In today’s day and age, doing research is not quite the same as our parents and grandparents. It is a hell of a lot easier. However, if ease is the positive, then what is the negative? The answer is the amount of information that is false.
I was training the other night, when a respected friend of mine began telling me about a discovery at John’s Hopkins. He said they found out that if you cut refined sugar & red meat out of your diet, then the cancer cells can no longer live. They apparently feed off of the sugar.
I was amazed by this and quickly made a mental check of my diet. I didn’t eat too much sugar, but I love red meat. ‘Not if it causes cancer, though’, I thought to myself. Over the weekend, I told my family and a few friends about what I had heard. They couldn’t believe it either. What an amazing discovery they all agreed. I was ready to change my diet.
Then today, I decided to research exactly what my friend had told me. I did a google search and found some article from 2005 about sugar proteins and cancer, but nothing like my friend had said. I changed around te words in my search and did another. That’s when it popped up.
I found a website with the exact letter my friend had read from Johns Hopkins. It was embedded in another letter, this one from the REAL Johns Hopkins.
Here is the link: http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cancerupdate.asp
Johns Hopkins was letting the public know the chain letter supposedly from them about cancer living off of sugar is completely false. They had nothing to do with it, nor did they know who did. It was simply another case of someone using a big name to back up their own beliefs.
And that is the negative of this information filled world we live in. It is more important than ever to do all of your research on everything. People, like my friend, have the sincerest intentions when they pass over valuable information because they believe it to be true. It’s up to us to make sure it is.
So do your research. I mean, come on. You don’t even have to leave your room.
3 Comments
The web is a huge formless entitity with an unlimited amount of information. Possibly one of the reasons our children suffer from ADD, is because we have to sift thru an exorbatent amount of it daily. Information used to take days months or years to get to its destination from its source. Today it moves in milliseconds. You can loose hours just sifting thru the rubble, one of the greatest things about the net is it’s access to information, anytype, anytime, anywhere. one of the biggest downside is the amount of erroneous info.
It can be subtle as misguided information, to plain all out urban legends and pranks. It happens with pictures too, digitally altered photos passed around, now it could very well be that de la hoya was in those fishnets, but
i highly doubt a shark the size of a helicopter is jumping out of the ocean attacking a scuba diver being lifted, those things happen in Jaws not in real life. The de la hoya stuff, well…. stop messing with those Brooklyn women.
It’s so true that there’s a ton of false information out there. As a professional researcher it almost gets overwhelming at times to sort through it all to get what you need. There’s a really great book out now called Living Life as if Thinking Matters, by R. L. Wysong that talks about how to use your mind to determine what’s right for you instead of relying on others beliefs and false information. It’s well worth the read if you get a chance to check it out.
@Ruth
Interesting. I am definitely going to look for it the next time my wife drags me to Barnes & Nobles (God knows I will have time
Thanks for the suggestion.