Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked (9 page)

However, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If sitting with Mom in a bathroom with the shower going makes both Mom and child calmer, then by all means do it. But maybe we should think twice before we advocate holding that mist tube in front of a screaming, thrashing kid in the emergency department, or placing a baby in a croup tent that separates him from loving care.

Dairy

If you are sick, you should stay away from dairy products (milk makes you phlegmy)

We have tried to debunk this myth before, but even our supporters have trouble believing that milk does not give them a lot more mucus. A pharmacist friend named Sonak, who considers himself a huge fan of medical myth-busting, just cannot believe that milk does not increase his phlegm and congestion when he’s sick. “I can feel it!” he insists. He thinks it is one myth where we are wrong. So we’ll look at the science again. If milk is going to make you more congested when you are sick, then we would hate to recommend the wrong thing.

Sonak has plenty of supporters on this one. Drinking milk or consuming other dairy products has long been thought to be associated with increased respiratory problems, congestion, or even with asthma. It has been a traditional Chinese medicine tenet to cut down on how much dairy you are taking in if you have too much mucus in your system. A twelfth-century physician, Moses Maimonides, recommended that people with breathing or congestion problems needed to eliminate milk and dairy from their diets. Even Dr. Spock said that children should not have milk when they have colds! Many of today’s doctors recommend the exact same thing; in a study of 330 parents, almost 60 percent believed that milk would increase their child’s mucus production, and almost a third of them got this information from their doctor.

Scientists have recently developed a hypothesis to help explain how milk might increase mucus production. We thought Sonak would be interested in this new theory. In the scheme of how allergies usually work, it did not make sense that milk would give you more congestion instead of, for example, giving you a rash or irritating your digestive tract. Scientists found that when milk is broken down by your body one of the chemicals it becomes is beta-casomorphin-7. The reason you might care about beta-casomorphin-7 if you think milk makes you phlegmy is that this chemical stimulates mucus production from certain glands that line the inside of your gut, specifically the colon. The scientists proposed that maybe this same chemical makes the glands inside your respiratory tract produce more mucus too. It is not yet time to say that Sonak is right and we are wrong. There are a number of reasons why we are not yet convinced by the science. First, there is no evidence that this chemical from milk stimulates the glands in your respiratory tract and makes them produce more mucus. Second, even if it is stimulating glands in your gut, there is no evidence that this would have an impact on your respiratory tract. The chemical would need to get to your respiratory tract, and that’s a separate set of pipes from your digestive tract. The two only intersect in the back of your throat. If milk is going down the respiratory set of pipes, you have more problems than just mucus—you will choke! For this chemical that is made in your digestive tract to have an effect in your lungs, it would need to be absorbed into the bloodstream in a way that also causes inflammation in your lungs. There is no evidence that this happens.

In contrast to this unproven idea, there are a lot of scientific studies that seem to prove that there is no link between drinking milk and becoming phlegmy. When tested carefully in human beings, there is no evidence that milk or dairy increases your mucus production. In one test of this idea, scientists took 125 volunteers and randomly assigned them to get cow’s milk or a soy drink, both of which were flavored with cocoa and peppermint in a way that made it impossible for the volunteers to know which drink they were getting. The scientists asked all of the participants to rank how much of a mucus effect they had after drinking either product and to describe what their symptoms were. When people did not know whether they were getting dairy milk or a soy drink, they could not tell any difference between how the drinks affected them. There was no difference in having a “coating over the mouth,” “swallowing a lot,” or having “thicker saliva” whether you drank milk or soy. However, if you believed beforehand that milk gave you more mucus, then you reported more of these problems for either of the beverages.

