In 1932 a wealthy American golfer named Eben Byers died, and they buried him in a coffin lined with lead.
The lead was not decorative. His bones had turned radioactive enough to be a hazard to anyone standing near them.
A few years earlier Byers had hurt his arm, and his doctor recommended a fashionable tonic called Radithor: radium dissolved in water, sold openly as a health drink, promising energy, vigour and a sunnier disposition. This was no backstreet con. Radium was the wonder of the age. It glowed. It was modern. Clinics offered radium cures, shops sold radium cosmetics, and the well-to-do drank it by the bottle because the advertising, and a good many physicians, swore it was marvellous for the constitution.
Byers believed them. He felt wonderful, which is exactly how these stories begin. He drank close to fourteen hundred bottles.
Then his jaw began to come away. Holes opened in his skull. The Wall Street Journal, with the bleak economy of a great headline, reported that the radium water had worked fine until his jaw came off.
Hold onto this part. Nobody forced it down him. He sought it out, paid a premium for it, and counted himself among the health-conscious. He did his best with the very best information money could buy. That is what killed him.
Byers was the careful one. The early adopter. The man who paid more and tried harder than everyone else to do right by his health. That is who this happens to.
We still buy vitality by the bottle. We still mistake confidence for evidence, and a glow for proof.
Go and look at the most confident health claim in your own kitchen. Byers found his every bit as convincing.