You should be drinking celery juice every morning. You must avoid dairy at all costs, but if you want to make your coffee healthier, you should put a spoonful of butter into it. Fruit should be the majority of your diet, but carbs are evil and will cause you health problems. You should go keto if you want to lose weight, but eating foods with a lot of fat is dangerous. You should be using essential oils every day, but the only way you can truly be healthy inside and out is if you have the proper crystals displayed around your home.
When it comes to what is actually healthy, there’s a lot of contradictory information floating around out there. So how are we to know what is safe and what isn’t? After all, some doctors used to recommend smoking cigarettes less than a hundred years ago.
One curious Reddit user recently asked, “What’s something most people think is healthy today that future people will shake their heads at?”, and thousands of people called out common dietary advice, lifestyle practices and habits in the replies. Below, we’ve gathered some of their most thought-provoking responses, so be sure to upvote the things you are wary of as well. Then let us know in the comments what else you think will be viewed as unhealthy in the future, and if you’re interested in checking out another Bored Panda article debunking food and nutrition myths, you can find that right here.
#1
Not vaccinating your children. Where the hell did this trend come from? It’s so dangerous and re-inviting deadly diseases like measles back into our society.
Image source: LeoMarius, Alexander Simonsen
#2
The hustle culture. Not everything you do needs to make money. You should be able to have hobbies that stay just that: hobbies.
Image source: Marley9391, Rifqi Ali Ridho
#3
Indoctrinating children to religion before they’re old enough to use abstract reasoning and decide for themselves
Image source: Pauljustblogs, Michael Morse
#4
The child-like worship of billionaires.
Image source: NutWrench, Danilo Capece
#5
There’s been a really weird trend of people drinking “alkaline water” that has a pH of 9.5 or some s**t. Here’s the truth about it: the second it comes in contact with your stomach acid, it’s not gonna be alkaline anymore. The pH of your body is most likely fine, and if it actually isn’t, you should be in an emergency room instead of listening to some snake oil salesman
Image source: CNRavenclaw, Stephan Müller
#6
A part of “fat acceptance.” While, of course, everyone deserves respect, regardless of size, the idea that being very overweight is a healthful lifestyle, is just wrong. Sure, most of the bodily harm of obesity won’t catch up to you, until later in life. But it WILL catch up to you. I’ve been overweight most of my life. While I’m generally healthy, my knees have paid the price, of supporting the extra poundage. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll escape the bodily harm of long term obesity.
Image source: rosenditocabron, Towfiqu barbhuiya
#7
The notion that “natural” automatically means healthier.
Image source: Moo2400, Fikri Rasyid
#8
Exposing your children all over social media.
Image source: Unusual-Balance-1736, Ketut Subiyanto
#9
40 hour work week with generally unfulfilling jobs. Source: I’m a clinical psychologist.
Image source: HomeWasGood, Christin Hume
#10
Vaping instead of smoking. You’re still filling your lungs with stuff that shouldn’t be there in the end. Looks like more research is coming out about the risks too. It’s not as bad as smoking, but it’s got its own issues. It’s fine if you’re using vapes and e-cigs to quit smoking, but it’s gone beyond that for quite some time now. Many people just exchanged one habit for the other.
Image source: Thorhees, Renz Macorol
#11
Lack of access/time in nature.
Image source: Telefone_529, Josh Zv
#12
Circumcision
Image source: wiredandtired1980, cottonbro
#13
Cooking things in plastic, eating and drinking things out of plastic.
Image source: AriesAsF, George Becker
#14
Very short video formats (TikTok, Instagram stories, YouTube shorts) and their impact on our attention span
Image source: VietQuads, Solen Feyissa
#15
Energy drinks – I’ll be amazed if there aren’t some long term effects of drinking can after can of Red Bull/Monster etc
Image source: WeMoveInTheShadows, Wells Chan
#16
From a doctor’s perspective, half of the US health food industry is absolute garbage.
1. Supplements. What’s in them? They aren’t regulated, so anything could be! Many studies have found a lack of actual advertised product at best, harmless filler such as saw dust commonly, and heavy metal and other toxin contamination such as lead and arsenic at worst. All for the cheap price of $$$$$ and your health. Is it possible that some could be helpful for specific things? Yup! But are most things on the shelf going to fit in that category? Absolutely not, no.
2. Most “diet” plans/snacks/products. Low in fat but high in sugar? Serving size of 1/4 of what is sold? Contains some mysterious fruit “scientifically shown” to combat the laws of physics? A laxative in disguise? Most of these plans are just like get rich quick schemes. They are sold to provide a quick path to a healthier and better life. But diet isn’t a quick fix. It’s a slow combination of everyday habits. Diet culture is a toxic scam and their advertisements are sickening both for the lies commonly told and the mental health toll on the targeted audience. Hell, most of the “good choice” food items at the grocery could be considered unhealthy processed garbage.
3. Fruit juice. Despite what Steve Jobs believed, fruit juices are pure sugar in a glass. Calories with limited nutrient content and a high glycemic load.
4. The way we teach physical activity. We use sports as a competition and filter kids out, only supporting the best of the best financially and through school programs. But the reality is that team and club sports can keep people active and engaged in their communities for life. This is healthy. If we can foster low-level skill sports for everyone we will have healthier and happier communities. Except for maybe American football. That s**t will give you brain injuries.
