Eating is an essential part of human life, and eating stuff that won’t poison us or damage our bodies is one of the surest ways to keep ourselves in a state of long-term good health. For this reason, humans have always been fairly careful about how their food is handled. Even before we knew everything we do about hygiene, we certainly knew a good bit about cooking and preserving our grub.

However, with the advent of the modern food system and the global need to bring safe food to all corners of the globe, many new ingredients have been used to keep our food safe for eating. The fact that people don’t have quite as much knowledge of the origins of their food anymore has caused many to become increasingly worried about what they are eating, and that’s made it increasingly easy for people to be fooled by fake food scares.

10The Dangers Of High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Many people you talk to will claim that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the greatest demon of the food industry. In fact, some people go so far as to suggest that HFCS is responsible for the rise of diabetes and obesity in our country. They also claim that HFCS affects your body differently than regular sugar and that it is basically ruining the health of our country.

However, after multiple different studies, the verdict is that there is no evidence whatsoever that it is more dangerous for you than regular sugar, or that it even affects you differently in any way, shape, or form. A study specifically designed to see if it could correlate with the rise of obesity also recently came up empty.

While scientifically there is no evidence that it’s more dangerous than regular sugar, some researchers do believe that it could potentially be leading to a less healthy nation overall. Decades ago, regular sugar became more expensive, and HFCS stepped in to save the day and sate the nation’s sweet tooth. People who indirectly blame HFCS believe that it was so much cheaper that we saw an overall rise in sugar in general in products, which helped contribute to the obesity epidemic.

However, whether this theory is true or not, what health experts recommend if you wish to cut back on your sugar intake is not to just remove HFCS from your diet, but to watch your entire overall sugar consumption carefully. All sugar will affect you and should be eaten with moderation.

9Subway Is Putting Yoga Mat Chemicals In Their Sandwiches

Not long ago, social media was ablaze with accusations that Subway’s bread contained a chemical commonly used for making yoga mats. Many people fell for this nonsense, and before long, Subway and other food producers were removing azodicarbonamide from their products in order to placate all of the angry bloggers shouting at them. However, it turns out that the entire scare was started by the blogger Vani Hari, also known as Food Babe. This is a woman who has made a business out of telling people that anything she can’t personally pronounce in an ingredient list is dangerous. She then starts angry petitions and puts the chemical on her banned list for her followers to read. This is quite a business, too. Hari sells products on her website (many of them containing ingredients she’s denounced), all while calling anyone who denounces her a shill for Big Food.

It turns out that azodicarbonamide is a safe baking additive that is used in incredibly tiny concentrations in dozens of baked products that you still find in stores everywhere. It was approved by the FDA in very small doses (45 ppm). Hari claimed that this additive can cause respiratory problems, but the only reports of this involved people who worked in the factories and inhaled the dust all day. Inhaling the dust of almost anything all day is bad for your respiration.

Some industry experts have also pointed out that products commonly used in industrial processes cross over into food production all the time. For example, an ingredient used to make tofu is often used in the creation of drywall. This may sound scary, but the finished product of tofu has about as much in common with drywall as Subway bread has with yoga mats.

8The Gluten Intolerance Fad Diet Train

Celiac disease has only recently received a lot of attention, and it still often goes undiagnosed for years. For those who do realize they have this rare disease, the only way to prevent suffering is to avoid gluten-containing products altogether. Unfortunately, due to the rapid spread of information on social media, many people in recent years have started to come to the conclusion that gluten is bad for them even if they don’t have celiac disease. This has led to a rash of people who say that they have “non-celiac gluten intolerance,” and so they try to avoid it for their own health, despite not actually needing to.

This has caused many more restaurants to stock up on gluten-free products, which can be nice for people who actually suffer from the disease, but probably annoying for waitstaff who have to continually hear gluten-free questions from customers who have jumped on the latest fad. Studies on whether there is anything to the non-celiac intolerance of gluten have been done, and the results show no evidence at all that gluten is bad for anyone who doesn’t have the disease.

