The Myth: Garlic is a natural mosquito
repellent.
The Truth: Garlic wards off vampires, but it won’t
keep mosquitoes at bay. Researchers at the University of
Connecticut tested the theory without success, although they did
suggest that perhaps participants hadn’t eaten enough garlic to see
results.
The Myth: Doing crunches is the only way to get a flat
belly.
The Truth: Crunches may help tone your belly, but
they’re not the only route to a flatter stomach. Eating whole
grains, such as quinoa, brown rice or bulgur wheat, may actually
help you shed belly fat. People who ate 3 servings of whole grains
(such as a 1/2 cup of cooked oatmeal, a slice of whole-wheat bread
and 1/2 cup of cooked brown rice) a day lost more weight and,
specifically, more abdominal fat than those who ate less than a
quarter of a serving, according to findings reported in a study in
The Journal of Nutrition.
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The Myth: Watermelon’s tasty, but not terribly
nutritious.
The Truth: Even though watermelon is very watery
(read: hydrating) and low in calories (only 46 per cup!), it packs
a healthy nutrition punch. In addition to some vitamin C (20% of
the Daily Value per cup), watermelon delivers lycopene—the same
red-tinged antioxidant found in tomatoes, linked to a lower risk of
certain cancers.
The Myth: Buying fresh produce at farmers’ markets is
expensive.
The Truth: Farmers’ markets might seem more
expensive than grocery stores, but prices at farmers' markets
for conventionally grown produce items were lower than they were at
supermarkets in a study conducted by Jake Robert Claro for the
Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, according to a
blog on the topic written by Barry Estabrook. The same was true for
organic produce.
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Organic
The Myth: Raw foods are healthier than cooked
foods.
The Truth: Raw-foodists claim that eating food in
its raw state preserves all its nutrients, including enzymes that
get destroyed by cooking. They make a point…kind of. Cooking can
destroy water-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin C, but it also
makes other nutrients, like lycopene in tomatoes, more absorbable.
While cooking does break down, or “denature,” enzymes, so does
stomach acid. Meaning that even if you preserve the enzymes by
sparing them the cooking process, most of the enzymes will be
destroyed through digestion anyway. This is not to say that eating
a raw-food diet is necessarily unhealthy. On the contrary, a 2005
study in The Journal of Nutrition found that raw-foodists
were far less likely than the general population to register high
levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol. On the flip side, 38% of the
study’s 201 subjects were deficient in vitamin B12, a nutrient
that’s also important for heart health.
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Busted
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