Old wives’ tales about health have been around for generations. Health myths persist because misinformation spreads easily, especially with the popularity of social media. Here is the truth about some of the most common health myths:
• Drink 8 glasses of water daily. According to WebMD, there is no need to count cups. People who drink when they are thirsty stay well-hydrated. In addition, fruit, vegetables, soup, and beverages such as juice, coffee, and tea all contribute to our daily hydration needs.
• Eggs cause heart disease. By now, it’s been pretty well established that eating eggs is good for you, as long as you don’t overdo it. According to Real Simple, all eggs are rich in protein, phosphorus, selenium, chlorine, iron, vitamin A and B vitamins. The B vitamins and choline found in eggs are beneficial to brain health. While eggs do contain cholesterol, experts say that dietary cholesterol does not significantly raise blood cholesterol levels enough to trigger heart disease in healthy people.
• You can catch a cold by being out in cold weather. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, contrary to popular belief, cold weather or feeling chilled doesn’t cause a cold. However, more colds do occur during the cold weather seasons because schools are in session, increasing the risk for exposure to the virus. People also stay indoors more when it’s cold and are in closer proximity to each other, making it easier to pass along germs. The low humidity of winter causes dry nasal passages, which are more susceptible to cold viruses.
• You need a daily multivitamin. You should get most of your daily nutrients from a well-rounded diet that includes lots of fruit, vegetables, nuts, healthy oils and whole grains. But if your doctor feels you are suffering from a deficiency, a vitamin supplement may be needed.
• You need to eat breakfast to lose weight. Not so, say experts from Cornell University who found that people who skipped breakfast didn’t overeat at lunch and dinner and, in fact, ate 400 fewer calories a day.
• Green mucus means infection. One study looked at green mucus samples from people with a cough and no other lung conditions. It found that only about 1 in 10 of those green mucus samples were caused by a bacterial infection. This means that most people with green mucus don’t have a bacterial infection. In short, mucus color alone isn’t a reliable way to say whether you need antibiotics, says GoodRx.
• Sugar makes kids hyper. While sugar isn’t good for children, research shows that it won’t cause them to act out or be unable to focus on their schoolwork.
• Toilet seats can pass along germs. According to WebMD, toilet seats are usually clean. It’s the doorknobs, handles and floors that can be covered with bacteria like E. coli, norovirus and the flu. Use paper towels to cover your hands when opening doors or touching handles and a hand sanitizer afterwards.
• Cracking joints triggers arthritis. While the sound of someone cracking their joints can be annoying, it does not cause arthritis. Experts at the Cleveland Clinic say one reason that your joints may make a cracking noise could be gas escaping from a synovial membrane, or a ligament or tendon passing over another ligament or tendon. However, if you feel regular or severe pain in your joints, seek medical help.
Strokes caused by an artery tear are landing five times as many Americans in the hospital these days, a new study says.
Cervical artery dissection involves a small tear in the inner lining of an artery in the neck that supplies blood to the brain.
Blood can clot at the site of the tear. If the clot breaks loose, it can travel to the brain and cause a stroke.
Hospitalizations for this sort of stroke have increased nearly fivefold during the past 15 years, according to findings published April 2 in the journal Neurology.
“Cervical artery dissection is an important cause of stroke, especially in people under 50, so it is crucial to detect it right away,” senior researcher Dr. Shadi Yaghi, a vascular neurologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., said in a news release.
“Strokes that are not fatal can lead to long-term disability, poor mental health and reduced quality of life,” he said. “Our research found a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations for cervical artery dissection, with rates rising steadily year over year.”
These sort of tears in the cervical artery are most often caused by a motor vehicle crash or other accident that causes neck strain, researchers said. However, activities as simple as heavy lifting has been known to cause a cervical artery tear in some people.
For the study, researchers analyzed 15 years of U.S. health data to identify more than 125,000 people hospitalized for cervical artery dissection.
Patients had an average age of 51, and just over half suffered a stroke from their artery tear, results show.
The number of artery tears increased about 10% a year on average, rising from 11 cases per million people in 2005 to 46 cases per million in 2019, results show.
