Everything in moderation, as the old adage goes. As it turns out, that couldn’t be more accurate, as research continues to shed light on how the modern world is damaging our health. We might be living longer today than our ancestors did, but the current era isn’t as health-friendly as we might think.

10Feeling Guilty Can Damage Your Health

Every January, people around the world resolve to leave their bad habits behind and embark on a journey of self-improvement as the new year begins. Then, a few weeks later, everyone starts to feel a little guilty for not following through.

But while a little guilt can encourage someone to make positive changes, too much guilt is a different story. Feeling guilty isn’t just unpleasant—it could be causing damage to your immune system. Researchers from Hull University found that people who felt guilty about their favorite activities had decreased levels of the antibody immunoglobulin A in their saliva. So if two people like to unwind with a box of wine and some trashy reality shows, but only one feels guilty about it, then the guilty person is more likely to catch viral and bacterial infections. That means your favorite “guilty pleasure” could be the reason you seem to catch colds more often than someone who just calls it “pleasure.”

9Light Pollution

According to astronomers, the majority of Americans under 40 have never experienced true darkness. Urban areas experience a phenomenon called “sky glow,” where artificial light is scattered by water droplets, creating a dome of light over the city. Even inside our own homes, the little lights on electronics like alarm clocks and televisions stay on 24/7—and our bodies just weren’t built to handle that. In fact, light pollution in the developed world is now so bad that it’s damaging our health. According to physicist Eric Vandernoot, the human body is hardwired for a cycle of light and darkness. Overuse of light in the evening is connected to a number of health problems, including increased risk of diabetes, obesity, depression, prostate cancer, and breast cancer.

Sleep disorders are another big problem. In fact, light pollution may have actually changed the entire way we experience sleep. Before the industrial revolution, it was common for people to sleep for two periods of around four hours each, separated by one to three hours “of quiet wakefulness.” Even today, studies have shown that people tend to revert back to this sleep pattern once light pollution is taken out of the equation.

And even if you buy blackout curtains and cover those flashing LEDs, you might still be in danger from excess light, since the streetlights are still on outside. Turning streetlights off has actually been found to drastically reduce crime (even criminals need to be able to see). Of course, that might not be much comfort to anyone trying to find their way home in the pitch dark, but at least they won’t get mugged.

8Added Sugar Is Worse Than You Realized

Sugar itself isn’t bad for you—glucose is essential to powering the body, especially the brain. The problem is that people are now consuming more sugar than ever, and you can definitely have too much of a good thing. And while our ancestors got most of their sugar from fruits and grains, these days most of our sugar is added to various processed foods—the average American eats 27.5 teaspoons of added sugar a day. It’s hard to cut back, too—the brain has a built-in trigger to let you know when you should stop eating and sugar consumption makes it less effective over time.

It’s only relatively recently that we’ve started to realize just how bad too much sugar can be for you. In the 1970s, when the public became concerned about fat in foods, manufacturers simply replaced fat with sugar. Since then, sugar consumption has shot up worldwide. Which is unfortunate, since sugar is now linked to high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, premature aging of the skin, dementia, brain damage, poor metabolism, and liver damage. Added sugar might even be damaging to our very DNA. In fact, some scientists now regard sugar as a problem potentially as damaging as alcohol and tobacco.

7Climate Change

We already know that global climate change is making Mother Earth sick, but it may also cause major health issues in humans. As our oceans get warmer, toxic algae blooms will increase in likelihood, area, and duration. Algae like Alexandrium catenella can contaminate seafood and cause everything from vomiting to death by paralysis.

Meanwhile, as the Earth gets drier, more dust will be blown into the ocean, spurring the growth of dangerous bacteria—poisoning caused by bacteria of the genus Vibrio in seafood is already up 85 percent since 1996. Rapid urban growth means that many sewer systems are already close to overflowing and contaminating our water sources—in Milwaukee, it currently only takes 4.3 centimeters (1.7 in) of rain a day for this to happen. As climate change makes flooding more likely, this could become a real problem. Between the flooding and the increased bacterial growth in the oceans, don’t be surprised if water-borne diseases make a comeback in the developed world.

6Lack Of Sleep

It might be a cliche, but in our fast-paced modern world many people just don’t get enough sleep. And researchers are increasingly concerned about just how dangerous that might be. In fact, men with chronic insomnia who sleep less than six hours per night are substantially more likely to die young than normal sleepers. In one study, 51.1 percent of male insomniacs were dead within 14 years, as opposed to just 9.1 percent of regular sleepers. Oddly, this only appears to affect men—women with chronic insomnia have only slightly higher mortality rates than average. That might be because men are more likely to suffer from severe insomnia than women, even though women are more likely to have insomnia overall.

While insomnia itself isn’t deadly, it will slowly wear a person down by not allowing enough sleep for the body to rest, recover, and revitalize, and long-term sleep loss is now known to cause irreversible brain damage by killing off neurons. Even just working night shifts can badly damage your health. There is also no such thing as being able to “catch up on sleep”—taking naps on the weekend won’t make up for lack of sleep during the week.

5Phones And Tablets

Of course, trouble sleeping isn’t helped by a smartphone buzzing through the night because you forgot to set it to silent—and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Even if you seem to get enough sleep during the night, using bright electronics like phones, tablets, and e-readers right before bed can really mess with your body. Harvard Medical School conducted a study where people would read a real book before bed for five days and then use an iPad for the next five days. Reading on an iPad made it substantially more difficult for people to fall asleep. Once they did nod off, they experienced less REM sleep and were thus less alert in the morning.

On a cellular level, participants who used an iPad before bed were found to have delayed the release of the sleep hormone melatonin by around 90 minutes. The specific kind of light given off by electronic devices confuses our internal clock by affecting the circadian pacemakers in our brains. According to PEW Research, 61 percent of Americans aged 18–29 reported keeping their cell phones next to the bed in order not to miss updates, calls, or texts during the night. But if you really do need a tech bump before bed, put down the smartphone and opt for something like the original Kindle, which doesn’t emit light.

4Suppressing Anger

Being unwilling to engage in a constructive argument about something that’s bothering you can wreak havoc on your health. Holding in anger increases stress, which in turn shortens lifespans. There is such a thing as healthy anger and it can be an effective coping mechanism. Anger is also an adaptive trait that can encourage risk-taking. On the flip-side, chronic anger expressed in explosive bursts is linked to high blood pressure, a weak immune system, strokes, cancer, heart disease, and digestive issues. A study by the University of Michigan found that couples who suppressed their anger had a higher mortality rate than couples who argued their problems out.

Learning to manage anger and conflict effectively is vital to health, but many people don’t understand how to deal with their anger, repressing it and effectively punishing themselves for their feelings. Psychologists say that it is not uncommon for people to experience low self-esteem because they deal with anger ineffectively—which can in turn have disastrous consequences for relationships, work performance, and mental health.

3Antibiotics Can Kill Helpful Bacteria

The development of antibiotics in the 20th century was one of the most important breakthroughs in human history—but it came with some unintended side effects. Humans are far more dependent on bacteria than science realized until quite recently (there are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in your body) and antibiotics tend to kill off the good bacteria with the bad. For example, bacteria in the human gut helps to digest food and boosts the immune system. That’s why a course of antibiotics often results in diarrhea and other stomach problems.

