So it’s the winter, and I’m perpetually on the verge of getting some illness or another. There’s always a snivel or a throat thing or a ache or whatever. The single thing I’m told to do most by the folks around me is to take Vitamin C in order to not get a cold.
And they’re wrong.
Don’t believe me? Try here. Or here. Or here.
It’s not that Vitamin C isn’t good for you, or that it doesn’t have positive effects- it’s that people’s perception of what those effects are is divorced from reality. Information gets filtered and handed off and “summarized” and thus distorted. The difficult part there is that people have faith in their sources, and thus don’t think of the second/third/fourth hand information as distorted, and we end up thinking that Vitamin C somehow cures the common cold. The details disappear, and it is those same details that hold the truths that we were looking for.