Use the Internet? Here’s Why You Can Ignore Most Health Research, Social Media, and My Advice

6-minutes Abs! Lose the baby weight now! Chocolate is good for your health! Wine is good for your brain! Gimme that smart pill!

Headlines and more headlines…ugh.

…at least we can all agree that good health is good and bad health is bad.

For the most part, we can control our health. We battle through accumulating resources related to time, energy, and available health options. We take matters into our own hands (buying gym memberships, learning to cook better). If we are lucky, sometimes our employers provide support like offering discounted gym memberships or providing healthy lunches for us.

Maybe this is where the future is headed…

After all, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan employees may soon have the best health benefits yet to be seen. The big wigs of these three companies, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon, want to combine forces to improve healthcare for their employees.

I am not an economist or pretend to be on TV, but this sounds like a good idea for most Americans. Reducing costs, cutting out middlemen, with an end goal of making healthcare affordable and accessible to more people. Hopefully, the merger is successful and sends a ripple effect to the rest of the world.

Either way, our health still relies on how effectively we change our behavior.

Think of it like this:

• Getting cheaper health insurance does not mean that you will go to the gym more
• Going to the doctor more often does not mean that you will comply with doctor’s orders
• Having a prescription does not mean you that you will take it as often as you should

Large policy changes help, but health still comes down to individual behavior change.

Behold my words as I yell from the Ivory Tower!!!

I get it. I have not been in the “real world” for some time now. C’mon Nick, what do YOU know!!! Over the past 5 years, I have slowly walked up the steps of the academic ivory tower. Earning a master’s degree and now, which my wife jokes, ¾ of a PhD.

My journey is almost complete.

I don’t pretend to know it all, but I acknowledge that I do not live in a vacuum.

Along the way, I have attempted to solve real world problems and figure out what information people really need.

The fact of the matter is this: the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know anything.

Watch out for people that think they have all the answers!

I don’t know anything…

I refined what I know about health and the science of human behavior. But, the challenge I found in academia is this:

• What is it that people really need to know?

and

• What can they do about it TODAY!?!?

What I do know…

I know that creating BehaviorFit while in school was the best decision I could have made. It gave me the benefit of learning the particulars of health and behavioral research while checking in with society. Testing ideas out, speaking, consulting, asking for feedback.

I think that I am doing an okay job with it.

But I digress…

Through my quest of reading and writing more than the average bear, I have to come to this conclusion:

MOST HEALTH RESEARCH DOESN’T MATTER!

…to you!

The individual. YOU are a person. YOU are not an experimental group. YOU are NOT a control group. YOUR world is a constantly changing day-to-day, hour-by-hour.

Research does not reflect real life.

I mean, what can YOU really take away from large research studies in the first place. They are complicated, very controlled, use lots of statistics and freakin’ hard to read.

Nobody ain’t got time for that…unless you are a full-time student and THAT is WHAT you DO!

But, group studies are good

Yes, big public health studies benefit us all by telling us to: wash hands during flu season, get our kids vaccinated, avoid too much sunlight if you have light skin, and my favorite, sit less and move more (here is my interpretation of the sitting issue)

All that stuff. Those studies, researchers, and professionals will always be needed.

We need to know what to do during the next health epidemic.

These studies are fantastic for what they are. Large, macro-level views of health, but offer no real-time cause-and-effect analysis for you, the individual, for your daily life.

Health and fitness tips come in various forms today

Just take a look at any of your social media feeds. My feed is saturated with these sorts of posts:

We are flooded with information every day. What do we do with it? What is right, wrong, useful, and only created to get a reaction? I would go with Brett’s Skiiing analysis for sure.

Do we take the attention-grabbing headline and run with it?

(kind of like the title of this blog…I hooked you in, hopefully you made it this far into the article)

We don’t have time to understand everything, but we think we do.

The problems with health advice and headlines

A problem emerges when blogs are loaded with very specific risk-factor studies which merge the worlds of health and human behavior.

(which almost seems like every health article nowadays)

We often take a headline for, as my professor Dr. Iser “Willie” DeLeon puts it: “a fact-in-the-bag.”

You can click around the Health section on Google News and find these catchy headlines instantly. Here is what I found (on 2/3/18) in less than 10 seconds:

“A glass of wine after work may be good for your brain, according to science”

Sounds sexy right! A good way to rationalize your drinking problem?!?! What’s that, you are wine drinker too? Even better! And you like scientific things? Homerun!

The idea is this:

“If I drink wine after work, then this will cause my brain to be healthier in the long run.”

Just look at the title again, it has the phrase “…may be good”, this does not mean that it will be good for your brain.

But if you dig deeper (which took me, the educated smart guy, 20 minutes to find the actual research report, read it, and make sense of it; again, nobody ain’t got time for that), you run into several issues with the study:

1. The study was done on rats
2. The study found associations not causes (more on that below)
3. The study is only about one variable (alcohol)
4. The rats did not drink after work, they were day drinking

I took the time to look up the article and found these graphs and figures:

How again are you going to relate these images to happy hour?

The indirect message so far is to be cautious about what you read and that most findings are way complicated than they seem.

[Side note: I have nothing against this wine article or website. They are in the business of writing things, to drive traffic, and sell ads, and make money. Their focus is not on helping out the individual reader.]