Researchers from New York University have also found that giving antibiotics to newborn mice made them more likely to develop metabolic disorders later in life. At that age, their guts were still being colonized by bacteria and the antibiotics disrupted this process—with long-term implications. The study suggests that human babies who receive antibiotics might be more prone to obesity and diabetes once they grow up. Of course, in most cases, the potential consequences of using antibiotics are very mild compared to the alternatives. Used judiciously, antibiotics are still one of medicine’s most important tools.

2Noise Pollution

Obviously, a sudden loud noise could damage your hearing, but what about the constant hum of noise that surrounds us every day? Spinning hard drives, passing cars, sirens in the distance, whirling fans—it is almost impossible to escape noise pollution in the modern world. Every year, around 30 million Americans are exposed to dangerous levels of noise as part of their job. But even people who don’t experience occupational noise hazards suffer from secondhand noise pollution. Hearing loss can lead to communication issues, discrimination, poor performance at work and school, loneliness, and depression.

Low-frequency sounds, such as vibrations caused by passing traffic, can have a direct effect on health. People living in areas with elevated noise levels have correspondingly high levels of stress hormones, and the World Health Organization has warned that noise pollution is a risk factor in developing heart disease. Noise pollution can also cause high blood pressure, sleeplessness, breathing problems, cardiovascular issues, increased heart rates, and even brain changes. Studies have also shown that high levels of noise can badly impact young children, having a significant negative effect on cognitive performance.

1Retiring

The dream for many Americans is to work hard enough to be able to retire and relax, but health-wise it isn’t that simple. Working a job you hate can damage your mental and physical health, which is pretty worrying when you consider that only 13 percent of Americans report enjoying their work. Even if you’re one of the lucky 13 percent, working too hard can still seriously damage your health. The average work week is now around 47 hours and a Gallup poll showed that 21 percent of full-time workers put in 50–59 hours a week, while 18 percent worked more than 60 hours a week.

And while working hard for retirement might sound like a good tradeoff, retirement itself can cause a decline in mental and physical health. Compared to similarly aged people who are working, retired people are up to 40 percent more likely to suffer from clinical depression. They are also 60 percent more likely to have a diagnosed physical ailment, although it’s not clear if that’s because people with medical issues tend to retire earlier anyway. The lesson is that moderation is important and the healthiest choices involve a fair balance between rest and work.

Kristance is a freelance writer and travel addict currently living in Argentina. She’s always “that person” who will bore everyone by blurting out facts awkwardly at inappropriate moments. She sometimes writes about her travel adventures on diggingtoroam.com and constantly adds ridiculous posts to instalaugh.tumblr.com. The most exciting thing that happened to her in 2014 was when Jewel retweeted her. If you want to hop on that Twitter bandwagon check out Kristance’s account.

They say that “hindsight is 20/20,” and as with some clichés, this one couldn’t be truer when it comes to some people’s attitude toward change, especially when it comes to doing something easier, better, or faster. Well, here are even ten more modern conveniences that most of us take for granted today that we couldn’t live, work, or play without.

These include conveniences that, when first proposed, some people “never got the memo on” or resisted in some other way since they’re such no-brainers now today. So keep reading to find out how amazing and outlandish the public’s attitude can be, not only today but also in the past, toward some of the most successful and important ideas, inventions, and innovations of all time.

Related: Top 10 Successful Inventions That Just Up And Died

10 Cold Start for Ice Cubes

Those residing in frigidly cold places could always get ice when needed during the winter months, so it wasn’t until the 19th century that ice became a global industry, taking much hard work and smart advertising to do it. An ice harvester, one Frederic Tudor, a New Englander, tried for decades to generate interest and buyers for his crops of ice he cut out of frozen lakes and ponds.

Thinking out of the box, he made a connection with people in the West Indies who might want his frozen product. When his friends and colleagues back in his hometown in Massachusetts heard, he was “laughed at by all his neighbors.” They thought it was ludicrous to try to ship ice all the way to a Caribbean island. Even the Boston Gazette got in on the act, saying, “We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”

When he did get to the Caribbean, with a 130-ton (117.9-tonne) load of fresh and frozen water in 1806, the natives of Martinique didn’t want the ice since they weren’t even sure what to do with it. To them, it was a novelty, and they were more amused with it than anything. With his valuable ice turning into worthless water, the resilient Mr. Tudor had to come up with something, so he did. He made as much ice cream as he could out of the water he had left. Although Tudor lost thousands on that initial attempt, he soon succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in an ice-delivery business with customers from Louisiana to India.

Frederic Tudor is well known today as the “King of Ice,” but we’ll call him the “King of Ices.” It has a better ring to it. Get it, king of hearts, king of spades, king of ices? ^[1]

9 The Skateboard Skates It to Stardom

In the 1960s, the recently developed pastime of skateboarding was just beginning to catch on with kids. But not with parents, as many declared the sport as just a fad—a possible fatal one—and they didn’t like it a bit. In 1965, according to the Pittsburgh Press, Harry H. Brainerd, Pennsylvania’s traffic safety commissioner, stated that skateboarding was just an “extremely hazardous fad” and asserted that parents “would be well advised not to permit the children to use skateboards until they have been instructed in and understand basic, common sense rules of safety for their use.”

He wasn’t the only one that thought kids couldn’t be trusted to ride early skateboards without killing themselves. A liberal political organization called the “Americans for Democratic Action” sent a petition to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1979 in an attempt to ban skateboards and skateboarding entirely. claiming, “The design of the skateboard itself cannot be improved in any way to make it safe.” Sorry, but the rest is history.^[2]

8 The Printing Press Prints Paper to Perfect Shame

A leading professor during the days of Columbus in 1492, the monk Johannes Trithemius, made a solemn prediction that the printing press would fail. In his essay, “In Praise of Scribes,” he asserted that writing by hand was morally superior to printing with a machine. Trithemius claimed, “The word written on parchment will last a thousand years… the printed word is on paper… The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years.”

How wrong was Trithemius? The material used for the books monks scribed in was made from animal skins called parchment. The paper of the day was made from cellulose produced from different species of plant fiber. Today’s modern paper degrades due to it being made from wood fibers and high acid content, making it unstable. In Trithemius’s day, rag stock was used to make paper and was so stable it would last for centuries. In fact, several original printings of the Gutenberg Bible sre still around to prove it.

Trithemius would go on to write, “Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” Ironically, his ranting and raving with pen and paper was overtaken by the printing press that he wanted so badly to fail. That’ll teach Trithemius to refuse a printed copy of the memo.^[3]

7 The Cell Phone Calls on Reason

Jan David Jubon was a telecommunications consultant in 1981 and was leery of the claims of how well the new cell phone devices would sell. His attitude in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor goes so far as to reflect it by saying, “But who, today, will say I’m going to ditch the wires in my house and carry the phone around?”

Even the “father of the cell phone,” Marty Cooper, didn’t predict just how significant the cell phone might soon become. This is evident in a comment he made in an interview with a newspaper reporter, who included Cooper’s quote in his article, “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems,” Cooper states, “Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.” But Jan had no cellphone, so he never got the memo. Hmm? If only foresight wasn’t 20-20, right, Jan?^[4]

6 Sony’s Walkman Walks the Walk and Talks the Talk

This device completely changed how the world listened to music. Right from the start, when Sony released their first Walkman in 1979, not everyone was “all in” on Sony CEO Akio Morita’s baby. In his book Made in Japan, Morita recalls, “It seemed as though nobody liked the idea. At one of our product planning meetings, one of the engineers said, ‘It sounds like a good idea, but will people buy it if it doesn’t have a recording capability? I don’t think so.’”