In fact, studies showed that there is another ingredient common in most gluten-containing products called fermentable, poorly absorbed, short-chain carbohydrates—FODMAPs for short—that are likely the real culprit. Testing showed that if the food didn’t contain FODMAPs, there was no health difference between the gluten and non-gluten diet. As of yet, there is still no evidence that suggests gluten is bad for non-celiac sufferers.

7Eating Too Much Soy Can Increase Estrogen Levels In Men

Soy is a popular food for vegans and people who are trying to find an alternative source for protein aside from dairy and meat. It has also become something of a hipster food, and in some circles it has gained an unfortunate status as a “woman’s food.” The rumor has been making its way around for several years now and essentially claims that eating soy can greatly raise your estrogen levels and decrease your testosterone. If you look around the web, you’ll find bodybuilders on forums discussing their worries of using soy because of the womanly effects it might have on their manly bodies, and some people believe that it can definitely cause a serious hormonal change for men. This has caused some men to swear off soy completely to ensure that they don’t decrease their precious testosterone.

However, despite the claims that have been floating around for a while now, there is no real evidence to back any of them up. Multiple tests have found no reason to believe that eating soy will seriously mess with a man’s hormone levels. The only outlier is an odd case where an older man with multiple health issues was found to have a few noticeable effects, but he was drinking three entire quarts of soy a day. As you might imagine, this is far more than even the most die-hard soy fanatics usually consume—and that much of any particular product a day is typically not good for you. Balance and moderation are the key to healthy diets, and even if you eat an above-average amount of soy, there is no reason to believe it will have any serious effects, according to the studies. The bottom line with soy is that no reasonable consumption of soy is likely to have any serious or lasting effect on male hormone levels.

6The Recent Spate Of People With Lactose Intolerance

We should be clear here first that there are people who are truly lactose intolerant to a fairly serious degree—just a few ounces of milk can quickly give them some serious digestive issues. And, of course, milk allergies are a different thing entirely. But in recent years, lactose intolerance has become a popular catchall cause for digestive problems for a lot of people, and this fad is giving doctors headaches. To begin with, many of them feel that people are not only exaggerating how much indigestion is actually caused by it, but also ignoring many other possible factors that could be causing the indigestion, simply because lactose intolerance is the popular thing to blame.

In order to test this theory, a group of study volunteers were given a glass of milk a day for a week. The researchers put lactase in this milk to ensure it would break down, preventing discomfort even in those who would normally have a real issue. The second week, they stopped putting the lactase in the milk, but didn’t tell the study volunteers. They also messed with the milk to make sure it tasted the same. The test subjects reported the same levels of indigestion for both milks, confirming the researchers’ theory that for a lot of people, lactose intolerance is actually just in their heads.

Doctors are also worried that people will end up missing a lot of important nutrients by trying to remove dairy from their diet. They caution that most people with even fairly strong lactose intolerance can still have a moderate amount with a meal and be fine. They also want to remind people that it is not a disease or a serious, life-threatening condition—it’s just indigestion.

5The Atkins Diet And Why You Actually Need Carbohydrates

Some years back, the Atkins diet took off in popularity like a runaway freight train, and a lot of diets were quickly derailed. The diet essentially suggested cutting back on carbs and focusing more on eating fats and proteins. The idea behind it was that carbs are normally what your body goes to first for energy, but if it’s starved of carbs, it will actually eat away fat first and you will get the weight loss you so desperately crave. Apart from the fact that, like most diet plans, you run the risk of yo-yoing if you don’t keep it up forever, there were also a lot of dangerous implications from the low-carb diet fad.

The thing is, our body actually needs carbohydrates pretty badly, and while replacing the processed carbohydrates in your diet with more natural ones is certainly a good idea, removing them almost entirely is definitely not so smart. Carbohydrates, as we mentioned earlier, are the first thing your body burns for energy. Restricting your body’s access to them can actually hinder workouts and even lead to muscle loss, as a low-carb diet can lead to you burning your protein and muscle mass instead of carbs.