In another great study of this myth, scientists took sixty volunteers and tried to make them sick with the common cold virus by sticking it directly in their nose. Then they carefully recorded the volunteers’ breathing symptoms and their milk and dairy intake over the next ten days. Even better, they actually measured the weight of the sick people’s snot to see how much mucus they were making! (Take a moment to be glad that you don’t have a job measuring people’s mucus weight.) Fifty-one of those volunteers got sick, but how much dairy they were taking in did not have any impact on how they felt. Drinking more milk was not associated with any increase in problems with coughing, congestion, or a runny nose, nor did drinking more milk change the weight of their nasal secretions. In other studies that look at adults with asthma, researchers also found that there was no effect on their breathing, coughing, or wheezing from drinking either whole or skim milk. It was the same as drinking water. This was also true in a study looking at patients with eczema and asthma. If they did not have any actual milk allergy, the milk did not do anything to flare up their asthma or their eczema. These are very careful studies, testing this idea in human beings, and showing no impact from milk.

Are we saying that milk causing more mucus is all in your head? Not entirely. People who believe that milk causes more mucus seem to be sensitive to the sensation that milk creates in the mouth. Though milk does not actually increase the amount of mucus your body makes or change how congested you are, you might feel something different in your mouth when you drink it. Experts tell us that milk spreads out in tiny droplets over the saliva in your mouth. The official name for this process is called “droplet flocculation.” The feeling of those tiny droplets in your mouth might be mistaken for having more mucus, especially among people who are very sensitive to this sensation. You also might be interested to know that drinking any fluid—water and milk alike—increases the amount of saliva that you have, though studies show neither makes your saliva thicker.

Even if you think something is happening and feel something different, this does not make it real! The studies have showed that people who are “sensitive” to milk’s effects can be fooled in the same way by soy drinks. Milk does not make your cold or breathing worse.

Day Care

Kids in day care catch more colds

If you have children or work with them, you know that they are prone to endless runny noses and coughs and sniffles, especially during the winter months. Children average between six and ten colds per year. Since respiratory infections typically last for ten to fourteen days, that is a lot of days out of every month with some sort of cold or respiratory infection. For children in day care, parents often feel like the situation is even worse. Children in day care seem to be sick all the time, and this makes some parents feel especially guilty about leaving their children.

There is some truth to this concern. Attending day care has been associated with more respiratory infections, but it is difficult to know what other factors are coming into play. While several studies have found higher rates of respiratory infections in children attending day care, studies have also found that children are sick more days when they have more siblings and when they come from poorer households.

It is also important to track where in a child’s lifespan they get sick. Very large studies show us that children in day care do get sick more often when they first start going, but these infections are less common as time goes on. As the children get older, they have no more infections than those children who are cared for at home, and they seem to have fewer illnesses once they are school-aged. This could be because they have been exposed to more viruses and bugs early on, so their immune system protects them well by the time they are in school. A Danish study looked at more than 135,000 children in Copenhagen, and found that the youngest children attending day care, those under two years old, were at a higher risk of catching colds than children who are cared for at home. In their first six months of going to day care, children younger than two years have much higher rates of getting sick than children who stay home. This is especially true for young children who do not have any other siblings. However, the risk decreases as the children get a bit older.

Parents who are concerned about all of the day care sicknesses need to balance this with what happens when children get sick when they are a bit older. Another study found that children who go to large day care centers when they are in preschool have fewer colds in later years, doing better than their peers in terms of not getting sick and not missing school when they are up to thirteen years old. The day care kids seem to have built up their immunity to common colds and viruses earlier in life, and they benefit from that once school starts, whereas the stay-at-home children start to get exposed to all of those viruses only when they hit school.

Deodorants

Deodorants and antiperspirants cause breast cancer

We’ve already discussed the fact that there are things you can do to prevent cancer. Some things, though, have nothing to do with cancer at all. Because cancer is scary, it sometimes seems like it doesn’t take much to inflame the myth-believing part of our brains to swallow as true a made-up story about cancer.

We can’t tell you how many times we have been forwarded e-mails from our friends that breathlessly relate how “studies” have proven that deodorants and antiperspirants cause breast cancer. They claim that “someone” doesn’t want you to know the truth. Neither of us has any vested interest in the deodorant and antiperspirant market, and all we want you to know are the facts.

