Recirculating Fecal Matter

It starts with a glass of water, or more specifically eight glasses of water.

For decades we were told to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. We heard it from doctors, coaches, personal trainers, fashion magazine, health writers, diet books, and Spandex-bedecked coworkers chugging liter bottles of Evian in the adjacent cubicles. It became such a well known fact, that people stopped questioning it—that the experts stopped questioning it. In other words: fire burns, the sky is blue, the earth revolves around the sun, E=MC2, and you need eight glasses of water a day.

And yet, it's wrong. In fact, not just wrong, but OBVIOUSLY wrong.

How can a hundred pound woman Twittering on her iPhone in a climate-controlled sixty-eight degree office building need exactly the same amount of water as a three hundred pound NFL lineman playing in hundred degree heat? How can anyone rationally argue that no matter what you weigh, what temperature it is, what your activity level is, what other fluids and fluid-filled food you might be consuming, you still need precisely eight glasses?

The idea doesn't just go against common sense. It's ludicrous. Not only are there no scientific studies supporting it, no one even knows for sure where the "eight glasses" myth came from. And yet for decades, it was accepted as an unassailable fact by the media, experts, and laypeople alike.

But it doesn't end there.

It turns out that stretching before sports actually reduces performance, salt does not cause high blood pressure, red meat does not cause colon cancer, reading in the dark isn't bad for your eyes, shaving doesn't make your hair grow back thicker, and despite the fact that (like me) you probably bought into the "eight glasses" myth, you use ALL of your brain, not just ten percent.

There are so many blindly accepted "facts" ranging from untested to utterly ridiculous out there, that I can't resist making up some of my own and trying to spread them. For example:

Did you know that eighty percent of the humidity in Times Square on an August day is human sweat?

or

Did you know that there's enough fecal matter recirculating in the average water park to fill a VW microbus?

I dare you to try these out and see if anyone even questions them. Hell, try coming up with a few of your own while you're at it and post them in the Comments.

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So if they're wrong about how much water we need to drink, what about the really big things? Say, what we should eat, or how to save the environment, or what to do about the global financial collapse?

Well, they're wrong about all that too. OBVIOUSLY wrong.

You don't believe me? Keep reading this blog...