After the Walkman was finished with development, Morita recalls, even “our marketing people were unenthusiastic… They said it wouldn’t sell.” But sell it did. The Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky, wrote in a 1982 article, It’s “now clear that the Walkman and its successors not only sell and sell from Anchorage to Ankara but also appear to have become a semi-permanent appendage to most of the world’s ears.”

The Walkman would get flak from a few city governments who were trying to get the device banned so people wouldn’t be walking the streets with headphones on, claiming they were a threat to public safety. Even today, there is a law still being enforced in Woodbridge, New Jersey, that comes with a $50 fine for being caught wearing Walkman headphones while crossing the street, regardless if they’re playing or not. Some things will never change.^[5]

5 People Didn’t Want to Hear about Car Radios

In 1992, a New York City magazine called Outlook, with an author breezily reminiscing in an intentional manner, writes, “This equipment, with which you can listen to the radio concerts while driving in your car, is said to be the very latest development of inventive genius for the amusement of the radio fan.”

Well, not everyone had such a positive outlook on the car radio in 1930, though. Quoting an anonymous source in the nation’s capital, the New York Times wrote an article pointing out the cons of car radio technology that said, “Music in the car might make him miss hearing the horn of an approaching automobile or fire or ambulance siren… Imagine fifty automobiles in a city street broadcasting a football game! Such a thing as this, I am sure, would not be tolerated by city traffic authorities.”

In a 1934 poll of members from the Automobile Club of New York, 56% said that car radios were distracting to drivers, a danger to others on the road, and just “more noise added to the present din” of the highway. If only they could hear the thumping of bass and see the glass shuddering with the deep bass beat in a young person’s car today, they’d be thunder-struck.^[6]

4 “Movies Don’t Need Sound!”

In the Roaring Twenties movie industry, the “talkie” was all the rage. But that opinion was far from universal for many consumers and professionals in the industry. Newspapers from coast-to-coast printed headlines like “Talking Films Try Movie Men’s Souls” or “Union’s Discount Talkies.” The public and even members of the movie industry were calling talkies names like “squeakies” or “moanies,” which aren’t terribly flattering, to say the least.

One of these disenchanted members of the movie industry was prominent film director Monte Bell. Bell had employed three other producers, who he instructed to write three different takes on silent films and talkies, using three different attitudes toward them. Bell wanted to “dip his toe in the water,” so to speak. So one producer claimed in his reviews that the silent film was dying, while another claimed the silent film still had plenty of legs left, and the third hailed talkies as the revolutionary advancement that would bring prosperity to the movie industry.

As things turned out, the debates that resulted from Bell’s small experiment strongly suggested that people wanted sound and/or dialogue in films. As usual, those who criticized the advent of sound in movies would eventually come around to their senses and embrace the technology just like everyone else has ever since. Can you even imagine “no sound” in a movie today?^[7]

3 New York Times on Smartwatches: “Wearable Tech Could Cause Cancer”

Can wearable technology cause cancer? According to an article in the New York Times in 2015 written by technology columnist Nick Bilton, it can. His article’s original headline had been, “Could wearable computers be as harmful as cigarettes?” It has since been changed to the less accusatory “The health concerns in wearable tech” (still online) due to the myriad of harsh criticism it received. Still, the problems the piece caused don’t quit there.

In the article, Bilton attempts to answer an important and interesting question: Do smartwatches increase the wearer’s risk of getting cancer? There have been decades of research done that could address this subject since the radiation taking the blame for all this emanates from everything that employs a screen or radio device, including smartphones, laptops, tablets, and flat-screen TVs. Instead of researching previous studies on the subject, Bilton dove right in by equating the dangers of using an Apple smartwatch to cigarette smoking. But recall that, apparently, there was a time when we were told smoking was good for us.

The problem is that Bilton’s only evidence was a 2011 report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer stating that it considered cell phones “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Bilton also claims the IARC report is “the most definitive and arguably unbiased result in this area.” This is more than just misleading since the IARC simply looked over available research on the subject and decided not to rule the possibility out due to a lack of data and time constraints.

In other words, it’s not like the IARC spent years researching this; they simply considered it briefly and sided with caution. So, in the end, it’s basically a farce in the eyes of the science and news media communities. Just kidding, folks, so don’t worry; that smartphone stuck to your head won’t kill you after all.^[8]

9 Motion Picture Association of America Tried to Get VCRs Banned

The Motion Picture Association Of America (MPAA) led the way for the industry’s attempts to ban the Betamax player and tapes, along with VCRs and their tapes, through legislation. In 1982, the president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, had this to say to Congress: “We are going to bleed and hemorrhage unless this Congress at least protects [our] industry against the [VCR]… [and] we cannot live in a marketplace… capable of devouring all that people had invested in.”

Sooner than later, the content industry made the decision to support legislation requiring licensing instead of a total ban on the products. But had it passed, the legislation would assuredly have driven up the cost of the devices so much that it would’ve ideally “banned” the devices anyway since the average consumer couldn’t afford one. Valenti continued in his address to Congress, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

He also insinuated that if Congress didn’t regulate VCRs, then movie producers might cut their production in half. Eventually, the debate made it to the courts, which ruled in favor of the VCR and related industries, and the ruling created a groundswell. It received overwhelming support from both the public and the media. By the late 1980s, the Sony Betamax and VCRs were flying off the shelves, with 2.3 million units being marketed worldwide.

With the content industry’s inability to regulate looking more and more like a foolish blunder, it conceded as well, as more and more Americans bought the technology. The problem was, and had always been, that Congress was always too quick to ban technologies that Americans don’t have access to yet. But not this time.^[9]

1 “Email Hurts the IQ More Than Pot”

According to a 2005 survey on the psychological effects of electronic communications media using alternate groups of five voluntary participants, the constant distraction of phone calls, text messages, and emails is a bigger threat to concentration and IQ scores than marijuana use. Participants reported suffering symptoms such as dizziness, inability to focus, and lethargy that rose to such heights during the survey. Some participants developed a drug-like addiction to their electronic habits, which seems odd.

Many of the participants reported that their minds were boggled as they faced new questions every time an email was delivered to their inboxes or a text popped into their phones. A psychologist from King’s College named Glenn Wilson, who had previously worked on 80 clinical trials for TNS research, stated that according to the survey results, the most damage had occurred due to a lack of discipline in the subjects’ mental handling of electronic communications. Ethical protocols were abandoned, with one in five participants leaving meals or social gatherings to write replies or answer the phone.

Nine out of ten participants fully agreed that responding to emails or texts during office conferences or face-to-face meetings was rude. To others, it felt like it had become an acceptable practice” and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency,” which is somewhat reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. Yet all that these subjects were doing was using electronic communications. Strange indeed.^[10]

Body hair. You know, I don’t know why we have such a problem with body hair in our society. Yeah, it looks a little weird. We don’t necessarily like it under our armpits—unless you’re a guy, then we consider it acceptable (even though it still looks like you’re holding a tribble under there). In other words, we hate on body hair for all the wrong reasons. So let me give you all the right reasons. 

Here are ten facts about body hair that will make you sick (or maybe a little freaked out).