Image source: LatrodectusGeometric, PhotoMIX Company
#17
Buying the latest iphone every f*****g time
Image source: itsmememe420, Bagus Hernawan
#18
I already believe that the majority of fitness influencers would benefit from counselling rather than advising followers on Instagram, so that’s undoubtedly the case.
Image source: DeboraCMartinez, John Arano
#19
The amount of sugar in food.
Image source: cynicismrising, Faran Raufi
#20
Essential Oils. Lots of silly pseudoscience. And it’s probably pretty unhealthy to breath in aerosolized droplets of oil.
Image source: intagliopitts, CRYSTALWEED cannabis
#21
The school day starting at the a** crack of dawn.
Image source: hautbois42069
#22
Soda. Humans aren’t supposed to even consume more than a fraction of the sugar in soda and everyone just smiles and drinks their liquid sugar
Image source: Ipconfigall, Alexandra Nosova
#23
Gluten free diets when you don’t have celiacs disease.
Image source: M0n5tr0
#24
Chiropractic “adjustment”, it is already something that is negligible in terms of what it does but it can also be dangerous. So many people get injured by it and some even get paralyzed because of it.
Image source: willowsonthespot
#25
Social media. I’m being super hypocritical, but we’re gonna look back on social media today the same way our parents looked back on the time they smoked and said “yeah, everybody smoked back then, it really wasn’t a big deal. Yeah, we knew it wasn’t good for you, but we still did it anyway. No, we didn’t think of it as some sort of addiction; we just did it because that’s what people did back then.”
Image source: ei283, Sara Kurfeß
#26
Children going to class and sitting in school all day 5 days a week for 12 years.
Image source: kaozennrk, Pixabay
#27
Letting children have unlimited access to the internet and using the internet as a babysitter.
Image source: JayB2A, Sven Brandsma
#28
Botox and lip injections.
Image source: T1koT1ko
#29
The amount of our lives we share with strangers online thinking we’re anonymous
Image source: rachsmith, cottonbro
#30
wouldn’t say today, but some people still normalise hitting your kids pretty hard, maybe it’s just cause i was hit pretty hard as a kid, but i’ll never do that.
Image source: notlovinglifern
#31
Eating meat at every meal.
Image source: anon, Valeria Boltneva
#32
All those weird trending diets.
Image source: Piggythelavasurfer, Louis Hansel
#33
K cups. The inventor of K cups already laments what his invention has wrought. He’s talked about how they’re not recyclable, expensive, and not good quality coffee.
Image source: originalchaosinabox
#34
“Low fat” products which predominantly were filled with high fructose corn syrup (high sugar diets) and other things that lead to metabolic syndrome (partially hydrogenated oils). Some have recognized the dangers in this already but in 40 years maybe we’ll see people look back and go “they made all of this money at the expense of ordinary citizens health”.
Image source: aliensporebomb, Peter Bond
#35
The way we look at having kids.
You have a dogs**t job, your spouse works as well so nobody will ever be home, when you are home you’ll both be tired and miserable from work, you and/or your spouse *clearly* have childhood issues to work out in therapy, you/your spouse or *both* have a genetic condition of some kind be it mental or physical, the food in the house is all pre-made/freeze-dried/frozen/junk, you live in an apartment/too small of a house, you’re a slave to massive debt for a useless degree/a car/etc, etc, etc…
Go ahead and have kids, it’ll be great and thier lives will be absolutely fine!
Image source: Lumis_umbra
#36
Juice cleanses. They are unhealthy and dangerous.
Image source: wilcocola, Alexander Mils
#37
Constant notifications and other distractions.
Image source: ExaBrain, Jamie Street
#38
Advertisement for gambling (most forms of gambling and most forms of advertisement). We already know they’re unhealthy when people affected by it becomes gambling addicts, but people still think gambling addicts is not a big enough problem and that the current level is just a healthy amount of entertainment. But I think the current level is already too much.
Image source: CrouchonaHammock
#39
orthorexia
ipakookapi replied:
For those who don’t know that word, it’s basically pathological fitness. Training more and eating more specific than your body and mind wants or needs.
#40
Slimming drinks and supplements
Image source: palpitatingspnach54, Karolina Grabowska
#41
Meat in general, but particularly processed, smoked and grilled meats. I think in 10-20 years most people in the US will be cutting meat consumption by double-digit percentages due to cost. Health studies show our need for protein is much better fulfilled with a combination of (1) smaller servings of meat than is now common and (2) non-meat protein sources. Meat will still be part of our diet, it’s the preparation and quantity that people in the future will find incredible. Processed meats, smoked meats, and grilled meats have compounds on the surface shown to cause cancer.
Mind you, I find this depressing because I eat all these things. Too late for me though, you all save yourselves and I’ll take the hit along with your bacon.
Image source: KyleCoyle67
#42
At present,the use of polythene is causing serious damage to our environment. therefore,the use of polythene needs to be reduced immediately.
Image source: Farzanaakter123
#43
89% of packaged food is trash.
Image source: Makincream516
#44
Taking a billion different vitamins in pill form.
Image source: slavnar95, pina messina
#45
Using all these household cleaning products in bathrooms etc. inhaling all that c**p
Image source: Classic_The_nook
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