25 Outdated Healthy Living Tips That People Still Follow

Healthy living and fitness are trending worldwide right now. Everyone is looking to adopt balanced diets that give us the required nutrition and energy to keep living a fit life till we have to kick the bucket essentially. After all, according to popular idealogies, we want to treat our bodies like a temple and if we treat it right, we will reap the rewards later. But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Unfortunately, not everyone does the required research when adopting a healthy lifestyle and often they tend to get sucked into following health practices that have long since been debunked. Since not everyone seems to be up to date on the latest findings, today, we decided to highlight a Reddit community thread inspired by user Urasianbella where folks discussed the myths about healthy living that are shockingly still quite popular, even though they have been found to do more harm than good.

#1

Potatoes are actually nutrient dense, not just starch.

Edit: the myth is that taters are just starch.

#2

That heart disease is essentially a one-way trip. You can absolutely reverse arterial plaque buildup with the right diet and a bit of exercise.

#3

Autism isn’t more prevalent these days due to vaccines its because we learned more about it and are actually diagnosing people rather than burning them or throwing them into an asylum 🫡.

#4

You can do everything ‘right’, illness, disease and old age will still happen.🙄.

#5

That universal healthcare in the US would cost taxpayers more than they pay now for healthcare.

#6

That you need to do a cleanse to get rid of toxins.

Our liver and kidney clear out what’s not necessary. Cleanses are a scam.

#7

British dental health is significantly better than American, they’re just less interested in cosmetic dentistry.

#8

Eggs raise cholesterol. They are actually packed with nutrients and healthy fats that are good for overall health.

#9

Natural means nothing. It’s a logical fallacy. Arsenic is natural, mercury is natural, lots of natural things are toxic. Stop trying to convince me that something is good because it’s natural. Oh and that goes triple for chemicals that are used. Natural doesn’t mean it’s better. I recently read how a winery was using a natural herbicide. It’s a lot more toxic than the artificial ones. They were poisoning people.

#10

Slightly off topic but people haven’t learned the recent news that we now believe we know what the appendix does. It’s a backup storage for gut bacteria so it can help replenish itself, like after antibiotics.

#11

That you can target fat by doing specific workouts.

You can’t. You can build muscle by doing specific workouts but your body will burn fat from where it wants, not in that one area.

Luckily, it’s made weeding out the workout frauds much easier!

#12

Eat fat, get fat.

Fat is actually important in your diet.

#13

That poster of the food pyramid that was in every classroom growing up.

#14

There’s no real such thing as a “cleanse”. Own a liver? That’s how we do a cleanse for real.

#15

Artificial chemicals aren’t inherently bad for you. If you can’t pronounce it, it’s a skill issue.

#16

KETO is awful, especially for people prone to high cholesterol or heart disease. people are still pushing low carb high fat diets…that c**p almost messed me up permanently! I will never try a fad diet again. Eating balanced like they taught us in school, with lots of fruits, veggies, and whole grains, and moderation on red meat is best for me!

#17

That fitness influencers look like that because they work hard.

The majority of them are on steroids.

#18

Myth: dieting is temporary.

Truth: losing weight is a whole lifestyle change.

If you temporarily change your diet to lose X-lbs and then change back to your normal diet, you’re also going back to your normal weight.

To lose weight and keep it off, you need to change your relationship with food. Maybe you do need to change what you eat, maybe you only need to eat less of it, maybe you need to modify when you eat, maybe you need to change macros.

If you don’t change your lifestyle, you’ll go back to it.

#19

Expensive equipment won’t make you see results faster. A 10lb dumbbell made from obsidian rock and blessed by a monk does the same job of a 10lb bag of dirt.

#20

I thought black people (me) didn’t need sunscreen because melanin protects us against the sun. Evidently that’s not entirely true.

#21

Women just need cardio.

Wrong. Women need resistance/strength training even more than men because of bone density issues at menopause and resistance training is the primary means of increasing bone density.

#22

When you shave your hair DOESN’T grow back faster, longer or darker!!! It’s just all growing back at the same time so it can LOOK more full. If it did work like that every bald man ever would shave their hard every day…

#23

That carbs are the enemy. Turns out your body actually needs them to function properly.

#24

Walking is pretty close to jogging in terms of calories burnt

Edit: I phrased this terribly. The myth is that jogging burns more calories than walking when in reality they burn very similar amounts when measuring by distance covered.

#25

Being cold gives you a cold – Viruses cause colds, not chilly weather. In fact, some studies suggest that exposure to cold may even boost immune function.

Shanilou Perera

Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.