To make matters worse, people who went on low-carb diets were found to have trouble on memory tasks, because carbohydrates also help your brain function at an optimal level. Studies have also found that people who went on low-carb diets were more irritable overall, likely because carbohydrates are also linked to releasing feel-good chemicals in your body. While it is true that processed carbohydrates have things in them that aren’t great for you, the fact of the matter is that low-carb diets are even worse for you. The best of both worlds is to eat plenty of carbohydrates, but get them from safe, natural sources like fresh vegetables.

4Scary, Unpronounceable Chemicals In Our Food

Many people today read the labels for their food and see long chemicals that they can barely pronounce as adults, and they get a little bit concerned. Most people either just let it go and buy the food anyway, deciding it isn’t that important to them, or they go online and look up the ingredient to see why it’s there. Unfortunately, there has been a recent trend of busy people deciding that if they don’t understand an ingredient, they’ll go to random bloggers for advice. As a result, we’ve started avoiding certain foods or chemicals for all the wrong reasons.

The Food Babe blogger we talked about earlier has a rule for her cult-like followers that amounts to this: If a small child cannot pronounce an ingredient, you shouldn’t eat it. This is, of course, a completely ridiculous rule to live by. Plenty of poisonous ingredients, such as arsenic, are relatively easy to pronounce, while a tongue twister like azodicarbonamide is certainly a whole lot safer. But what’s really scary is the amount of people who are willing to be willfully ignorant about what is actually in their food.

3The Frightening Acidic Powers Of Coca-Cola

The dissolving powers of Coca-Cola have been thrown wildly around the Internet for years with a rather reckless degree of irresponsibility. People wantonly claim that Coke can dissolve metal nails and T-bone steaks, is suitable for cleaning car engines, is extremely dangerous to your stomach, and is so acidic that Coca-Cola truck drivers have to have special permits for carrying corrosive materials. While it would be amazing to have a cheap, household product that is so readily capable of all those things, the fact of the matter is that they are simply not true. To begin with, even if these claims were true, they would basically apply to all sodas. All sodas have carbonic acid, and you would be hard-pressed to find a modern soda that doesn’t contain citric acid as well.

Carbonic acid itself is hardly that acidic, and while citric acid is fairly more so, there is more citric acid found in a typical glass of orange juice than there is in a can of Coke. In other words, if the claims were true, they would apply equally to a glass of OJ. And according to Snopes, the acids in your stomach are far stronger than anything in Coca-Cola, so you really don’t have to worry about it dissolving your insides. Of course, this still doesn’t mean that soda is good for you, but in moderation it isn’t going to kill you.

2The Lurking Danger Of Wood Pulp In Our Food

Not long ago, the media went on a food panic about the dangers of cellulose in our food. In order to mislead people as best as possible, they referred to it as “wood pulp.” While that’s essentially true, it gives people a rather inaccurate picture of what they are actually eating. Some of these hysterical postings slyly made it sound like they were suggesting that cellulose could have something to do with obesity, and despite making it sound dangerous, couldn’t mention any real dangers besides the fact that it has no nutritional value.

The reason, of course, is because there is no danger from cellulose at all. While it is referred to by panic mongers as “wood pulp,” it’s something that’s found in the cell walls of all plants and is basically pure fiber. It goes right through you and won’t give you any calories or nutrients, but it is not at all dangerous for you—in fact, you’ll find cellulose naturally in any fruit or vegetable.

Some people also tend to think of it at least as an evil filler ingredient, meant to make you think you’re getting more food than you actually are, but that’s not really the case either. Food items label the calorie count, and since cellulose doesn’t provide calories, there’s no way it can inflate the count and make you think you are getting more nutrition than you are. In food production, it’s basically just used to thicken foods and help them mix better.

1Doritos And Other Chips Are Scary Because They Double As Kindling

Doritos are the quintessential chip of teenagers and stoners everywhere. Despite their popularity, they are also not known for being very good for you, and most people would place them firmly in the “junk food” category. However, sometimes you hear something about a particular food and it gives you even more pause than usual. On YouTube, people have made a trend of showing how you can set fire to a Dorito and it will very slowly burn. For many people, this is a dramatic demonstration of just how bad this food is for you.