Some people believe that toxins in deodorants and antiperspirants enter the blood and cause cancer. Some people believe that shaving your underarms breaks open the skin and lets these toxins in faster. Some people believe that these toxins collect in the lymph nodes in the breast. None of this has been shown to be true.

Most of the published “studies” are not actual studies, or if they are, they’re seriously flawed. For instance, a paper appeared in the
European Journal of Cancer Prevention
in 2001 entitled, “Underarm Cosmetics Are a Cause of Breast Cancer.” What many people missed was that this manuscript was published under the heading “Hypothesis” and actually was a thought piece in which the author theorized that maybe deodorants and antiperspirants could be a cause of breast cancer. It wasn’t a study, and it didn’t actually prove anything. But if you just looked at the title and the journal it appeared in, you’d get a completely different picture.

Another influential study published in 2003 declared, “An earlier age of breast cancer diagnosis is related to more frequent use of antiperspirants/deodorants and underarm shaving.” This study found that women who were younger and had breast cancer reported shaving their underarms more and starting to use deodorants and antiperspirants earlier. They therefore concluded that shaving underarms and using antiperspirants was associated with earlier onset of breast cancer. There was one huge flaw, though. Since the study examined no women without breast cancer, it’s entirely possible that younger women are simply more likely to shave their underarm hair than older women. But we can’t tell since there was no comparison group studied of women without breast cancer.

Or can we? In 2002, a study was published that compared about 1,600 women both with and without breast cancer. In that study, no association could be found between shaving underarms or using deodorants and antiperspirants and breast cancer.

You might wonder why most breast cancer occurs in what is called the upper outer quadrant of the breast, nearest to where deodorants and antiperspirants are applied. Generally speaking, this is because most breast tissue is in the upper outer part of the chest. In fact, the American Cancer Society notes that the proportion of breast cancer that occurs in this area of the breast is equal to the proportion of breast tissue that is in that area.

You might also wonder why your doctor has told you not to use antiperspirants when you’re getting a mammogram. That’s because the aluminum contained in antiperspirants can interfere with the scan. It has nothing to do with concerns for your health.

Breast cancer is a serious problem with a large impact on the health of women. There are things we can do to help women avoid breast cancer and detect it sooner. But giving up deodorants and antiperspirants will do nothing to prevent it.

Echinacea

I have just the thing for that cold … Echinacea

The echinacea flower is widely believed to be an effective remedy for your sniffles and snot. Many people believe that echinacea is an immune stimulator that helps protect your body against getting colds or even fights them off. Unfortunately, there is little scientific evidence in support of echinacea fighting colds.

Studies including as many as 3,000 people have looked at whether echinacea prevents colds and whether it treats upper respiratory tract infections or colds. For neither purpose does echinacea stand up to scrutiny. The results of the studies are difficult to combine into a final set of results because they look at different parts of the plant and they use different methods for their studies. Nonetheless, an overview of the studies suggests that echinacea just does not perform as well as we would like it to.

In 2006, a Cochrane systematic review examined all of the evidence from studies of echinacea. The Cochrane systematic reviews are considered the highest-quality reviews that summarize the science of a particular subject. In sixteen studies of the herb, echinacea did no better than a sugar pill (placebo) for preventing or treating colds. In the best studies, where the volunteers either received a placebo or else received echinacea, the majority of studies did not find any benefit for echinacea in preventing colds. When you look only at the less well done studies, those that did not use placebos, scientists more often find just a suggestion that echinacea helps to prevent colds. When only the lower-quality studies show an effect, we worry that biases and bad science are influencing the outcome. The results from the better-quality studies are more trustworthy. These studies tell us that echinacea does not prevent colds. The summary of the high-quality studies also concludes that echinacea does not work to treat colds or cold symptoms. In an example of one of the well-crafted studies that was published in the
New England Journal of Medicine,
doctors divided 400 volunteers into groups that either took a sugar pill or took echinacea. They found that taking echinacea did not change the severity of a volunteer’s cold, nor did it change how the cold progressed.