Men and women were equally at risk for suffering an artery tear, but there were differences between races.
Cervical artery dissections increased by 16% a year on average among Hispanic people, compared to 13% for Black people, 12% for Asian people and 8% for white people.
Seniors also have become more prone to these tears, with an average annual increase of 12% among people 65 and older compared to 8% for people under 65, researchers said.
“Possible reasons for this nearly five-fold increase over 15 years include greater awareness of cervical artery dissection by health care professionals, better access to imaging to help identify it and an overall increase in this condition for which a cause has yet to be determined,” Yaghi said.
“Given the rising incidence of cervical artery dissection, our study underscores the importance of finding prevention strategies as well as new treatments to reduce the risk of stroke,” he added.
Just putting this out there. From Science to Humanity’s Well-Being: 9 Extraordinary Examples of the Power of Music.
AUTHORMarika Spitulski
Anyone who listens to music — which is around 90% of the population — has likely experienced its power to soothe, stir up emotion, connect, and jog memories. Whatever the mood or moment, the soundtrack possibilities are endless. But the power of music stretches far beyond merely comforting or entertaining its listener — studies show that the art form is also full of possibilities when it comes to the world of science.
Research has proven that music can be harnessed to improve mental health, reduce pain, and otherwise profoundly affect our brains. From the fields of neurology to astronomy, music has contributed to unique advancements in the way we understand ourselves and the world. These findings support the idea that music can serve as a catalyst for healing, breaking barriers, and connecting — sometimes without us even being aware of its impact.
The relationship is a two-way street: Scientists have used music to enhance their field, and musicians have used science to enhance their art. To highlight this intersection, we compiled the below music-meets-science examples, ranging from music being used to help people with dementia to astrophysicists using planets’ orbits to create musical rhythms.
Well-Being and Music: Using Music to Reduce Pain and Feelings of “Unpleasantness”
Aleksei Morozov/ iStock
Research has shown that music has the power to reduce physical pain and provide comfort. And an October 2023 paper published in Frontiers in Pain Research added to that body of research, finding that listening to your favorite songs is particularly effective.
“In our study, we show that favorite music chosen by study participants has a much larger effect on acute thermal pain reduction than unfamiliar relaxing music,” lead author Darius Valevicius said in a statement. “We also found that emotional responses play a very strong role in predicting whether music will have an effect on pain.”
The scientists also evaluated musical themes to see if they affected pain relief, and found that “moving or bittersweet emotional experiences” seemed to result in lower ratings of pain and unpleasantness.
Neurology and Music: Scientists Re-Create Pink Floyd Song by Analyzing Listeners’ Brain Waves
In August 2023, Scientists re-created a portion of Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” by analyzing the brain waves of people listening to it.
Researchers played 90% of the song for epilepsy patients undergoing surgery to curb seizures, and trained a computer model on their neural activity collected via brain electrodes, per Science. The team then programmed the algorithm to come up with the remaining 10% — about 15 seconds of music — based on the patterns it had learned. The resulting audio is an eerie, echoey simulacrum.
“We’re on the threshold of lots of things — the fusion of neuroscience and computer engineering, and really, in many ways, the sky’s the limit,” study lead Ludovic Bellier told Fortune. The work provides insight into how the brain processes music, and may be used to help people who struggle to speak due to injuries or diseases.
Mental Health and Music: Study Shows Music May Benefit Mental Health as Much as Exercise
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Music lovers will tell you that bopping along to your favorite song is a surefire way to feel better, but a scientific review published in JAMA concluded that music’s benefit to mental health is actually comparable to that of exercise. In other words, singing your heart out in the shower could be as good for your mind as a jog around the block.
Researchers analyzed data from 26 studies involving a combined 779 adult participants. Each study measured the impact of making and listening to music on health-related quality of life (HRQOL). The review, published in March 2022, found “moderate-quality quantitative evidence of associations between music interventions and clinically significant changes in mental HRQOL.”
After comparing that evidence to data on other approaches, the authors noted that the results are within the range of the “average effects of established non–pharmaceutical and medical interventions (e.g., exercise, weight loss).” Read more.