Now, these fire videos are actually useful in that they show how Doritos would make fine kindling if you were ever out in the wilderness, but there is no reason at all to think it makes them extra bad for you. As Lifehacker explains, Doritos and other similar chips like Frito’s and Cheetos (which all work just as well or better), are basically just hydrocarbons soaked in fat and then dried. In other words, you could hardly ask for a better way to start a fire, but there is nothing especially dangerous going on in your corn chips.

Archaeology and the sciences at large are no stranger to less than savory individuals looking for their 15 minutes of fame or, worse, looking to bend history to their worldview or fringe beliefs.

People in the 1800s were cut from a different cloth and seemed to be particularly fond of messing with their fellow citizens. 

From ancient, fossilized giants, papier-mache mummies, to forgeries of ancient tablets, here are ten of the weirdest pseudo-archaeological claims.

10. The Calaveras Skull

In July of 1866, workers at a local mine on Bald Mountain in Calaveras County, California, claimed to have found a human skull in the depths of the mine. The skull had allegedly been located 130 feet beneath the surface, below a layer of solidified magma. James Mattison, the owner of the mine, presented the skull to a local merchant, who gave it to a local physician, and eventually, it ended up in the hands of JD Whitney, the State Geologist of California and Professor at Harvard University. Whitney determined that the skull belonged to a Pliocene age man and he would continue to believe this even as doubts were raised about the authenticity of the skull’s origin.

Even JD Whitney’s successor refused to admit the skull to be a fake, and it took many years before it was officially discredited as a hoax. 

Those who examined the skull determined that it was too modern in character to be from the Pliocene age, and the sediment covering it could not have been from the mine, suggesting that it had been planted there. 

As early as 1869, a San Francisco newspaper declared the skull to be a hoax after interviewing a local minister. The minister had overheard miners going on about how they had planted the skull as a joke on Professor Whitney.

9. The Davenport Tablets

In 1877 and 1878 Lutheran clergyman and Swiss immigrant, Jacob Gass discovered a series of three tablets inside a Native American burial mound at the Cook Farm in Davenport, Iowa. The tablets depicted scenes of cremation, hunting, an astronomical table, and featured a host of different languages. Initially, prominent scholars like Spencer Bird, of the Smithsonian Institution lauded the tablets as the missing link between Native Americans and those living in the old-world, proving that their mounds had been built by an older, culture of advanced settlers.

They were later discovered to be complete forgeries, and Jacob Gass’s status as a reputable archaeologist came into question. 

It’s been argued that Gass himself didn’t perpetuate the forgeries, but was rather the victim of a xenophobic effort to ostracize him from the Davenport Academy by jealous colleagues who didn’t like the idea of a foreigner being part of their institution. This line of thinking was later challenged by the discovery that Gass often traded in counterfeit Native American pipes, though it has been argued that Gass never knew about the illegitimate pipes and that his own relatives perpetuated the hoax, persuading him to take the fakes.

8. The Cardiff Giant

In 1869, after a seething theological debate with a revivalist preacher, cigar maker, and staunch atheist George Hull would set in motion one of the most famous hoaxes in American history. Hull returned home, claiming to have become “flabbergasted” by the preacher’s claims that giants walked the Earth in Biblical times, and in an effort to undermine his religion, would embark to create a giant of his own. The elaborate ruse cost Hull two years of his life and $3000 and involved forging partnerships with a Chicago marble dealer and a farmer in Cardiff, New York, named William “Stub” Newell. 

Newell and Hull buried the statue on the premises of Newell’s home and later Newell would call unsuspecting workers to dig a well, where they would discover the alleged body of a fossilized 10-foot-tall man. It didn’t take long for news of the “discovery” to travel, and hundreds of amateur archaeologists and spectators flocked to the scene. Viewers of the statue were invited to draw their own conclusions, and many were moved by the possibility that it might have been real, despite the statue’s obvious poorly quality. 

Eventually, Hull’s petrified giant attracted the attention of PT Barnum who was a notorious huckster. After Hull and Newell refused to sell him their statue, Barnum would forge his own and begin showing it as if it were the real deal. Hilariously, Hull and Newell would attempt to sue Barnum for creating the forgery, but a savvy judge offered them to bring their statues to court and whoever’s was determined to be the real thing would be granted their injunction. Of course, both statues were fakes, and Hull would later admit to the hoax.

