“You are not flushing out toxins, you are only stripping your body of the nutrients it needs...”

"Especially since a lot of these detoxes rely on consuming only one thing or excessive amounts of one thing, such as detoxing by consuming exclusively lemon juice, olive oil, and Tabasco is a popular one.

You are not flushing out toxins. You are only stripping your body of the nutrients it needs by cutting out all the foods you'd eat in a balanced diet and replacing them with detox garbage. So the only things you filter in your blood are the nutrients you need in there."

"Add to that: The idea that you can't get pregnant while breastfeeding. You can."

"I just had a friend's mom go through this. She's on blood pressure medication and was told that a salty diet would be dangerous for her, so she cut out all salt from any food.

She ended up in the hospital for hyponatremia."

"Here's a quick explainer: Your heart depends on electricity following a specific, organized pathway through the muscle to beat. Under specific circumstances, this can be disrupted, and a bunch of stray, disorganized electrical currents roam the heart, causing it to tremble instead of pump blood — this will kill you extremely quickly.

Defibrillation delivers a strong shock to the heart tissue to knock out the disorganized mess, giving your natural pacemaker a moment to catch its breath (repolarize) and take over managing the rhythm again."

"I have multiple family members who refuse to eat tofu because my red-pilled brother-in-law has convinced them of this. It doesn’t matter how many studies I send them, a YouTuber convinced him, and he’s a man, so they take his word over mine."

"I had to sit through a 'health education' course, and the instructor recommended that we add some lemon to tap water, which would make it more basic/alkaline and thus healthier.

I raised my hand and asked, 'Aren't lemons acidic? How would adding something acidic to water make it more alkaline?' The instructor looked at me like I was nuts. Then she said, 'Lemons are fruit, and fruit is alkaline.'

That’s how I knew I shouldn’t take everything in that course at face value…"

"It's a useless statement that keeps people ignorant of the brain's physiology. The brain can change throughout the lifespan. If it didn't, you wouldn't remember anything that happened in your thirties or forties.

Sure, many developmental processes slow down, but it's a continuum. Nothing magical happens at 25. Your brain still responds to hormone changes, stress, and pleasure. Regions like the entorhinal cortex create new cells long after 'development' ends. You can also still become addicted to substances and do permanent damage when you are older. A lot of people use that phrase to scare kids away from drugs and alcohol before a certain age, but just because you are now 30 doesn't mean drugs and alcohol aren't harmful to brain health."

"I work in microbiology, and one of the most common samples to test for viruses, bacteria, and fungal infections is piss!

"My short response to dispute this is that the plumbing in your home is a bad analogy. Plumbing isn't kept at a constant high temperature as the human body is. Anything cold going in isn't going to stay cold for long enough to create a 'fatberg' inside your intestines."

"I’m in nursing and aspire to work in public health. RFK and Trump's HHS are my mortal enemies.

I grew up in an anti-science and anti-vaxx household and had to do a lot of deprogramming from conservative cult-like beliefs. It puts others in danger and severely impacts your kid’s life. Measles is killing at high rates again, and the US is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. So many people are dying or becoming disabled from vaccine-preventable illnesses."

"Same with high cholesterol. My husband had a heart attack at 40, and they discovered his cholesterol was in the 300s. (At a check-up six months earlier, it had been at the high end of normal.) It's also worth noting that half a dozen of his male relatives died of heart attacks in their early 50s.

Everyone assumed he must eat nothing but garbage, but it wasn't remotely the case — his genes were working against him.

I know two brothers in a similar situation: One eats like crap and is overweight with very normal cholesterol. His younger brother eats great, works out all the time, and has been on meds since his mid-30s for his cholesterol."

"I finally got through to a friend by making a comparison to something in their everyday life: You hunt deer with bullets. You kill ants with RAID. Are these interchangeable? No, because they're completely different organisms.

You kill bacteria with antibiotics. You kill viruses with antivirals. Are these interchangeable? No, because they're completely different organisms.

"I heard a doctor advocate for this in a lecture at a medical conference, and it’s nonsense.

You can have a fortified cereal with a long list of ingredients that’s healthy, and a cupcake with a few common ingredients that contains a caloric overload. The underlying assumption seems to be that preservatives are automatically bad, even though these are tested to be safe and are only theoretically bad if you’re eating a ton of them.

The kernel of truth is that ultraprocessed foods tend to be unhealthy, as they generally have longer ingredient lists. But even then, the simplicity of the ingredient list isn’t as reliable as just reading the nutrition label."

"This myth drives me bonkers. I have a lot of stretch marks from my babies. There is nothing unhealthy about stretch marks, and there is also no reason to prevent them. It took a little time to get used to the fact that my body isn’t the same after having two babies, but it’s a fault of society that we make women feel like their bodies should be the same after making a whole human being. 

I have stretch marks because I have two beautiful children, and there should be no shame in them."

"People shouldn't be made to feel guilty for getting cancer or any other illness, because there are things that really are out of our control. As humans, we don't like feeling like we can't control everything, but really, there are a lot of things we don't have control over.

A person doesn't get sick because they didn't take vitamins, eat enough kale, or do or take whatever the current holy grail of health is — sometimes bad things just happen."

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.