I recently found out that smoking has health benefits. I now feel pretty lied to.
Smoking apparently significantly reduces the chance of getting Parkinson’s Disease or Ulcerative Colitis, and can help with some other stuff. That doesn’t mean smoking is a good idea; it has big downsides too. But the anti-smoking propaganda I’ve been exposed to presented smoking as purely bad, which apparently isn’t true.
I don’t know how much smoking is required to get what benefits. I wonder if historically people smoked small amounts (I’d think most people couldn’t afford more) and got some benefits with less downside. I don’t know and have other things to research. I’ve just found that many traditional human practices have some sort of (sometimes hidden) wisdom and benefit to them, and I wonder if smoking could be another example. And then sometimes modern changes, like mass production or modifications with new technologies, can make things worse (like enabling smoking a lot instead of a little). This comes up with a lot of food where traditional recipes are healthier than a lot of modern ultra processed food. And traditional food practices often have nutritionally beneficial food pairings, and do things to reduce downsides of foods, that people were using long before science could explain the benefits.