Related: 10 Weird Ways Human Hair Has Been Used

10 Sexy Beard Facts

If you listen closely in a sound-proof room, you can hear your hair growing at night. Okay, no, that’s a complete lie. But the actual truth is that your hair is the fastest-growing tissue in your body, second to bone marrow (’cause blood cells are more important than hair). That isn’t that strange, I know, but this one is.

If you’re looking for a long, luscious beard, perhaps have more sex.

When you anticipate sex, essentially when you release more testosterone, your hair follicles get the message that it’s time to work harder (no jokes, please). So while you, uh, have fun, your beard is growing faster than it ever has before!

9 Dandruff is a Fungus

There’s a fungus among-us, and it’s on your scalp.

The fungus is scientifically called Malassezia Globosa and is part of the yeast family. Most newborns are born with the yeast on their scalp, but it exists without causing any problems for the most part. But sometimes the yeast goes deep follicle diving and decides to live there… rent-free. And that’s how you get dandruff!

Dandruff causes the dead skin cells to push to the surface faster than average. Your body can’t shed the dead skin cells in time. There actually is no cure for dandruff, but you can use certain products to help alleviate it. Look for shampoos that have Zinc Pyrithione which treats the inflammation dandruff causes.

8 You’re Going Gray for a Reason

Okay, this fact won’t make you sick, but it may make you consider your lifestyle. You know how parents complain that their kids are making them go gray? They aren’t wrong. Stress (and age) can cause lower pigment production in the hair follicle and therefore, gray hair. But at least you can give gray hair a cool name.

The scientific term for gray hair is called canities.

Another reason why you may be experiencing some gray hairs here and there is because your hair is bleaching itself from the inside out. You know how people used to bleach their hair using hydrogen peroxide? Well, when your hair builds up too much hydrogen peroxide, it’ll bleach itself.

But wait, there’s more!

It’s not just the head on your hair that turns gray. Your hair turns gray everywhere…everywhere.

7 The Best Mop for Oil Spills

Hair is naturally hydrophobic, meaning it repels water. However, it is a lipophilic material, meaning that it loves to soak up some oil. In fact, hair does such a great job at absorbing oil that people will use it to clean up oil spills. Consider this the next time you share a hat or helmet…you may be picking up someone else’s oils.

Anyway (don’t share hats, kids).

This isn’t one of those hypothetical facts. It actually does happen and has been since the late 1980s. Most recently, in 2020, an oil spill off the coast of Mauritius leaked 1,000 metric tons of oil into the Indian Ocean. Salons all over Mauritius cut and donated hair to provide eco-friendly material for the clean-up. 

6 Hair, Teeth, Nails, Skin, They’re All Made of the Same Thing

Hair is made up of the very special protein keratin. Keratin is also what our teeth, nails, and outer layer of skin are made from. (This is why one woman is growing fingernails from her hair follicles.) Keratin is like other proteins in the body which are made up of amino acids. It’s also found in an animal’s hooves, claws, beaks, horns, feathers, and tail. 

Some of you of may be like, “Oh, that’s the special shampoo I use. It’s keratin shampoo!” It’s not just a marketing scheme. Manufacturers purposefully add keratin proteins to the shampoo to coat the cuticle of your hair. The idea is to make a stronger hair less prone to frizzing and breakage. You do need to use the shampoo consistently if you want to see results, however. This is because the keratin needs to build up a layer around the hair.

Finally, now I can look like a hair model!

5 It’s Dead, Jim.

Your hair is dead. Yeah, you’ve got a dead thing living on your head, and it’s not a bad toupee. The only living part of your hair resides within the follicle. The follicle provides the root of your hair with the blood supply it needs to stay alive. But once the hair cells grow out, those cells are good as dead. If you were to look at a hair strand underneath a microscope, you’d see layers of dead cells, overlapping each other like shingles.

Also, when you’re dead, so is your hair. Contrary to popular myth, your hair doesn’t keep growing once you die.

4 A Witch’s Brew Will “Do”

You think putting egg whites and avocado in your hair as a treatment is gross? Wait for this one.

One 16th century physician swore he could make hair grow back by using a mixture of boiled slugs, emerald oil, honey, saffron, soap, and cumin. No, you don’t drink it, silly. You rub it all over your scalp. Not sure if he really saw results or not. 

Also, in 16th century there was one recipe for hair removal that consisted of cat poop and vinegar and another of boiling arsenic and quicklime. But the earliest form of chemical removal of hair dates back to the ancient Turks. They used a mixture called rumsa. It consisted of yellow sulfate or arsenic, quicklime, and rosewater.

I’ll just be hairy, thanks.

3 You’ve Got Something Crawling Around, There

Remember when we said that your hair is dead? Yeah, okay, that’s still true, but you’ve got something pretty darn alive co-existing with that dead hair. Outside of whatever you may have picked up doing whatever you do in your free time, you have mites living in your hair follicles.

Demodex folliculorum lives in the hair follicle and lives off of your dead skin. Like the fish flakes you give your fish, but human dead skin cells. They also feed on oils, hormones, and other fluids around the hair follicles. You’ll most likely find these mites living on your face, in particular your eyelashes. They can cause issues if there you have an infestation of them (gross), but for the most part, we just play host.

A single hair follicle can hold up to a family of 25 mites and that’s just about as many, if not more, eggs a female Demodex can lay in your hair follicle. They can contribute to problems like acne, hair loss, rosacea, dermatosis, rash, and other skin conditions. Elderly people, people with cancer or compromised immune conditions such as HIV/AIDS, and those experiencing extreme stress are particularly susceptible to a mite’s potential noxious effects. 

I haven’t told you how you can spread these mites yet. You spread them by direct contact or by eggs that are contained in dust (dead skill cells and hair in dust).

2 The Life Cycle of a Hair

Humans are the only species that need to cut their hair regularly because human hair growth and shedding happen at random. We don’t exist like other wild mammals, with perfectly trimmed fur and whatnot. No, if we let our body hair grow we’ll look like a wet cat before its Sunday bath.

This is because human hair grows cyclically. There are three stages to hair growth and shedding: anagen, catagen, and telogen. Depending on the location, it’ll grow to a specific length, chill there for a while, and then shed. When this happens, a new hair replaces that one. During this phase, the hair will grow 1 cm every 28 days. A single hair can live up to five years 

1 You Don’t Have Pubic Hair on Your Face But…

Well, actually, you sort of do? 

Pubic, armpit, and facial hair are all the same kinds of hair: terminal hair. Terminal hair starts as fine and soft hair, but then becomes coarser and thicker once you hit puberty. The hair follicle also develops a sebaceous gland, or sweat gland (why your armpits are sweaty). The sebaceous glands in pubic hair (named that because the hair grows over your pubis, or pubic bone) are smaller than the ones on your face. 

All of these facts don’t make terminal hair gross, just mature (unlike the fact that we’re suggesting your beard is actually pubic hair). 

They say “hindsight is 20/20,” and as with some clichés this one couldn’t be more true when it comes to some people’s attitude towards change, especially when it comes to doing something easier, better, or faster. Well, here are 15 modern conveniences that most of us take for granted today, that we couldn’t live, work, or play without. Conveniences that when first proposed some people “never got the memo on,” since they’re such no-brainers now in hindsight, or resisted in some other way. Please keep reading to find out how amazing and outlandish the public’s attitude can not only be today, but was in the past, towards some of the most successful and important ideas, inventions, and innovations of all time.

