This is an All Ears English podcast episode 2620.
Debunk and connect with Lindsay and Michelle.
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What does the word debunk mean and how do you use it?
Today, learn how to bring up new research in tons of areas including nutrition science history, politics and more.
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Hey there, Michelle.
What is going on with you today?
Not too much, Lizzie.
How are you?
I'm feeling good.
I'm ready to be on the mic and talk about a good topic for today for our listeners.
Yeah?
Yeah, me too. too.
Lindsay, do you tend to believe studies that come out in the news?
Or are you wary of them?
Like that's like 15 of people who eat this will die like in like 20 years.
You know about food illness.
You know there's so many things that come out.
What do you what's your feeling when you see those?
I tend to believe them when it supports a habit I already have and it says it's good.
Like coffee.
These days, the press on coffee is good.
Yes, yes.
A lot of good stuff coming out.
But then you never know.
In two years, it could be like, oh, now it causes cancer.
I mean, that's what happened with not exactly what happened with wine.
But back in the in the aughts, do you remember when everyone said red wine is good for your heart?
It's good for you.
And so everyone started drinking more red wine.
And now they're like, nope, alcohol in general is very bad for you.
Yeah, i know it's so hard.
It's so hard to follow along.
I don't know anymore, so that's why i try and stick with everything in moderation and hope for the best.
Um yeah, i mean not obviously things that are terrible for me, but yeah, things that are on the um.
So today we're going to talk about a word that often comes up in these scenarios.
And this is I think this is kind of a buzzword today because we're always I mean, I've seen it a lot recently
Yeah, because we're always talking about these kinds of things.
So what's the word?
Debunk.
Debunk.
I love it.
It's kind of fun to say.
It sounds like we're dropping news here.
Yeah.
How do you spell that?
Yeah.
D-E-B-U-N-K.
Interesting word.
I don't know where it comes from, but it basically means to show that something people believe, that something, is now false, that maybe they believed was true before.
Yes.
Yes, right.
Yes, exactly.
So we're going to talk more about that in just a second.
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So Michelle, this is going to be fun, because I've always found it interesting, especially in American culture.
Poke fun at ourselves here.
We're so obsessed with health research, nutrition research, but we still have some of the highest rates of obesity in the world.
It's like, what gives, you know?
Yeah, good question.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's also because we're such a large country.
Yeah, sure.
And it's like, it's so hard to get everybody on board.
But different areas in the country are totally different.
And so it's very, it's very interesting.
So with this word debunk, so again, it's kind of like proving something is wrong.
Yes.
You might hear things like debunk a myth, debunk a theory, debunk a common misconception.
Do you say debunk or debunk?
Which do you say?
I feel like you could say both, right?
I think you could say debunk.
Yeah.
Now we're saying it too many times that it's sounding silly to me.
I think that I say both.
I think there's no way to go wrong with this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, you might hear this or see this word in the news a lot, right?
Like.
So we talked about, you know, debunking.
I guess I say debunk a study like what we're talking about, you know?
Oh, like they...
The coffee.
You know they said that coffee was bad.
But now we've debunked that and we realize it's great right.
All the better for us.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
But it's not just nutrition.
Even though I really enjoy, I don't know, I find nutrition really interesting.
So I enjoy seeking out those.
Whenever those articles are in the news, I always read them and add them to.
You know, my body of knowledge misunderstandings right.
Yeah, yeah.
But it goes beyond just nutrition, of course.
So here's one with nutrition, though.
I read an article debunking the misconception that a low-fat diet is good for you.
And this is another thing that has been coming out recently.
But then people saying high-fat diet is good for you.
I'm not sure about that either.
Right.
It's it's, you know, some of it you just have to.
You just have to take it all with a grain of salt and like kind of, just do your best.
I don't know.
It's because I mean, you know, then they say there's good fats and bad fats.
When I, you know, when we were growing up Lindsay, I'm sure you remember it was like everything was low fat, low fat.
Yes.
Meanwhile, they're adding all these chemicals in.
Right.
That are probably really dangerous for our health.
Right.
All these fake sugars and, you know, sort of additives and preservatives.
Yeah.
They had to make it taste good somehow.
Right.
Right.
Like I remember...
Yeah, I remember when I first started thinking about that.
I remember because I would always get like low fat salad dressing.
And I remember one of my mom's friends was like, yeah, but like, what happened?
They had to do something to make the taste good.
So like, what are they?
And I
That sort of made me think.
And yeah, I always remember that.
This is why I love traveling.
Because if you go pretty much anywhere else in the world, a lot of the food is fresh.
Like you go to Italy, France.
I mean, you're eating farm to table.
And it's not astronomically expensive either.
Oh, God.
I remember when I went to Slovenia last year, Slovenia, the food in Slovenia is so clean.
It's just so clean.
And you can tell, you feel it in your stomach when you're eating it.
It's just such a different experience than eating here in the States.
Yeah yeah yeah definitely, yeah.
Um, here's another one.
The supervisor debunked the rumor that layoffs were going to happen next week.
So what are we saying here?
What did the supervisor do?
Yeah, he basically, he or she basically said okay, it's not true, there is a rumor, but the rumor is incorrect.
There are no layoffs happening next week.
He addressed it in some way and said that it was false.
Or what's another?
I'm going to show you something that will debunk your prior misconceptions about homeschooling.
Right.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing, homeschooling in this country.
Right.
Yeah.
So I, you know, sometimes people think, oh, like, they have judgments on homeschooling.
And then but people who homeschool their kids, they feel really strongly about it.
So interesting stuff.
And this is all colliding with the Instagram age, right?
Where we have people kind of just saying what they think is true, whether it's based in any science.
They just use certain phrases that feel heavier.
