bad bc imagine if everyone’s grades in school were equalized!” (heard this one in high school, the guy who said this was infuriatingly praised by the whole damn class. Regardless of any discussions of Capitalism v Socialism v Communism, this terrible analogy always irked me because it really emphasizes just how infantile most criticism of socialist/communist policy really is. You know what? If “getting a bad grade” because you “didn’t work hard enough” in this analogy led to you literally dying because you couldn’t afford healthcare, I would share my damn grades with you. And I was a straight A student lol)

    4) capable of thinking with their logic rather than their emotions

    • See every single person who abstained from voting because they were single-issue voters over Palestine even though Trump was way worse on their single issue. Once someone even told me something to the tune of “If you’re thinking with logic and doing anything other than outright crying at everything that’s going on, you’re an awful person” (susceptible to propaganda much?)

    Idk. This got long lmao, didn’t realize how many gripes I had bottled up. This is all stuff I have actually heard or seen ppl say. People in the US frustrate me, and I am hoping this is an effect unique to America, perhaps because of American exceptionalism or the massive quantities of Russian/Chinese propaganda aimed to destabilize the US or too much individualism or something, because I really want to just leave the country and be done with American culture forever.