Science Vs Wives Tales
Eat chicken soup if you have a cold.
Go, Grandma! Hot liquids are soothing for the throat. Onions and garlic help the lungs and have anti-microbial effects.
If you carry the baby high, it’s a girl. If you carry low, it’s a boy.
False. How a mother carries her baby is based on her physique: the length of the torso, where the baby is positioned, how it’s sitting. The gender has nothing to do with it.
Don’t go swimming on a full stomach.
True. Overeating before an activity can make you feel sick and give you a stomach ache. It’s not seriously dangerous, though; you’re not going to be overcome by cramps and drown. This wives’ tale could have been created to keep kids from throwing up in the pool.
If you swallow your gum, it’ll take seven years to digest.
False. Otherwise every time you get an x-ray, you would see lumps of gum.
Eating carrots will improve your vision.
Not exactly. Carrots are full of fibre and Vit A. The beta-carotene is healthy, but same with the apple; there’s a lot more to eye health than just eating carrots.
Shaving will cause the hair to grow back thicker.
False. You have two different types of hair: pre-pubescent hair that will come back the same no matter how you take it off, and “hormonally related” hair, which is subject to hormonal changes. It is possible to kill a hair follicle after repeatedly subjecting it to waxing over a long period of time, but that follicle might have died anyway because of hormonal changes, such as menopause.
Spicy foods cause ulcers.
False. Spicy and acidic foods can aggravate an ulcer, but the won’t cause ulcers unless you already have the predisposition. Otherwise, all people in Mexico would have ulcers.
Honey cures a Cough & Cold Symptoms.
True. After treating 100 people with cold and cough symptoms and sleeping difficulties with over the counter drug of honey-floavoured dextromethorphan, and 100 with honey, surprisingly the honey did better than the drug, coming out head and shoulders above dextromethorphan at relieving cold and cough symptoms.
Researchers think that the stickiness and viscosity of honey is what helps it alleviate coughs, while the natural antioxidants can help in the healing process. Thanks, bees!
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If you have any old wives tales that you have found to be true or faulse, please share us.
🙂
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Some swell tips and info here, Polly. Thanks for sharing. My mother used to always tell me, when I’d see a spider (I HATE spiders!), “Well, where there’s one, there’s always another.” And, my friend told me, “At any given point in time, you are never more than three feet from a spider.” I don’t know if these are true . . . but I’m trying to think about Christmas and Disneyland and other happy thoughts, just in case! LOL Bright Blessings! Faerie
old wives tales are the best hee hee!
The carrots and eyesight story was started in the UK during WWII to cover the fact that RAF night fighters were now carrying radar.
The success of people like Cunningham and Rawnsley was put down to carrots. Rubbish, but there was another reason that carrots were picked on as the source of the apparently phenomenal eyesight of the night fighters. They were plentiful. Unlike a lot of things at that time.