Top 10 Most Gruesome Inventions And Innovations

10 Vaccinations Were, Well Vaccines

Online bullies call them anti-vaxxers but they were once dubbed “antivaccinationists,” and they’ve been around much longer than covid-19, and obviously, they’re people who oppose vaccinations and vaccines or simply believe “my body my choice” when it comes to vaccination. In spite of the fact that vaccinations are considered to be one of the top ten achievements in the area of public health in the 20th century, and have saved countless millions of lives, still people have opposed it for longer than it has officially been around. Even the process of pre-vaccination called variolation came under similar fire by the public. The public rejected vaccination for many reasons, ranging from opposition in the mid to late 1800s in the United States and England to the smallpox vaccine, and the anti-vaccination leagues that subsequently formed as a result, to the more recent vaccination controversies surrounding their safety. Much of it though, most likely has to do with fear of the unknown—and trust.

9 A Birthday Party Could Ruin A Kid’s Character

The following was taken directly from an online copy of a 1913 edition of Ladies’ Home Journal:

“… The children’s birthday party habit not only affects the moral nature of children in various ways, and sows dangerous seeds for the future in child character and habits, but it also threatens their happiness through the danger to health which such parties involve. Instead of wholesome tiny…sandwiches…such a mixture is set…that the whole physical system is frequently completely upset. …”

As we can see from this very short excerpt , from an exceedingly long rant that appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal of 1913 , they weren’t too thrilled about birthday parties for kids. The part about the birthday party ‘habit’ not only damaging the ‘moral nature’ of kids, but also a kid’s character, is some pretty heavy stuff. I’m not sure I want to threaten any of my grandkids’ happiness by sowing ‘dangerous seeds,’ and risking their health by throwing them a birthday party, and making them sick in the process. Doesn’t sound like a good time to me, or to be honest, any birthday party I’ve ever been to. So I’m guessing that our family tradition of making a huge chocolate cake, with a lot of chocolate frosting, and giving the entire monstrosity to our one-year-olds, in a sort of competition to see who “destroys it the best and makes the biggest mess,” wouldn’t go over too well with these ladies.

8 The Bicycle Would Cripple You—Or Worse

Back in Victorian times, doctors were totally against people riding bicycles—especially women. So much so, they literally practiced a disturbing form of pseudoscience. Their fears were so misguided that they claimed that riding a bicycle disgraced a woman’s walk by causing it to turn into a “plunging kind of motion.” They also felt that the activity could actually wear a person’s body all the way down to the bones, causing conditions such as “bicycle foot,” and “bicycle hand,” which were very highly feared. These doctors also claimed that bicycle riding could even damage your face by the combination of the strong winds created by the momentum of the bicycle, added with the strain of the effort, causing “bicycle face”—which was allegedly a permanent condition! And as for the daintiness of women, the exertion would most certainly cause their slight frames to become far too masculine, providing they could survive the torture of course. Nope. These doctors never got the memo about the value of exercise.

7 A Refrigerator Cost A Fortune

An American wife in 1920: “Honey. Should we buy one of those new refrigerators, or one of those new automobiles?” He replied, “Well, if we buy a refrigerator we won’t have to take horse and wagon to the market so often, but if we get one of those Fords we can go and get what we need whenever we need it.” She replied, “We could just get both.” He says, “We could too.” Then Grandpa spoke up, “There’s a problem.” The husband asks, “What’s that Dad?” He explains, “That refrigerator you two want will cost you a lot more than the Ford!” He was right.

In the early 1920s a Ford Model-T cost around $260. A bit expensive considering people made about $2,000 a year, but affordable. On the other hand, a refrigerator, say a Frigidaire, would cost nearly twice as much at $450! So if our imaginary couple made the $2,000 a year, they’d need to spend 35% of a year’s income to buy both! And imagine today spending almost twice as much on a refrigerator as a car! Prior to this there were the ice harvesters, and businessmen in the industry, who opposed mechanical refrigeration at first. Their lost income notwithstanding, there can still be no doubt that they eventually had a refrigerator in their kitchens too, and many of those businessmen, such as Birds Eye, would soon become the frozen food giants of today.

6 Coffee Was Satan’s Drink

When one ponders coffee, lush tropical hills may come to mind, or the aroma of it brewing first thing in the morning. A 16th century pope may come to the minds of many historians and coffee aficionados though. He was Pope Clement VIII, and is said to be the party responsible for the popularity of the aromatic bean circumventing Europe and the rest of the globe. In the 16th century coffee was so popular throughout the Ottoman Empire, that Sultan Murad IV thought of chopping the heads off of anyone found drinking the brew, but even that horrific threat didn’t stop coffee lovers from indulging. Since the Islamic world drank coffee it was dubbed “Satan’s Drink” by Roman Catholics and Christians. Eventually though, coffee made it to Rome, and after a steaming cup was placed in the Pope’s hand he allegedly said after drinking it, “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.” He then gave it his blessing. So, the next time you enjoy a cup of Joe, you might want to say a prayer of thanks to Pope Clement VIII.

5 Taxis Were Deemed Necessary (By One Man)

Being resistant in a different sense, in 1907, a legend of life in the Big Apple was born, when a soon-to-be, world-renowned icon rolled onto the city streets—the first metered taxis—and they were green…and red. Since these colors were so hard to see they were soon painted their iconic garish yellow so they could be spotted from a distance, and so it wasn’t long at all before 700 New York City taxis could never be found when you really needed one. The legend of the New York City cab began after Harry N. Allen was slammed by a $5 fare (that’s 130 bucks today) for a quarter mile ride in a horse-drawn cab! Now that is rough. But soon after getting fleeced by the cab driver Harry resisted in spades by creating the New York Taxicab Company. Allen had 65 gas-powered, French cars shipped over, painted them green and red, put drivers in them, sent them out, and an icon was born. That’s giving it to them Harry!

4 The Umbrella Was Persecuted

The first English man to carry an umbrella, or “brolly,” was Jonas Hanway. The French invented the folding version in use today. There both sexes used umbrellas, but in Britain they were thought to be highly feminine, so when Jonas showed up on the streets of London with his umbrella the jeering and taunting soon began. Londoners were quickly laughing and yelling insults and names at him, calling him “effeminate” and worse, and some even called him “Frenchie,” the ultimate insult in 17th century England. This also upset the cab drivers who figured that a man with a “brolly” wouldn’t be wanting a ride in the incessant London rain, so maybe neither would anyone else if “brollies” caught on, so they took to throwing rotten fruit at the man. It got worse over the years, but Jonas held on, and the rest is history. He thought of the idea during his travels to Persia where they used huge parasols to get out of the hot sun. His thoughts were that they might work for rain as well. Who calls this guy, dry holding an umbrella, an “idiot,” while standing drenched in a downpour, right?

3 The Airplane Was A Toy

In 1911, a very influential person made the profound comment, “Airplanes are interesting scientific toys, but they are of no military value.” The strange thing about the resistance here is the pedigree of the person resisting. I mean the fact that a French general, who was also an Allied commander during World War I, would say something so naive seems mind boggling. That French general was none other than Ferdinand Foch. How could he not see the potential of a machine that flies for at least aerial reconnaissance is beyond this writer. The Wright Brothers had already been making headlines with successful flights for eight years, and only eight years after he made this this statement, a Curtiss seaplane made the first successful Atlantic crossing from Newfoundland to Portugal. I guess the General never got the memo.