And so there is fake news out there.
It's tricky.
It's crazy out there, Michelle.
It's crazy out there.
It is.
It is.
What's another one?
The professor debunked the myth from the 1800s by explaining the history to the class.
Okay, so when you have more context, maybe you can debunk certain myths a bit better, right?
Or one more.
The reporter put out a shocking story debunking the idea that the school system was doing well.
Good.
Okay.
Lindsay, have you ever had to debunk anything in your life at work?
That's a tricky one.
I feel like I mean, when we set our highest value here at All Ears English as connection, I feel like maybe the industry was more in a mindset of being correct, being perfect, focusing on being correct, but we believe that there's something higher.
It's not exactly the same thing.
But I don't have any good examples.
Michelle, do you have any?
Anything?
There are certain things in the news yeah um, you know that will come out, where you know where you will talk about them with family or something like that, and you're in.
You know there's a lot of you know political discussion and you say, wait a second, but that's not true.
Like you heard that somewhere.
Maybe you heard that online and that wasn't a valid source and you know so.
Oh god yeah yeah yeah, When it comes to politics and things with vaccines and stuff people's perspectives that can get into a really heated area.
You got to be careful to enter those conversations.
But yeah, I mean, if...
But yeah.
Anyways, we can say more about this.
Yes.
I mean, but Lindsay, how does someone debunk?
What are you debunking with?
Well, so you try to do it with proof, with facts, images, numbers, videos.
But I feel like nowadays, in kind of this fake news era, we don't necessarily listen to facts or trust facts all the time, or not everyone does.
So I don't know.
How do you do it, Michelle?
I mean, yeah, that's how you should do it.
But I wonder, like even now, I'll see things coming up online for me where I'm watching a video or something and I can tell that it's not real.
So that's the scary part about where the news is heading and with AI and things, that's just that's just actually frightening, because something i mean right now i still think it's a little glitchy where you're watching something and you're like wait a second, that doesn't look like her, that's not the real person, right?
Yeah, that's a i don't know and that's there's no way.
But in a few years or even sooner, you know, it might get harder to tell and we have to be really careful, Don't worry, guys.
This is the real us right here.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, it's true.
It's true.
Yeah.
Just a few years from now, I mean, AI is just moving so incredibly fast, Michelle.
So a year from now, we don't know where we'll be.
It's true.
Yeah, it's wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, so other ways we might say debunk, if we don't want to always go around saying debunk debunk, debunk.
We could say disprove, right?
The professor disproved the report by showing the graphs she had recorded in her book three years ago.
Or expose, right so like she exposed the truth, right so that's more like to uncover um, by sharing pictures she had taken of the couple together.
Yes, expose so uncover, unleash the information that no one knew about before, right.
Discredit.
The scientist discredited the reporter's claim by bringing her to the lab and showing her exactly why she was wrong.
So all in the same ballpark, not exactly the same.
Right, some minor differences.
Yeah.
So let's do a role play here.
You and I are reporters talking about a story that we're about to break.
I would love to be, I feel like, in an alternate life.
I would like to be like an investigative reporter.
If I were better at details, I think it, you know, Yeah, definitely.
It would be it would be interesting.
Also, I just want to bring up one more which I kind of touched on earlier, which was to prove someone wrong or right.
To disprove could also be another one.
So there's a lot here.
But all right, here we go.
All right.
Wow.
This is huge.
All right.
We need to be strategic about this if we really want to expose the truth.
Right.
We need proof in order to discredit the claims that came out.
We will debunk everything they said.
Okay.
All right.
Good.
So we're really, here we are exposing the truth, exposing the truth.
You said we need to be strategic about this if we really want to expose the truth, meaning bring light to the facts.
Yeah.
Yes.
And then you said, right, we need proof in order to discredit the claims that came out.
And then you said, we will debunk everything they said.
Yeah.
And yeah, and I really admire and respect investigative reporters that get to the bottom of these stories.
We need them.
But in the US, they're getting a little less funded now, like investigative reporting.
We've talked about this on the show before.
There's the talking heads because it's entertaining.
They bring in the podcasters and then I don't know who they bring in like personalities and they just have opinion opinion, opinion all night, you know, on cnn, and there's less actual news.
Investigating like, go out and investigate a story, talk to sources, you know, that's what i want to see more of, but we're seeing less of it, unfortunately.
Yes, exactly.
All right, Lindsay, guys, check out episode 2609.
That was English grammar to show your nostalgia.
And Lindsay, what do you think about the takeaway for today?
Well, I think it's.
I mean, I don't know, it depends on your social circle, but I feel like I sometimes talk about like health research with friends.
This is an area where you can be a little safer than if you veer into politics.
You could end up in a tricky area.
But like talking about studies that have debunked prior understandings of things like the wine thing is kind of funny and interesting.
Right.
However.
However, now I think that you know health and politics, it's really like starting to mix together a lot.
So that can also lead to... I thought I found a topic that was just... You found a neutral topic?
No, you didn't.
Yeah.
No, but I mean, yeah, things like that.
But yeah, there's a lot of controversy about what's actually healthy and in politics and who believes what.
And so, yeah.
It's wild.
It's wild.
So try to find a topic that...
You could talk about scientific research that's continuing to come out.
That is not so hot button right.
Hot button is a bonus phrase for today.
It's not a hot button issue, meaning an issue that sends people off into their silos of belief, right.
Yeah.
Sports. sports some misconceptions about sports or right right right something about how movies are made or you know there's yeah there's something out there still i'm sure i'm sure there's still something to debunk guys don't you worry all right good stuff um good episode today michelle and i will see you back on the show soon you have a good time all right you too bye Thanks for listening to all ears English.
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