I was a recent guest on an episode of the Behavioral Observations podcast: Nick Green wants to get you moving.
We talked all things BehaviorFit, health, and fitness.
One theme emerged: We live in a world of information overload.
A “data deluge”…(all the credit goes to my colleague Triton Ong for introducing this phrase to me)
Information coming at you all the time like a fire hydrant set on full blast. Except your fire hydrants are never-ending notifications, refreshed news feeds, and anytime you look at a smart device.
It becomes difficult to figure out what information makes the most sense for you, and where you are at on your health journey.
WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES, SO…
Say what you want about the medium, but this is how we get our information. It’s great, not perfect, but it’s what we got.
Some experts say to curate your feed. Get rid of the junk. Turning down the fire hydrant if you will.
After all, you wouldn’t keep subscribing and paying for the same junk magazines would you?
[Have you found Facebook’s 30-day snooze alarm recently?!?! What a great feature!]
So now that you have your feed full of the stuff that you want to see, how do you make sense of the things that you are reading?!?!
This post supplements last month’s article: Use the Internet?
Last month, I showed you how to be critical of why most health research doesn’t matter to individual consumers. This month I am sharing the trends I have seen while reading so many health blogs…allowing you to better navigate everything that you read, click, and consume.
NAVIGATING THE SOCIAL MEDIA SEAS…
How do you determine which articles are right? wrong? fake news? real news? Or just poorly written up?
Are you falling prey to headlines? The photo? A debate between two online trolls? Is the message clear and easy to follow?
You can call them tips, tricks, distractions, strategies, or marketing tools, knowing them allows you to be an educated reader and evaluate what you are ingesting on a daily basis.
Being healthy is hard enough. Let alone, falling prey to certain aspects of articles that may waste your time and set you up failure.
Here are 10 features of health blogs that may distract us from the real takeaway from any study:
- The journalist uses a catchy headline. This is our world today, but often the title implies something more than it is, or something completely unrelated (think click bait). Think about the article I found for last month’s article: “A glass of wine after work may be good for your brain, according to science.” Catchy right?
- The article has a “cool” picture. Using the same article above, a photo from the NBC show “Parks & Recreation” was in the wine after work article… a cross-marketing tactic perhaps?
- The article opens with a general statement from the research article itself. Just boring pseudo-plagiarism is you ask me…
- There is some odd interview with one of other authors of the research article. Was this a phone call, Skype chat, in person interview? Who knows…How was this information collected?
- The information about the research is filled with jargon that the average reader will not understand. Unless the article is your specialty, then you are not really going to understand what the research is about. I only feel comfortable with the gist of what the articles are about only because I have been professional student for the past 5 years.
- The original research article is rarely cited (or hyperlinked to). This is important because some scientific findings are obscure…just take us to the data already!!!
- The blog has hyperlinks to other pages on that company’s website. When you click the hyperlinks, you never get to an original source. This is a common strategy that websites use to increase website traffic on that site. We all do it, I did it above with last month’s blog.
- The hyperlinks in the article link to other dense research articles that nobody has time to critically evaluate. Most of the time you leave with whatever the headline says. Again, going back to the original problems noted in last month’s article.
- The implication is a cause-and-effect relationship for you to change your behavior. With last month’s blog example, if you drink wine regularly, then your brain will be ok. Most research talks about correlations, not cause-and-effect. We want cause-and-effect findings.
- The research is done with animals, leaving the finding open to interpretation for humans. Self explanatory.
These are some of the features that stuck out to me after reading health blogs over the past 5 years. Not all have these 10, some have none.
If anything, you can now view articles through this BehaviorFit lens.
Keep moving,
—Nick