An Academic Robin Hood At Your Service

Because I have the opportunity to think about these issues in health and research, I want to give back to the people. The information I learn should not be limited to me, but accessible to all.

This article is not about me. It is about you, the reader. The individual that wants to do good for their health now, and in the future.

In a way, during my journey, I see myself more as an Academic Robin Hood. Working on the inside, infiltrating the man, robbing the ivory tower of its knowledge, and bringing it back the people!

Back to the knowledge thievery…

So how do we read the internet?

Put on Your Skeptic Hat and Notice 3 Problems

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic, has a Baloney Detection Kit which is a toolbox that helps us evaluate the good, the bad, and the ridiculous. Aptly named, the “kit” detects baloney that people believe. Shermer looks for truth in science, not relying on what on humans say about things.

We can use some of his tools everyday as we scroll up through our lives.

By using the Baloney Detection Kit, we can avoid making up bad rules (“wine after work is good for our brain”) for ourselves to follow. We spend so much time scrolling up on our smart phones that we should almost be in the business of evaluating all things on our screens.

Our internet consumption pattern should look like this:

Read an article. Evaluate the article.

Read an article. Evaluate the article.

Read an article. Evaluate the article.

But in reality, it probably looks something like this:

See catchy photo.

Read part of a headline.

Swipe to next article

Read half a headline.

See catchy photo and read part of headline.

Read half an article.

Leave the internet more confused than we started…

[Behavioral Science Factoid: This is an important exercise because, from a behavioral perspective, we learn things from either doing the things themselves (I will not drink 2 glasses of wine after work because I get a hangover the next day) or following certain rules (I will not drink after work because I need to drive home too). Read more about following behavioral rules in my BehaviorFit Manifesto.]

Most health things we learn about on the interwebs boil down to 3 problems.

As we address these problems, let’s keep using our example of drinking wine after work.

Problem 1: Correlation does not equal causation

This is one of the hallmarks in scientific thinking. Just because two things go together does not mean that one causes the other. Check out the fun things that Spurious Correlations does:

As the number of movies that Nicolas Cage stars in increases, so does the number of deaths by drowning. (The red and black lines move together).

Does that mean that we make Nic Cage stop starring in movies? Well, maybe…but other reasons.

Cage does not cause drowning deaths. So, the idea is the same for most health findings. Drinking wine after work does not cause improved brain function.

Problem 2: People take health claims as cause

The real finding is this: Drinking wine is associated with an improvement in brain health

What people think: If I drink wine, then my brain health will improve.

Problem 3: People forget they don’t live in a controlled lab.

The wine study was conducted in a lab, with rats, on very specific diet, raised a very particular way, who had minimal change in their lives.

Our lives are not controlled lab studies. Among all things, you eat different things every day, have various tolerances to alcohol, have jobs, raise kids and live across the globe. Things are different.

Now, let’s map this onto the real world.

Do you think reading this headline gives you the license to continue or start drinking wine after work? For some, unfortunately, it probably does. That’s the theme of this article. Enough with the headlines already!

At this point, I have described some issues with health advice and gone after a few problems…

So, how do we buck the system?

Be your own experiment!

This is the challenge that we all face. How do find order in our chaotic days? Like filters we use on Facebook and Instagram, we need one to show how our health and fitness is caused by our actions and the environment around us.

Enter behavior analysis.

Behavior analysis uses data to track the things we do. It is our cause-and-effect filter. If we track certain things, plug in some data, then order will be revealed…

[Sing with me now: “I can see clearly now, the chaos (rain) is gone…”]

This is largely the premise of last month’s blog, New Year’s Resolutions Stalled? We need a strategy to take data and figure out if life is headed where we want it to go.

I invented the acronym BSMGE that guides your own self-experimentation:

1. Brainstorm
2. Select
3. Measure
4. Goal
5. Evaluate

This process allows you to take any health idea, filter out the noise, make sense of it, give you guidance on your next steps, and provide you with the confidence on how to better live your day, week, month, year, and life.

…kinda like a Behavioral Swiss-army knife. It does a little bit of everything.

But, hey, what about the wine?!?!

Want to see how wine affects your brain health? You could start by tracking the number of glasses of wine you drink per night, how great you feel the next day, and some type of brain health metric. I am not even sure what that metric would be, but that is where you might start.

My advice is over…

We are inundated with health ideas, research, and bad advice. Whether any of it is right or wrong doesn’t really matter. What matters is how you apply that advice and figure out if it makes a meaningful difference in your life.

A little data, making a filter, can put a lot of this to rest.

Let’s say we do have better brains after drinking wine every day. Come 40 years down the road, you have this “healthy”, wine-soaked brain, now what? What are you doing with yourself? Bragging about how healthy your brain is? Or doing something more productive or fulfilling?

Let’s not confuse quantity of life with quality of life.

But then again, you can completely ignore my advice.

Come back next month, as I discuss how I evaluate these all-too-common trendy scientific posts.

Keep moving,

Nick

Reference:

Lundgaard, I., Wang, W., Eberhardt, A., Vinitsky, H. S., Reeves, B. C., Peng, S., … & Nedergaard, M. (2018). Beneficial effects of low alcohol exposure, but adverse effects of high alcohol intake on glymphatic function. Scientific reports, 8(1), 2246.

My team and I help people chip away at the health goals. If you want some help, check out what we do, and click the link.