Jul 17, 2023

An Early-Summer Guide Guide to 10 Health-Threat Myths And Clarifications

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By Ed Goldman

If the weather holds, the month will bring with it an escalation of outdoor activities such as awkward company picnics, spectator-sport sunburns, rafting catastrophes and pickleball injuries. 

To make you feel comfortable about the coming season, here are 10 myths and clarifications about the sunny months.

Edgy Cartoon

Quick! Call the mayo clinic

  1. MYTH: Mayonnaise left outside at a picnic can cause you great stomach upset, or worse. CLARIFICATION: Only if you eat it. What the hell’s wrong with you?
  2. MYTH: Wearing a life vest while river rafting could save your life if your raft overturns. CLARIFICATION: You will not need to wear a figure-insulting vest to prevent your drowning if you opt to sit on a riverbank watching other people’s rafts overturn. Should you decide to wade in to help rescue anyone, we can assume no liability for the consequences.
  3. MYTH: Leaving your dog in a locked automobile in 100-degree weather will likely kill the little critter. CLARIFICATION: So will leaving your dog in an unlocked automobile. Dogs do not have opposable thumbs and are not capable of opening car doors. This is why so few of them are employed as parking valets or carjackers.
  4. MYTH: If you eat a substantial meal, it’s wise to not go back into the water for at least an hour. CLARIFICATON: If the meal’s that good, who even needs to go back in the water? An alternative suggestion would be to ask for seconds then nap until the tide rolls in.
  1. MYTH: Sweating while participating in outdoor sports is healthy since this process is nature’s cooling system. CLARIFICATON: That may be true but it only pertains to humans.  Ergo, filling your home’s swamp cooler with human perspiration is inadvisable.
  2. MYTH: The owner of a vacation home you’re renting has locked certain closets to prevent your looking in them. CLARIFICATION: The owner probably wouldn’t care that much if you looked in the closets—only if you stole his or her stash of credit cards and opioids.
  3. MYTH: At company picnics, everyone should be treated the same, from the CEO to the custodian. CLARIFCATION: This is a matter of semantics. They should be treated the same—the same as you do when you’re at the office, that is. Which is to say: suck up to the CEO and be patronizing to the custodian. The latter will prove helpful if that custodian happens to also be a former Triple-A baseball player who came into some hard luck but can now be your company’s ringer as you play against a rival firm. When you get back to the office on Monday, you can praise him for about a week then go back to being merely patronizing. Don’t worry, he’ll expect it.
  4. MYTH: The higher the SPF number of your aloe sun block, the greater the protection it’ll provide against such maladies ranging from sunburn all the way to melanoma. CLARIFICATION: This applies to you only if youapply it to you. If it just sits in your go-ahead bag or whatever they call those crappy straw totes, it won’t even protect the bag.
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  1. MYTH: It’s not good to eat a great deal outside on an empty stomach. CLARIFICATION: Absolutely true. You should instead eat a great deal outside on a table, bench or blanket. That person with the empty stomach would doubtless prefer that, too. 
  2. MYTH: Children tend to be more active in the summer. CLARIFICATION: I sure wasn’t. Not having to climb out of bed at dawn to walk to school, not being forced to frolic for 20 minutes during a particularly odious period called “recess” and being left to pore over whatever I wanted at whatever pace felt comfortable—I’ve never been a fast reader, which is why my voiceover work doesn’t include doing the disclaimers at the conclusion of car commercials—always comprised a bit of heaven of earth for me. Still does. Year ’round, in fact. Pass me the aloe.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).