Your Brain on Media

Guest post by Carolyn Dean, MD, ND

A recent study that apparently showed that eggs are as bad as smoking is just another nail in the coffin of our sanity! The flawed study of smokers who also ate eggs was funded by two foundations endowed by drug companies. It was written by three authors, two of whom declared interests in statin (cholesterol-lowering) drugs. The eggs in the study were not free-range, organic eggs and the conclusions reached can easily be challenged on the basis of bias as well as the technical aspects of research. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we really should take all this medical research money and put it into something worthwhile—like nutrition and lifestyle clinics to educate people about how to take care of their health.

But researchers research and need money to do their research, no matter how misguided or unnecessary. And the media needs content—the more salacious the better’and doesn’t have any concern about the message being given out.

Just as with nutrition and exercise and lifestyle choices, you have to choose whether or not you are going to allow the media to eat your brain. It’s entirely up to you if you want to spend your time and energy on reading political lies or trying to wrap your head around senseless medical research or cries of “the sky is falling.” Actually, it’s just plain gossip.

The definition of gossip is casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.

Unfortunately, the constant barrage of media content is mostly untrue and is designed to make us vulnerable and unstable and sell us endless products through clever ad campaigns. It’s designed to make us feel “less than” so that when we buy something we feel “better”‘all of which has nothing to do with education, even though the media says it has a mandate to “inform” the public.

So, you listen to the news (gossip), read about a study (that’s just a job for a researcher), or hear about some horrible situation in the world that you can do nothing about. Then you repeat those words and take it into your being and feel vulnerable. That’s the definition of stress: a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.

Because you can’t do anything to deal with the horrors you read about, you’re caught in a constant mental tension that can cause disease.

So, what’s the answer? Take care of yourself, first—like the flight attendant tells you on the plane to put on your oxygen mask before helping someone else. I know it’s difficult and I know most people use the media to distract themselves from their own problems. If someone in the news is suffering more than you, it actually makes you think you’re not doing so badly. But that’s hardly a solution.

My solution is to turn off the media and take advantage of some of the great tools that are out there that can help relieve the massive stress we’re all under but don’t know it or acknowledge it.

Dr. Carolyn Dean
Carolyn Dean, MD, ND is the author of The Magnesium Miracle and 22 other books and ebooks. She has been at the forefront of natural medicine for more than 30 years.