I used to periodically meet with a friend in Pittsburgh who ran a nonprofit that pushed to help improve the health of our population. She was one of the earlier people to promote eating real foods, not limiting fat, and actually caring about what we put in our mouth. She was locally pushing this message throughout the Pittsburgh region. A couple years back, we met for coffee in Aspinwall to discuss strategy and a local lecture series. We were both a bit distraught as we discussed the amount of chatter that has been overwhelming the internet and the typical avenues we venture to for health information. As she told me, “It’s like screaming into a tornado.” Not to mention, most of the info is wrong, overly simplified, or made to be captured in a simple graphic without promoting any semblance of thought process. Many serve mainly to pull the reader into buying some product, while other platforms like Facebook and Twitter serve to sell products, sell our information, and foment as much controversy as possible while sedating our brains and pushing consumerism camouflaged as important news and information…
The clutter extends far beyond these disastrous social media platforms. The medical research field has fallen victim to a similar overload of chatter. Papers are now published by the second, many to open access journals that will publish anything as long as the author is willing to pay the fees, sometimes ranging up to $5,000 a paper! I refuse to review for any of these journals as several have published papers that I had rejected in the past, merely shopping them around to reviewers until they are eventually accepted. The researcher, statistician, and publishing machine Dr. John Ioannidis warned us of many of these issues in 2005 with his paper Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.
While Dr. Ioannidis may have been a bit dramatic with the title, this begs the question: If the peer-reviewed scientific research field is producing false research, where does that leave the watered-down snippets of health information circulating around the internet in a tornado-like fashion? What are we to believe when this tornado encircles us, inundating us with nearly incomprehensible chatter?
We, of course, go to a place of safety. But where is this shelter? Well, the first step is: 1. Remove ourselves from the conversation. I know, I know, but what if I miss something?!?! There is so much going on I am told I cannot miss a minute of it!
And no, this does not mean to put our heads in the sand, but rather decrease the amount of info that inundates us and focus on certain topics and sources instead. For instance, read one quality study, not the sensationalized highlights of 50.
While social media has been set up to make us feel like we are missing extremely important information at any moment if we are not continuously plugged in, the truth cannot be further from this, especially when it comes to our health. As anyone well-versed in this field knows, the last 30 years of diet and exercise research has been a bit subpar. Take for instance exercise research and hypertrophy training and the barrage of exercise recommendations from some of our national groups. If you take what my brother taught me in seventh grade and provided me no new information for the past 20 plus years, most of the research produced by Schoenfeld confirms all of these strategies (though we still do not even know for sure what causes hypertrophy). I could have avoided the circuit training, machine lifts, incorrect rep schemes, and years of misdirection had I simply ignored these studies and consensus reports (oh, and they keep coming and, yes, they are often funded by certain unnamed companies that happen to produce exercise machines for circuit training). This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep up with the exercise research literature, because there have certainly been some gems in the last couple years, but if we miss an hour, day, week, or month or studies paraded on social media, we will be alright.
And this is of course ignoring all of the cesspool of dumpster-fire epidemiology studies that have set the entire fields of nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle research back by several decades (yes, breast cancer and dietary fat we are talking about you). These studies, which have been thoroughly discredited a million times over, continue to produce social media and news unworthy headlines that X, Y, and Z causes this that or the next, when in reality 99.9999999999% of these reports describe coincidental, spurious, and weak associations.
And while we are on the topic of social media, 2. Know the agenda of your sources. Any sites profiting from add revenue and trying to sell us products have to go. Deeply read many of the above-mentioned epidemiology studies and you will find things like the Harvard group placating their funders and continuing to kick awake the decaying mummy of their horrendous initial population studies (please just let the mummy die in peace!), the Adventists and PETA members pushing any diet that avoids animals, the non-lifters pushing poorly done and, unsurprisingly, negative “exercise” studies, the CSPI and Michael Gregor pretending to be a group of researchers and physicians pushing a health message yet whom are very clearly animal rights groups camouflaging this nutritional orthodoxy as a health message. This is not to say these studies or sources cannot provide any valuable information, but, much like the nightly news, it’s a fool’s errand to think you can masterfully sort through the rubble to find a rare gem. Better to avoid the rubble in the first place and let it join in the dumpster fire of so many other terrible sources of “science.”
3. Consider the medium. Last but not least is an area where many of us, like myself in the past, do not even consider. The media source, i.e. technology, that is presenting us this information cannot be underestimated. Marshall McLuhan told us decades ago that “The medium is the message.” Neil Postman thoroughly warned us of this in – believe it or not – 1984, when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. Some media are clearly best at entertaining (TV and video), some at stoking controversy (social media, Twitter, Facebook) and others at creating a bizarre popularity contest (image-based social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook). Let’s not pretend these are media where we go to learn, lest again we find ourselves sorting through the rubble to find that one gem of knowledge. The only reasonable choice is to avoid the rubble, and when in doubt, focus on those sources well-versed for allowing us to think deeply and contemplate (book, long-form article, and manuscript reading).
The Age of Information has overwhelmed us with a cloud of clutter, and simply attempting to think clearly in this requires an immense amount of time and energy. The only solution is addition by subtraction. I continue to focus on books and longer reads. This activity in itself requires me to think deeply on the topics, avoid being swayed by advertisements, and forces my brain to dig deeper as opposed to being assaulted by a Gatling gun spewing its rapid machine gun fire of information. I may miss a study or two, a random interesting blog post, or a funny and entertaining tweet, but I avoid millions of duds and time sinks that serve only to waste my mental and physical energy and cannibalize time I can be spending with my family and friends – a limited commodity.
Thinking Clearly – Distinguishing Amusement from Everything else
I love Fast and the Furious movies (minus the seventh edition which was even too ridiculous for me). I love John Wick. I love Daniel Craig in James Bond, particularly Casino Royale. I love these movies so much that I play them in my garage gym while I work out in front of the only TV in our house. They are a great form of entertainment!
But that’s it. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, but compartmentalizing those things in my life that are clearly entertainment and those that are not has largely helped me navigate the cluster of information that bombards me every day.
Politics, religion, philosophy, (real) history, medicine, research, and other important topics are not entertainment. Like Maximus launching his sword at the table where the local elite were sitting, and then yelling “Are you not entertained,” I realize just how overwhelming this push for entertainment has been. Though in all fairness, I was very entertained by Gladiator and love that movie. This realization has led me to understand the importance of reading books and approaching important topics as deeply as possible – and this is only possible through media that allow deep thought. Again, “The medium is the message.” They may be a bit boring at times, but these topics are not entertainment and some extra concentration is required.
I play the movies above – i.e., watch TV – while working out. I don’t confuse them with important topics or TV as a vital task. I recently had someone ask what I do with my daughter since we do not have a TV to watch. Apparently, she never considered the importance of reading to children, playing games with them, building things, and tending gardens with them. I also no longer go to Twitter, Facebook or other entertainment sites to get serious information. I like entertainment, but a line in the sand must be drawn. Neil Postman was well ahead of this in 1984 when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, and nowadays entertainment has become even more pervasive and difficult to isolate from anything of importance.
The medium is in fact the message. But knowing this allows us to control the medium.
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