Multi-vitamins are a 28 billion dollar industry and is growing fast among people of all different ages. There are thousands of different brands that claim to help people live a healthier lifestyle but there is actually no evidence that they actually work according to Marion Nestle who is a nutritionist. Many people already get their required minerals and nutrients from food alone. Vitamins for these people could actually be dangerous because it is not healthy to exceed daily limits for some vitamins. ConsumerLab.com actually tested 60 different multivitamins and found that a third of the labels were misleading and that the vitamins contained higher doses than the bottle read. Vitamins can help people who have serious health problems but for the average person, they are most likely wasting their money.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/02/econundrums-do-vitamin-supplements-work

Planes used in World War II were continually getting shot down by German anti-aircraft machines. In order to help prevent this, the RAF decided to put extra armor on the planes that returned. The RAF thought it would be simple because they would just look at the areas that were shot the most and put extra armor in those places. A Hungarian mathematician name Abraham Wald explained how they were completely wrong. His reasoning was that it would be smarter to put extra armor on the areas that were shot the least because the planes that were shot in those areas were the ones that never returned.

The Counterintuitive World

In the 1960’s Walter Michel performed a psychology test on nursery school students. He would place a marshmallow in front of the child and said he could have that marshmallow or if he could save it for 15 minutes the child would receive another one. The children who waited for the entire 15 minutes generally went on to have more successful lives than the children who ate the marshmallow upon receiving it. A science graduate from the University of Rochester name Celeste Kidd believed that the test didn’t actually test a child’s patience but actually the child’s trust in the adult. Kidd conducted her own test to see if what she thought was true and to her surprise she was. Kidd’s test composed of giving children crayons or stickers and telling them they could use them or wait for better art supplies or bigger stickers. For half of the children, Kidd kept her promise and for the other half she didn’t. After performing this test, the children were given the marshmallow test and the kids who received the better supplies and stickers had results of 9 out of 14 waiting the full 15 minutes compared to the kids who were lied to whose results yielded only 1 out of 14 waiting the 15 minutes. This shows that patience in children can be taught by persuading them that it is worth it to wait.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-17/what-does-the-marshmallow-test-actually-test