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“I just want to be crystal clear about this oats situation,” one senior Conversation editor stressed in our morning Zoom call this week. Everyone on the call was intently focused.
“Are. Oats. Bad for you?”
Silence on the call.
A health editor unmutes herself while the rest of us brace.
“Well. It’s complicated,” she posits.
“Arrrrrrgh!” We all groan.
“But no. NO. Oats are not bad for you,” she finally confirms, to a collective sigh of relief.
This question matters because we all eat a lot of oats. I eat a lot of oats. The senior editor eats a lot of oats. How are we supposed to get through the winter without a steaming bowl of porridge of a morning?
But oats have fallen victim to what is now a common social media cycle for food. First it is lauded as the greatest ingredient you’ve never heard of (even though you almost certainly have). Next, it features as the basis for a million different recipes, relentlessly clogging your feed. Finally, some random TikToker will declare, frequently having ‘done their own research’, that the wonder food is actually terrible for you and only idiots would consume it.
And so it was that oats were cancelled for algorithmic clout — and became the subject of our morning Zoom call. The suggestion doing the rounds is that oats have no nutritional value. But today we can confirm, via actual research. Oats are in fact good for you in so many ways, we struggled to get them all into this one article.
Another internet clout carnival that has turned sour is the practice of shaming people for taking selfies at Holocaust memorial sites by leaving critical comments on their social media posts or even reposting them as an example to others.
The original intention was of course good — to educate people about how inappropriate and disrespectful it is to use sites of reflection as the basis for your cute holiday snaps. But an investigation into the practice of naming and shaming has revealed that it is becoming part of the problem. Vigilantes are hunting down the selfie takers as a way to promote themselves and, thereby centering themselves in the tragedies they purport to be respecting. They’re also targeting young women a lot more than men.
In perhaps more predictable findings, we’ve been told that hot tubs contain some very nasty germs. Using them can lead to something horrifically monikered ‘hot tub lung’. And yet, if you can avoid picking that up, there are still health benefits to a steaming soak. Just don’t take a lasagne in with you, as this article unexpectedly advises.
Also this week, a large balloon that rivals the Hubble telescope, a fact-check on the benefits of hyaluronic acid, and four ways to eat less meat.
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