Technology and Music: Machine Turns Heartbeats of Children With Heart Defects Into Rhythms
About 40,000 children in the U.S. are born with congenital heart defects, or CHD, each year. In an effort to hold space for this condition in an intentional way, a father of two sons who have heart issues reached out to Swedish audiovisual artist and woodworker Love Hultén.
From there, the CHD-4 was born: a unique drum-like machine that decoded electrocardiograms from four children with heart defects and transformed the patterns into sequences, which ultimately produced sounds based on their unique heartbeats (the individual shape, pace, and beats per minute).
Fast Company described Hultén’s invention as a “one-of-a-kind machine designed to produce rhythm and music where there is none,” with Hellqvist adding that “it takes dark and heavy experiences and transforms them into something beautiful. Into hope and change.”
Astrology and Music: Astrophysicists Bring a Sound to Saturn’s Moons and Rings
Astrophysicists at the University of Toronto used music to bring a sense of Saturn to Earth — despite the planets being hundreds of millions of miles apart.
The team “converted Saturn’s moons and rings into two pieces of music,” said astrophysicist Matt Russo in a press release from the institution. They made the music based on the patterns of “orbital resonances” and “rhythmic gravitational tugs” that were then converted into musical harmony. This data was collected via the Cassini spacecraft, a mission that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
Dan Tamayo, a postdoctoral researcher at CITA and the Centre for Planetary Sciences at U of T Scarborough, explained: “Saturn’s magnificent rings act like a sounding board that launches waves at locations that harmonize with the planet’s many moons, and some pairs of moons are themselves locked in resonances.”
A March study published in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy also found that while music helped improve cognitive functions of patients with Alzheimer’s, the influence was even greater when the patients were involved in the music making.
Attention and Music: Using Music to Stay Focused
Have trouble staying focused? Consider turning on some tunes. A Stanford study showed that “music moves [the] brain to pay attention” by engaging certain areas and, ultimately, increasing cognitive activity. Per a press release from the institution, “Music engages the brain over a period of time … and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.”
That being said, music isn’t broadly beneficial to every task on your to-do list. Psychologists have found that music is more distracting than beneficial when it comes to studying.
“Multitasking is a fallacy; human beings are not capable of truly multitasking because attention is a limited resource, and you can only focus on so much without a cost,” cognitive psychologist Brian Anderson said in a Texas A&M University press release. “So when you’re doing two things at the same time, like studying and listening to music, and one of the things requires cognitive effort, there will be a cost to how much information you can retain doing both activities.”
Artificial Intelligence and Music: AI Completing the Beatles’ Final Song
Forty-five years after John Lennon first started working on the song, artificial intelligence put the finishing touches on what we know today as “Now and Then.” According to the official video’s description, the unexpected gift is thanks to a software system that allowed for the song to be completed with contributions from all four Beatles in the piece — and is a reflection of the band’s “endless creative curiosity and shared fascination with technology.”
There’s no question AI is changing the way music is being curated, played, and created, and this is one example of how it can be used to salvage something beautiful.
“It marks the completion of the last recording that John, Paul, George, and Ringo will get to make together,” the video’s description reads, “and celebrates the legacy of the foremost and most influential band in popular music history.”
Music and Togetherness: Singing With Others Is Good for Us
Vladimir Vladimirov/ iStock
A growing body of research shows that singing together at any occasion boosts well-being. One of the reasons for that is endorphins, those happy hormones runners are always going on about.
“Singing is one of the mega-mechanisms we use for bonding,” Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian. “Singing in the shower gives you a bit of an uplift, but when doing it communally, there’s something about the synchrony of singing that creates this massive endorphin uplift.”
Dunbar set out to prove singing’s bonding power in a 2015 study, in which strangers sang together for an hour and left as, well, not strangers. “It was as if they’d known each other since primary school,” he recalled.
He noted that the prolonged exhalation and breath work required while singing likely contributes to its health benefits. Going forward, this research could help inform therapies for dementia, Parkinson’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, long COVID, and more.
