As we've told you roughly one million times, news websites sometimes play fast and loose with little details such as "double-checking their sources" or "making sure what they're saying is even remotely true." But, making up stories about some crazy thing that happened in a village in China is one thing; messing with our health is another. We can, at least, trust the news to get matters of life and death correct, right? Uh, right?
Turns out, nope. Some recent medical news stories are about as accurate as the "Plastic Surgeons Hate Her!" and "One Secret Trick To Grow Horns" spam ads decorating those selfsame articles. For example:
#6. Wine Won't Kill You With Arsenic
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Perhaps due to all the pressure to live up to generational cohorts such as Shia LaBeouf or Paris Hilton, millennials are drinking more wine than any 20-somethings ever before -- and, since we also have no money, the wine we buy tends to be cheaper. So, it probably put the fear of God in you when you heard from sources such as CBS, Slate, and Daily Mail that the high levels of arsenic in low-priced wines is going to kill everyone who drinks them. There's even a class action lawsuit about this currently going on in California, where cheap wine accounts for like half of the economy.
cbsnews.com
dailymail.co.uk
slate.com
"The Bachelor ratings plummet."
And yes, it's true that the levels of arsenic are "dangerously high" ... for water -- which, unless you manage to pull a reverse-Jesus, isn't the same as wine. Putting arsenic in your wine sounds like some evil-soap-opera-stepmother shit, but we're talking about extremely tiny amounts here; there's also arsenic in other agricultural products such as juice or grains. Unless you're drinking two liters of the absolute cheapest wine a day, you are going to be fine. And if you're drinking that much alcohol in a 24-hour period, you have much more serious issues to deal with.
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Like growing a suitable beard or fighting cats for your turf.
As for the company that did all of the testing, wouldn't you know it -- they just happen to sell a kit that you can use to test the arsenic levels in your wine before going on your daily bender.
#5. Feeling Lonely Can't Kill You
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Do you feel lonely from time to time? Congratulations! You're gonna die! At least, you might -- according to Express, CNN, and The Huffington Post, who recently reported that just being lonely can increase your chance of death by a shocking 30 percent. So, go out there, and marry the first person you find! Your life might suck as a result, but at least you'll still have one.
express.co.uk
edition.cnn.com
time.com
"The Bachelor ratings and wine sales soar."
The problem here -- besides the fact that telling already lonely people that their loneliness will kill them is kind of a dick move -- is that what's on those headlines isn't exactly what the study found. What actually increases your risk of death is extended isolation -- if you spend all of your time in your house with no company but your cartoon ponies, that could lead to an early death for a number of reasons. It could be a sign that you have an underlying health problem, such as depression. It could even just be because you don't have the financial means to go out or travel to see friends often. Or, maybe, you'll slip and hit your head, and your cats will eat your face.
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"Where are your hobos now?"
All of those things increase your risk of death. But, feeling lonely isn't going to kill you, unless you get deep into autoerotic asphyxiation or whatever.
#4. Sorry, We Don't Poop Gold
Frank Fennema/iStock/Getty Images
Since you're spending all of your money on wine and don't have enough left over to visit people who care about you, it probably seemed like great news when you read that we're all literally crapping money. Illustrious publications, such as Washington Post, as well as regular bullshit peddlers Gawker and Vice, all proclaimed that there's gold in your poop (yes, yours, specifically). And we assume that if you're willing to go to some of appraiser/proctologist, you could find a way to make money out of that.
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motherboard.vice.com
gawker.com
"We deal with enough literal piles of shit; we don't need you putting figurative ones in us." - Assholes
But, wait, don't take that sifter to the toilet yet: Sadly, it isn't our butt chocolate that contains precious metals -- it's our sewage. The original press release even mentions that the metals found in sludge could come from "hair care products, detergents, even nanoparticles that are put in socks to prevent bad odors" -- or, stuff only a moron would eat (and subsequently poop out). They can also come from things such as storm runoff and waste from industrial manufacturing. The real story here was "there's gold in our sewers," not up your ass.
pubs.acs.org
There wasn't enough space for your ass in this graphic, anyway. Or anywhere, really.
In other words, unless your landlord has some weird fucking fetishes, panning your poo for this month's rent isn't gonna work out. Sorry.
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