10 More Great Myths That We All Still Believe

1. If you touch a baby bird, its mother will abandon it. Mama birds don’t have a great sense of smell. They wouldn’t know you picked up a baby bird or not. When you see a baby bird on the ground, crying and carrying on, it’s just learning how to fly. Just like you fell down a few times before learning to walk, so it goes with the baby bird. So it’s okay to move the baby out of the sight of a cat without Mama giving up all that time and energy to get it that far.
2. Most of Your body heat escapes through the top of your head when you go outside. While it is true that you do lose from 40 to 50% of your body heat by not wearing a hat, the same loss can and does happen with any part off the body that is uncovered, such as your hands. If you went outside on a winter’s day with a t-shorts and shorts, you would only lose about 10% of your body heat from your head.
3. You need to feed a cold and starve a fever. This myth goes back nearly 500 years, when doctors had little better than a good guess as to what ailed us. In spite of much advancement in Medicine, this one still hangs on as a truism. What it comes down to is to eat if you’re hungry and have a cold or fever, and don’t eat if you’re not. Your immune system operates very well either way. Just make sure to get enough fluids.
4. Bread crusts are where all the vitamins and nutrients are. Where this myth came from is lost in the mists of Motherhood. It seems to always have been around. Perhaps bread crusts have gotten confused with actual things that have healthy outsides, like pears and apples. All bread comes from the same batch of dough that was placed in the oven to bake. Nothing happens when bread bakes to make the crust better than the rest of the bread. Maybe it has something to do with the whole “Children are starving elsewhere” myth. Who knows?
5. You need to shampoo every day. Your hair is made of fiber, much like a piece of cotton or linen. If any of them gets washed too much, it will begin to lose its integrity, and structure. Your hair also produces a natural oil that is essential for protecting the hair, making it more brittle. Dermatologists recommend shampooing no more than 2-3 times a week. They also recommend using a very mild shampoo, not the ones that the shampoo companies want you to use 365 times a year. They’re only interested in selling you more shampoo.
6. Lip balm is addictive. Is there acid in your lip balm that will get you hooked on it? Not surprisingly, no. the acid found in many lip balms is salicylic acid, which is a major part of aspirin. The only ingredients that can be harmful are such things as fragrances, menthol and camphor, but only if consumed in huge quantities. You might get hooked on lip balm, but only from a psychological stand point. But that’s not the lip balm’s fault, it’s usually a part of a larger compulsive behavior. So don’t worry about whether the occasional chapped lip treatment is doing you any harm.
7. Yawning means that you’re tired. We still do not know why we yawn or what function they have. We do know, however, that everyone yawns, even babies in the womb. It turns out that yawning may just be a way for the brain to cool down. People yawn twice as much in the winter as they do in the summer. It’s a way to remain alert, much the same way as splashing some cold water on your face does.
8. Reading in the dark will hurt your eyes permanently. This is as silly as saying that whispering will harm your ears. People read by candle and lamp light for thousands of years without them going blind. There’s no evidence at all that low light results in anything bad except someone telling you that it’ll hurt your eyes. At worst, your eyes will grow fatigued and you’ll need to rest them. The same goes for being too close to the television. N o harm there either. Perhaps it’s the precipitous drop in reading material quality that has our eyes telling us to stop reading it.
9. You only use 10% of your brain, at most. This is attributed to writer Lowell Thomas, who made the number up in an introduction to a book by Dale Carnegie. The actual quote is from William James, a Harvard professor. He stated in 1936 that we only use a small portion of our possible mental and physical resources. Modern science has discovered that we in fact use nearly 98% of our brains at all times, with 2% in a recharge mode. This 2% changes constantly, and eventually the whole brian is recharged. 98% is much better than 10%, don’t you think?
10. Crude Oil comes from dead dinosaurs. This one is my favorite. The fact is that crude oil is not “Fossil” Fuel, because there’s no fossils in it. No dinosaurs, or any other creature, gave their lives in the creation of crude oil. This lie was invented around 1876 by a Russian geologist, who found some organic residue in some samples of crude oil brought up from underground. He published his findings, calling the stuff “fossil fuel.” That became the facts, and few of us have questioned it since.Crude oil is Abiotic in source. Basically it comes down to this: we are NOT running out of petroleum! The crude oil, and most of the natural gas, are the bio-products of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth’s surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth’s rotation. Put more simply, most hydrocarbons on Earth are not “fossil fuels” but part of the primordial “stuff” from which Earth itself was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Here are the crude facts:

• Oil is being discovered at 30,000 feet, far below the 18,000 feet where organic matter is no longer found. How did it get there?
• Wells pumped dry over the years are being found later to be filling up again. Where did this come from?
• The sheer quantity of oil pumped out of the ground far cannot be accounted for by organic material alone.
• Saturn has shown that it has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth. Did dinosaurs live on Saturn in the past?

So there you have it. The many silly things we all grow up believing because our parents or teachers tell us that it’s so. Now you know the truth. Some people will lose sleep over having their beliefs exploded, but you’ll get over it. They’re not worth worrying about, even if they were true. For more interesting and controversial topics, please check out my blog at: www.hightrafficwizard.com