7. The Dummy Mummy

In the early 1920s, the Mississippi Department of Archives was the recipient of a few generous archaeological finds which included various Native American pieces and what appeared to be a “bonafide” Egyptian mummy. 

The mummy was small, many suggesting that it must have been a child and would go on display until 1967 when a medical student named Gentry Yeatman petitioned the museum to let him examine it for a research project. When his request was granted, Yeatman discovered that the mummy was a fraud.

To Yeatman, the first sign that something wasn’t quite right about this mummy was the frayed newspaper fragments sticking to its back. The student went on to x-ray the piece and found it to be constructed on a wooden frame, held together with nails, animal bones, and covered in papier-mache. 

The forgery wasn’t even done well, as evidenced by the two newspapers with print still visible on their pages. One of them was from a German-language newspaper, and the other, the Milwaukee Daily Journal dating back to 1898.

6. The Crystal Skulls

In the 1860s a form of skull carving, made from polished quartz began circulating in the art market. These skulls, claimed to have been crafted before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, graced the art collections of institutions as renowned as the British Museum in London, the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and Washington DC’s Smithsonian Institution. 

The skulls were later discovered to be absolute forgeries, though experts expressed their doubts as to the authenticity of the skulls as far back as the 1930s. Using scientific instruments, they showed that the skulls were undoubtedly from post-Columbian times. 

But if you believe Dan Aykroyd on the subject of the crystal skulls, who has gone so far as to create a vodka product contained with a glass bottle in the shape of one of the skulls, then you probably believe that these mysterious artifacts are genuinely 5,000 to 35,000 years old. Aykroyd, when interviewed on the subject claimed that, though the origins of the skulls were controversial, everyone agrees that they’re powerful symbols of enlightenment and hope for a better future, and further went on to claim that the skulls bear no mark from carving tools and took hundreds of years to finish.

Well, at least he was great in Ghostbusters, right?

5. The Case of the Terracotta Warriors

Between the years of 1915 and 1921, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was proud to show off a recently acquired archaeological marvel, three statues depicting Terracotta warriors thought to have been created by the Etruscan civilization in the 5th century. Unknown to the museum (whose curator was quite proud of the statues) the whole collection was composed of less than elaborate fakes. 

The hoaxers were two young men named Riccardo Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti. These two men were skilled Italian visual artists. Though Riccardo’s father and brothers were experts in creating pottery forgeries, Riccardo was the most skilled of his brothers. 

With his partner Alfredo, Riccardo would create the first statue; but the statue would prove to be too large for their kiln, and they would break its arm off thanks to a positioning dispute between the two artists. After successfully duping the museum into buying their statue, the pair began working on a giant Terracotta warrior head using the description offered by ancient writer Pliny as a basis. Pliny’s writing described a 25-foot-tall statue of the god Jupiter from an ancient Roman temple. Riccardo and Alfredo made the head stand four and a half feet high.

The museum didn’t suspect a thing, and the two began planning their biggest hoax yet, an immense 8-foot-tall Terracotta warrior; but tragedy would strike after Riccardo was thrown from his horse, ending his life.

Riccardo would be replaced by two of his cousins in order to finish the 8-foot-tall Terracotta warrior. In 1921 the Met. purchased the statue for a price rumored to approach $5 million when accounting for inflation. Something was wrong with this statue’s genitals, however. Many of the local Italian ladies recognized them as Riccardo’s, and it turns out that the forger had modeled the genitals after his own.

Despite this, it would be decades before the statues were proved to be forgeries. In 1960 a series of chemical tests would reveal that within the glazes of the statues were chemicals not used before the 17th century.

4. The Ancient Grand Canyon Egyptian Colony

Today if someone claimed to have discovered proof that ancient Egyptians had existed in the United States thousands of years ago, they would be met with plenty of skepticism (well, maybe not, considering there are of people who still think the Earth is flat), but in 1909 two Smithsonian-funded archaeologists claimed just that. The April 5 edition of the Arizona Gazette reported that two archaeologists, Professor SA Jordan and GE Kinkaid, claimed to have found evidence of an ancient Egyptian colony inside the Grand Canyon. 