2 The Laptop Would Die

“Laptops Are Dead—Or Will Die,” could’ve been a headline in the New York Times back around 1985. At least that’s what the tech writers were saying in the paper about that new trend in personal computing. Quite often, those who write about new technology, never get the memo, and don’t see which direction it may be heading, because according to the tech experts of the time, at the Times, laptops would eventually bite the dust for a couple reasons; one was they’d be too expensive to build, and the other was that nobody would want a portable computer in the first place. They were predicting that “…no matter how inexpensive the machines become…[they just couldn’t] imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.” In other words, if you were fishing, you wouldn’t want a computer, because you were outdoors. In their defense, there is the fact that the World Wide Web, Internet, and WiFi didn’t exist then, so our digital world wasn’t even near their radar. The irony of this is the fact that Nikola Tesla had already invented cellular technology more than a half of a century earlier. Hmm?

1 The Light Bulb Was Unworthy

In 1878, the British Parliament had a jolly bright idea when they formed what was apparently a scientific committee charged with creating a report on Thomas Edison’s idea for the incandescent lamp. The committee’s final determination, was that what was to become famous world-wide as the “light bulb,” was “good enough for our Transatlantic friends, but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.” Would that be “English scientific men?” Seeing how the incandescent lamp in question was on the other side of the Atlantic, maybe they should’ve tried it? Or if they did, given it a bit more of a chance maybe, or something. Then possibly the British could’ve seen the future in somewhat of a “better light. ”

Top 10 American Inventions You Can’t Live Without

Everyone has a bunch of foods that they like, another set of ones that they hate, and a whole lot of “it’s fine, I guess” in between. 

However, there are some very special foods that don’t readily fit in any of those categories. These are the foods that really make you feel something, and not in the greatest possible way. They might taste fine, but contain ingredients that wreak havoc on your body in ways you could never believe. They might give out a smell that sends even the proudest skunk sulking in the corner. They might be extremely healthy, unless you make a small mistake that completely flips the script. The dangers they pose come in many forms, but they all have one thing in common: They’re the foods with the ability to make us sick. 

10. Chili peppers

When you’re talking about foods that make people sick, there’s no denying that chili peppers must be included on the list, simply because of the sheer physical reaction they incite. The capsaicin that the heat comes from is the same stuff they use in pepper sprays, and though its heat doesn’t actually burn us, a strong enough pepper will be able to convince your brain that its hotness is of the touching-the-stove variety. Which, as anyone who has eaten hot enough chili peppers can attest, is no picnic when you just ate said hot stove.

Perhaps surprisingly — or unsurprisingly, depending on your personal stance on spicy food — the fact that chili peppers can make us physically sick doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad for us. In fact, they’re pretty healthy. They might sometimes taste like hell incarnate, but chili peppers are very rich in minerals, vitamins and an assortment of beneficial substances. They have also evolved to repel harmful bacteria, which keeps them from spoiling and, ironically, prevents you from getting sick.

Still, “It’s actually pretty healthy” is probably not going to be the first thing on your mind if you eat a ghost pepper on a dare.

(Please don’t eat a ghost pepper on a dare.)    

9. Raw oysters

Oysters and other molluscan shellfish are delicacies that are commonly eaten raw, which is all fine and well — if the water is clean. The problem here is that they’re filter feeders, and as you can imagine, the whole “filter” part means that the dirtier the oyster’s home waters are, the more nasty stuff it contains. Lots of things can affect the oyster’s cleanliness, from the presence of fecal bacteria and biotoxins to rainfall and river flows. Basically, if your oyster lived in a sewer, you’ll eat the worst bits of the sewer. 

Apart from the various possible problems the oyster’s eating habits bring, there’s also the fact that you have to be very, very healthy to be able to safely eat a raw oyster. There’s a long list of health conditions and diseases that basically overrule your ability to eat raw shellfish, ranging from the fairly unsurprising (cancer, various metabolism and/or gastrointestinal conditions, drinking too much alcohol) to borderline commonplace (diabetes). 

Should you eat a raw oyster and be unlucky enough to be in a risk group and see the risk become reality, you could be looking at a whole array of illnesses, or even death. The Virginia Department of Health mentions that the delicacy could give you hepatitis A, norovirus, or Vibrio infection — which means a wide selection of potential symptoms that include (but are not limited to) “vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, stomach pains, severe weakness,” or perhaps “skin rashes and blisters, shaking chills, and high fever.” That’s a pretty heavy schedule, even disregarding the possibility of death mentioned earlier.

8. Ackee fruit 

Ackee fruit was imported to Jamaica from West Africa, and its uniquely creamy, buttery tang proved popular enough that it’s now their national fruit. There’s just one minor problem: you have to wait until it’s ripe before eating it, and be really, really sure that it is before you eat the thing. Otherwise, it can literally make you sick. There’s even a disease named after the adverse effects of the fruit: “Jamaican Vomiting Sickness.” 

Unripe ackee pods contain tons of hypoglycin, a poison gas that eventually goes away when the pods ripen and open. Crack a pod open too early, and the remaining poison can kill you. If it doesn’t, it’s Jamaican Vomiting Sickness time. The symptoms can be exactly what you can probably imagine, but if you’re really unlucky (though not quite “dead” unlucky), you might also look into symptoms like “coma, convulsions, delirium, toxic hepatitis, acute dehydration and a state of shock.” Yeah, Jamaica isn’t messing around when it comes to national fruits. 

7. Kidney beans 

There are few foods that are more unassuming and innocent than red kidney beans. If anything, you’d expect them to be full of healthy substances which, to be fair, they are. However, red beans also have some sneaky ways to make you sick.

Correctly prepared kidney beans are fine and safe and good, provided you enjoy kidney beans. However, raw kidney beans have tons of phytohaemagglutinin, a tongue-twistingly named protein that’s toxic. As such, incorrectly prepared kidney beans run the risk of giving you kidney bean poisoning, which is basically diarrhea and vomiting — only, it can get so bad that you have to be hospitalized.

Another, stranger badly-cooked-kidney-bean danger comes in the form of antinutrients — a group of substances that wreck your digestive system’s ability to absorb nutrients. This might not seem like a huge deal in countries where people could generally afford to lose a few pounds. However, it can be a major issue in developing countries that heavily rely on beans for sustenance.  

6. Cassava

Cassava is a starchy root crop that comes in two rough varieties: bitter and sweet. Well, three varieties, if you consider “poisonous” to be one.

As a highly flexible source of carbs that can be used in a variety of ways — including flour — cassava is a huge deal in some countries, such as Uganda. Unfortunately, there’s one catch in dealing with the root. Unless you follow a proper detoxification process that involves soaking, drying and scraping it before turning it into anything edible, it’s going to contain a ton of cyanogenic glucocide. Yep, we’re talking about cyanide, here, and if there’s enough of it in the cassava, eating it could make you seriously sick — or even be fatal. 

This isn’t just a theoretical situation, either. Cassava cyanide poisoning outbreaks absolutely happen. In one September 2017 instance, 98 people were poisoned in Western Uganda, and two of them died. 

