The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday urged the public to check the “rumor buster” page on its official Web site when encountering rumors about food or medication.
Claims that “eating barbecued meat and drinking cola at the same time can cause bone cancer,” “eating too much barbecued meat can lead to calcium loss” and “barbecue grids release toxic heavy metal” are often rampant on social media in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, but lack a scientific basis, the agency said.
The FDA in 2015 launched a page where it clarifies common misperceptions about food and drugs that are spread on the Internet, which as of yesterday it had clarified 340 rumors, it said.
The agency finds that there are three main types of rumors, it said.
The first type is “healthcare advice for lazy people,” which claims that eating certain foods can have drastic health effects — such as a rumor that drinking lemon water kills cancer cells, it said.
The second type “fabricates terrifying truths,” it said, such as by claiming that other countries have enacted new food regulations or misinforming people that dimethicone in shampoo can make them bald.
The third type “mingles truth with falsehood” by making a general judgement based on partial truth, such as claiming that eating persimmon and yogurt can lead to severe food poisoning, it said.
Persimmons contain high levels of tannin, which easily binds with proteins and lumps them together, causing bad digestion, it said.
Of all the explanations on the FDA Web site, the most viewed are titled “vinegar can be used to wash off all pesticides,” “monosodium glutamate is poisonous” and “using shampoos that contain dimethicone can lead to hair loss,” the agency said.
However, rumors often reappear in another form, the FDA said, urging people to follow doctors’ instructions and drug prescriptions, consult the Web site when in doubt and not spread information they cannot verify.
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