Among the supposed evidence, the two claimed to have found a series of strange caves carved with human hands, and tablets with Egyptian hieroglyphs which the duo suggested proved the settlement dated back to Ramses. 

The specific region where the two claimed to have found these items is a particularly dangerous part of the Grand Canyon, but that didn’t stop private collectors and academics from making expeditions to the area. But Kincaid and his partner never presented any photographs or artifacts as evidence, just a tall tale for the folks at the Arizona Gazette to chew on.

The Smithsonian doesn’t have any record of Kinkaid or his partner, let alone an alleged discovery of this magnitude. Though, if you ask conspiracy theorists, they will claim the Smithsonian covered the whole thing up and the Egyptian colony is still there. The reptilians just won’t let us near them.  

3. Japanese Paleolithic Hoax

The news broke early on November 5, 2000 that an amateur archaeologist named Fujimura Shin’ichi had been caught on camera planting fake artifacts at an archaeological site. At the time, the Kami Takamori site was known as the oldest Early Paleolithic site on Earth, beating out sites in Europe and the cradle of civilization itself, Africa. 

If the artifacts they had contained had been proven to be real, they would have rewritten human history. This wasn’t the case, however, and once the video evidence of Fujimura’s acts got out, doubt was cast at every dig site in Japan which he was involved with. 

It’s been suggested that Fujimura planted over 180 artifacts from the years 1976 to 2000, and because of this, the existence of humans in Japan was widely accepted to date back to more than half a million years ago. Fujimura’s hoax muddies the waters there, setting archaeology in Japan back quite a bit. Currently, there is no evidence to suggest that humans had any presence in Paleolithic Japan, though evidence does show a presence in China and land bridges did connect to the island of Japan at least twice within the last 700,000 years. 

2. Grave Creek Stone

In 1838 a polished sandstone pebble was discovered in a 2,000-year-old burial mound in West Virginia. When analyzed by scholars, they suggested that of the 25 characters carved into the pebble four of the markings seemed to come from Ancient Greek, four Etruscan, five runic, six ancient Gallic, seven old Erse, 10 Phoenician, 14 old British, 16 Celtiberic, and some of the markings bore resemblance to Hebrew as well. And in the 1870s physician, RJ Farquharson came up with three wildly different translations for the inscription on the stone.

“Thy orders are laws, thou shines in thy impetuous clan, and rapid as the chamois.”

“The chief of emigration who reached these places (or island), has fixed these decrees forever.”

“The grave of one who was murdered here; to revenge him may God strike his murderer, suddenly taking away his existence.”

But at the same time, antiquarian MC Reed commissioned a law student, a pharmacist, and a college professor to each draw 20 or more characters not resembling any alphabet or symbols that they could easily recall. The result was that each person’s presented characters resembled Old World alphabets, and from this study, Reed concluded that the Grave Creek Stone couldn’t be anything other than a forgery.

1. The Persian Princess

In October 2000, Pakistani police interrogated a man attempting to sell a mummy on the black market for $11 million dollars. When pressed, the man claimed to have gotten the mummy from an Iranian man who had discovered it after an earthquake. 

It was claimed that the mummy had been a Persian Princess. She was discovered inside a wooden sarcophagus with cuneiform inscriptions claiming her to be related to the great King Xerxes. The “discovery” caused brief tensions between Iran and Pakistan, as both countries claimed ownership, but this wouldn’t last.

Eventually, Pakistani authorities delivered the mummy to the National Museum in Karachi, where it underwent extensive tests to prove its authenticity. After CT-scans, analysis of the ancient Persian script, and carbon dating, the mummy was revealed to be a forgery, and what’s worse, was how old the body was.

The body belonged to a 4-foot-7 woman who likely died in 1996 and was over the age of 21. Authorities believed the woman to be the victim of a murder, but after re-interrogating the two men who had been attempting to sell the mummy, they determined that the men most likely had obtained the corpse from illegal grave robbers and removed her internal organs. 

The case remains unsolved to this day.