5. Durian 

Here’s what you need to know about the durian. In the summer of 2020, a post office in Schweinfurt, Germany received a strange, vile-smelling package that launched a large-scale evacuation operation. 12 workers received medical treatment, and a total of 60 postal folks were swiftly evacuated as a full house of emergency workers, firefighters and police descended upon the nefarious package. 

It contained four durian fruits.

The durian is a tasty and incredibly nutritious fruit that’s so popular in Southeast Asia that they call it “the king of fruits.” Its creamy flesh and sizeable seeds are often used in cooking, and the whole package comes with just one minor drawback: The flesh smells awful. Like, evacuate-a-Bavarian-post-office awful. 

The German incident was not an isolated one. In 2019, the University of Camberra library in Australia was evacuated because a durian in a trash can was mistaken for a gas leak. In 2018, a similar situation caused the evacuation of over 500 students and staff at the University of Melbourne. In 2015, another smelly durian alert took place on the British island of Jersey. We could go on. 

So, there you are. The durian might not be the most dangerous or poisonous thing on this list, but the fact that it can single-handedly cause an evacuation of hundreds of people just by smelling awful is nothing short of a superpower.  

4. Hot dogs

Look, hot dogs aren’t necessarily sickening. Unless they haven’t gone bad, or you haven’t let them fester on the table for hours on end, or you avoid checking how they’re actually made, there’s no reason to suspect that they’d make you sick. 

However, you absolutely can choke on them. Hot dogs are the perfect size and shape to be a severe choking hazard for kids, especially if you cut them wrong. It’s not just a “babies can’t eat properly” thing, either. In 2014, an adult competitive eater choked to death on a hot dog. When a Washington Post journalist started digging around, it turned out that hot dogs are a leading cause of choking for kids under 14, and the situation was serious enough that the American Academy of Pediatrics has demanded that the shape of the hot dog should be redesigned.

We actually find ourselves in support of that idea, both because it’s terrifying that a 13-year-old can apparently just randomly choke on a hot dog, and because we kind of want to see just what shape a redesigned hot dog would be. Good luck to vendors trying to stuff the dodecahedron dog in a bun with dragged-through-the-garden trimmings.  

3. Sannakji 

It’s one thing to choke on food, but a completely another one when the food actively tries to choke you. That’s what sannakji, an esteemed, yet controversial South Korean delicacy, can do to you.

Sannakji is, essentially, tentacles of a small octopus dipped in sesame oil. The catch is that they’re so very, very fresh that they’re still wriggling. Some even enjoy eating the whole octopus rare. You can probably guess where the health hazards come in — the wriggling tentacles mean that they’re a choking hazard, and it doesn’t exactly help that their still-active suction cups could very well grab the inside of your throat, with potentially deadly results.       

Apart from the health risks the dish posits, animal rights activists have pointed out that the fact that the tentacles are moving mean they must still be alive, which would make the existence of the dish sheer torture for the animal involved. According to octopus expert and author Peter Godfrey-Smith, they might very well have a point. “It is not clear where the [octopus] brain itself begins and ends,” he has written. “The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain and nervous system.” Such points, combined with the fact that the tentacles still respond to outside irritants, have caused some to believe that the sannakji octopi are still alive in their own, strange way. Could that be why they try to strangle the folks eating them from the inside?

2. Casu Marzu 

Cheese is always a little bit touch-and-go on the “making you sick” front. Sure, a slice of cheddar slowly melting on a burger patty is a thing of pure glory, but there are other cheeses. Wild cheeses. Dangerous cheeses. Cheeses from the scary side of town, with the weird blue veins and a smell that clears your sinuses from a block away. And then there is Casu Marzu. 

Casu Marzu is essentially a hard, Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese, with one significant spin on the theme: It’s completely infested with tiny, wriggling maggots. This is no accident, either. Local cheese makers specifically invite Piophila casei flies to make the cheese wheel their home by cutting a small opening in it and leaving it in the open. The idea is that once the flies lay their eggs in the cheese and the larvae hatches, the excretions involved will react with the cheese’s protein and fat, which makes it nice and creamy. 

Once the cheese starts leaking, it’s good to eat — at least, for a given measure of good. The cheese is described as a strong, gorgonzola-like thing with a strong smell and a slightly acidic taste, but there’s one little caveat: The maggots are still there, and they’re jumping around. Yep, the cheese maggots can jump “a few inches,” which means that when the wheel is unsealed, you should protect your eyes to avoid being blinded by a shower of kamikaze maggots.   

The maggots must be alive at this point, because if they’re already dead, the cheese has gone bad. However, you shouldn’t actually eat them alive, because they can damage your digestive system, causing nausea, pain, and/or vomiting. So, if you really want to taste the maggot cheese despite all obvious drawbacks, you’re faced with a choice: Either risk it and eat the jumpy maggot cheese with its inhabitants still alive — or mash them to death, and then eat their home. From their point of view, you’re the destroyer of worlds either way.

1. Pufferfish 

Pufferfish chef must be one of the most stressful occupations on the planet. Sure, they don’t have to dive with sharks, or wrestle alligators, or open the store doors on the morning of a Black Friday sale. However, they toil away every day, knowing with absolute certainty that a slightest mistake could result in the death of a human being. 

There are over 120 species of pufferfish, and they get their name from their unique defense method of rapidly expanding into a hard-to-eat ball by rapidly filling their stomach with water. Nearly all of them also have another, less strange but infinitely more dangerous weapon at their disposal: They’re poisonous. Very, very poisonous. Your average pufferfish contains enough of the highly toxic tetrodotoxin (which is 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide) to kill 30 humans. That’s a whole lot of poison, and the situation’s not made any easier by the fact that there’s no antidote.

This wouldn’t be a problem if pufferfish tasted like urine-soaked rubber bands. Unfortunately, some pufferfish taste pretty awesome, and are considered a delicacy. Enter the Japanese dish known as fugu, which is very expensive, and requires a specially trained and licensed expert to make. Prepare the dish incorrectly, and it’s so poisonous that despite its comparative rarity, as of 2018 it still caused an estimated 50% of serious food poisoning deaths in Japan. 

It’s not a particularly nice way to go, either. Tetrodotoxin starts slowly numbing and even paralyzing your body roughly 20 minutes to three hours after the meal, and if things get really serious, the paralysis eventually stops you from breathing.

No one likes to be sick, and in the age of Covid this hits home more than ever. The moment you get a cough or fever, you have to wonder if it’s just a cold or something worse. And even if it’s not a devastating and lethal illness, if you’re sick with anything, you’re going to be dealing with symptoms that make your life miserable, even if only for a few days. So when that happens, try to take some comfort in knowing that, as awful as you feel, each one of those symptoms is doing a job and trying to help you in some way.

10. Vomiting

Emetophobia is the technical term for a fear of vomiting and a surprising number of people suffer from it. Though, in a severe form, it’s rare. In general, as much as 8.8% of the population has at least a mild fear of throwing up. It’s not hard to understand, either, since vomiting is not all that enjoyable. So why does it have to happen at all?

Well, from a very basic standpoint, it seems clear that you vomit because your insides want something outside and they can’t wait. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Something has triggered your digestive system to suggest you ingested something bad. A toxin, a poison, something that is a severe irritant and your body no longer wants it around.

There are mechanical reasons for vomiting as well, such as conditions that affect the nerves and muscles in your stomach, or even stress, but that’s a different issue. As a symptom of an underlying virus or infection, vomiting is your body’s way of trying to speed your recovery by forcing the thing making you sick right back out.

