The sleep chart everyone copies has a footnote nobody reads
The age-by-age sleep chart is a compromise document, and the panels that wrote it said so. What the primary sources actually show about how much sleep you need.
Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day
The randomised trials point gently the other way. But the real story is the audit that found only 17% of citations to a key trial described its results accurately.
The eight-glasses rule is a sentence someone deleted
The 1945 document blamed for the rule said most of your water comes from food and that thirst is an adequate guide. Both sentences were cut. Here is what the evidence actually shows.
Stretching Barely Prevents Injuries. Strength Training Cuts Them by Two Thirds.
A meta-analysis of 26,000 participants ranked the injury-prevention strategies head to head. The one everybody does came last. The one almost nobody does came first, by a mile.
The Vitamin D Trials Nobody Talks About
Two of the largest supplement trials ever run found almost nothing. Then the Endocrine Society withdrew the threshold that made half the country deficient in the first place.
Sugar Does Not Make Children Hyperactive. The Study That Proved It Tested the Parents.
A 1995 meta-analysis of 23 controlled trials found no effect. A year earlier, a smaller study had already explained why everyone believes otherwise — by giving every child a placebo and lying to their mothers.
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The 50% Divorce Rate Was True for About One Year. You Can Name It.
In 1981 the United States recorded 2,422,000 marriages and 1,213,000 divorces. Divide one by the other and you get 50.1%. It was also the peak year. The statistic has not been updated since.
The Open Office Was Built on a Measurement. Then Nobody Measured It Again for...
When researchers finally put sensors on employees before and after a redesign, face-to-face interaction fell by about 70%. The study did not measure productivity — and after six decades of fit-outs, almost nothing has.
Nobody Is Left-Brained. The Man Who Won the Nobel for Split Brains Said So...
A study of 1,011 brains looked for people whose left or right hemisphere ran stronger overall. It found lateralised functions everywhere and lateralised people nowhere.