9. Shivering

With many illnesses, you’ll find yourself running between temperature extremes. One minute you’re cold and the next hot. And while a fever has its own purpose, which we’ll mention shortly, what’s the point of feeling cold and shivering? 

Shivering when you’re sick and feeling cold is essentially stage one of a two stage process. The second part often leads to a fever, but they need to go hand in hand. Your body wants to heat up to fight off infection, but it can’t do that out of nowhere. You need to make the heat somehow and that’s what shivering is for.

Your muscles begin contracting and relaxing rapidly. That physical process creates heat. Once your body has reached a high enough temperature, the shivering stops and then a fever sets in. 

8. Fever

The process by which a fever works in your body is not something most people consider. You get sick, sometimes you get a fever. On a deeper level, many of us understand that this increase in temperature is your body’s way of trying to fight off an illness. But how?

Fevers can be triggered by a number of illnesses, be they infections or viruses, and more. Your body is reacting to something it understands as undesirable by producing white blood cells in a greater abundance. These white blood cells stimulate your hypothalamus, which is what generally keeps your body in balance. One of the things it maintains is temperature. In simple terms, it turns up your internal thermostat so you get hotter than normal. 

As blood vessels contract, your blood goes away from the outside of your body to the inside. You shiver, producing more heat, and your body warms up. 

Most viruses and bacteria function in a host body at a stable temperature. They can only handle so much variation. Your immune system forces your temperature to rise in an effort to kill off as much of the invading pathogen as possible and return you to good health. The problem, of course, is that a fever that goes too high can be a danger all on its own. 

7. Runny Nose

When you’re sick, everything in your body seeks to get the cause of the sickness out and, more often than not, it can only do that in a gross way. In the case of a runny nose, your body needs to amp up mucus production in the hope that whatever infectious thing is inside of you gets stuck and oozes out. 

With something like a cold, the pathogen making you sick managed to get past the mucus lining in your body, which is a natural filter. Your body responds by making something called cytokines, which are proteins that can move between cells and send signals throughout your body. In this case, they signal your immune system to increase mucus production. 

Excess mucus is used to clean the mucus lining and flush out any contaminants or pathogens that may have infected it. It’s like your body trying to powerwash itself from the inside, basically. Without this excess mucus production, you would be more inclined to either stay sick or get sicker.

6. Coughing and Sneezing

The dreaded cough is one of the first and most notable signs of a myriad of conditions that plague us, especially during the winter. Cold and flu season are the cough’s natural habitat. Like vomiting, coughing is a reflex action your body takes when it senses something that it doesn’t want inside of it. Unlike vomiting, it’s a little less picky about how it operates.

Basically, anything that irritates your breathing is going to cause coughing. That’s why a cold makes you cough, but so does smoking or getting a nose full of pepper by accident. Your body has sensed something that doesn’t belong in it and is trying to force it out with a blast of air that can actually propel things outwards at up to 50 miles per hour.  Sneezing performs essentially the same function.

As we just saw, mucus production is a by-product of many illnesses, so, in those cases, coughing is a complementary action that helps clear your airways to ensure you can keep breathing. On the other hand, various proteins in our immune response can cause inflammation in our throats and airways as a method of combating infection or viruses. A by-product of this is also a cough, since your airway is inflamed. The cough itself may not be eliminating anything in those cases. In general, however, both a cough and sneeze are working to remove pathogens from your airways.

5. Sore Throat

So what tends to come along with a cough, a fever, and excess mucus? A sore throat. Something like a chronic cough can exacerbate a sore throat and make it feel worse, but it’s not typically the root cause of a sore throat. That’s actually something we just mentioned when dealing with coughs – inflammation. 

You can think of inflammation as similar to a localized fever. The places in your body that become inflamed when you’re sick get red, they swell, and they warm up. Your body is trying to fight off something in that specific location where inflammation has occurred. Many of us think inflammation is caused by what’s wrong with us, but technically, is your body trying to fix what’s wrong with you. 

The inflammation triggers the production of white blood cells that go to the inflammation site to combat whatever infection is plaguing you. When the white blood cells and antibodies reach the site of the swelling, they put pressure on nerve endings. These two things together create the feeling of your throat being thick and swollen, as well as in pain. Uncomfortable though it may be, it’s a sign your body is working as it should to fight off the illness. 

4. Loss of Appetite

Getting sick often means losing your desire to do almost anything. And while you may not be in the mood to physically run around and do things, even necessary biological imperatives like eating can take a back seat. Loss of appetite is a very common symptom of many conditions. 

Blame the cytokines again for this one, as the suppression of appetite is a method your body uses to focus on healing. Digesting food can take up as much as 15% of the energy your body expends in a day. When you don’t eat, that energy can be used instead to help fight off the illness that you’re battling. 

The other potential reason is that, if you’re vomiting because you’re sick with an infection that’s giving you stomach issues, it’s pretty clear you don’t want or need to be putting more food inside of yourself at that moment. So your body is holding off on the desire to eat until you’re physically able to do so. 

3. Pus

Pus is probably one of the most unpleasant substances made in the human body. It’s thick and can sometimes smell just awful. It’s also a prime indicator of a seriously bad infection. But it’s not the infection itself, it’s your body’s response to an infection. As off putting as it may be, if you didn’t have the ability to produce pus then you’d probably be in a pretty bad way.

When you have an infection, pus builds up around it. It’s just white blood cells looking to eliminate that infection. Problems arise when the infection is worse than your immune system can handle. For instance, a foreign body can’t really be destroyed by white blood cells, so an infection will grow. Likewise, an abscess may only get larger as tissue dies and the infection grows bigger than your immune system can manage. 

Consider, however, that if you couldn’t produce pus, then your first line of defense against infection wouldn’t exist and even a small skin infection could potentially become deadly.

2. Drowsiness

For many of us, getting sick means spending the day in bed. Even when you go to the hospital, they put you in a bed. It’s probably the most prescribed treatment in the world for nearly every conceivable condition. So the fact that getting sick often makes you drowsy makes a lot of sense. 

Sleep is necessary for life, even if we don’t fully understand the mechanisms of everything that happens when you’re out for the night. But we do know it allows your body to take the time to repair itself from damage. When sick, sleeping is especially beneficial since you’re not wasting time on waking endeavors. Everything from digesting to thinking to moving takes energy your body could be using to heal when you’re awake. You’re just more efficient at healing when you’re asleep. 

Research has shown that in worms, certain nerve cells release neuropeptides when they’re ill. These neuropeptides stamp down the nervous system and make the worms fall asleep so they can heal. It’s been speculated a similar process is occurring in humans as well. 

1. Sickness Behavior

Sickness behavior may sound like a vague term, but it kind of has to be. It’s a blanket term for that hard to describe feeling when you know you’re sick. It’s everything we already described, and then how you deal with it when you experience it. You feel slow and gross and tired and weary. It doesn’t matter which sickness you have, sickness behavior is how you personally deal with it.

Cytokines and other proteins are at the root of your sickness behavior, the suite of awful symptoms you feel when you’re ill. And while some of the individual things have functions, which we’ve covered, the overall feeling of awfulness seems to exist as a measure of preservation and isolation. You feel awful to keep yourself from getting up and doing anything else. A sort of self-quarantine, really. Stop the spread of illness to others, stop the strain on yourself, and just focus on recovery.