đĄ You are what you eat
Intersection #2 â the intersection of food, information, and diet: optimising your input.
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âYou are what you eat.â
Have you heard that before? Well, either way, now that you have, think about it â and then letâs talk about it. Itâs very true â literally. We donât normally (and actively) think about it, but what we eat actually gets incorporated into our bodies.
If youâre super-curious about it, you might be able to figure out where each piece goes and what it does. For example, if youâre having a chicken salad, where do those proteins go? How about the carbohydrates or the lipids?
This, if possible, gives you a better understanding of the importance of caring more about what you eat. Your body is actually being reconstructed [to some extent] by the stuff you eat. Even though figuring out where all these nutrients go isnât impossible, itâs not that easy for most of us, and if itâs not easy, thereâs a good chance we wonât do it â âcause weâre inherently lazy [af] â surprise!
But with the advances in technology, whoâs to say itâs not possible in the next 5-7 years? Maybe even sooner. We do have similar [non-invasive] devices with more specific functionalities, such as FreeStyle Libre, which measures blood glucose almost in real-time, and you can literally see the effect something you just ate has on your body â specifically, on your blood glucose. Knowing this, and experimenting with it, can make you aware of the instant effect and therefore affect your decision-making in terms of what to eat. Two sips of coke, and you see the spike in your blood glucose in minutes⌠Now, the next time, youâll think twice before you open that second can if you know what high blood glucose can do to your health.
Now, think about what non-invasive health monitoring products can do for you â and your [mental] health. For example, Apple Watch measures your blood oxygen or detects if you fall or your heart rate. This can have a profound impact on how we understand our bodies.
We donât think about it, but itâs interesting how we know whatâs happening miles away in different parts of the world in real-time, but we donât know whatâs happening less than a foot away â inside our bodies.
When we can monitor our bodies in real-time and receive all these pieces of data, we canât go back to not knowing. Itâs like one of those concepts weâll never have to deal with it again, like getting lost. If youâre old enough, you remember the 1980s or 1990s, when you had to go somewhere for the first time, and youâd get lost, even with a [paper] map. Now, this whole concept is outdated because we have smartphones with built-in GPS and 4G/5G connectivity. So you donât get lost; you just explore with no fear of getting lost. In fact, you canât not know your location!
Now, letâs come back to the effects of this constant monitoring of your food input. If youâre given the tool that shows you what eating that burger or drinking that whiskey does to your health in real-time, would you still eat it? If you could see that the preservatives used in that food are on their way to ruin your liver, and you could see that your liver health was down to 94% instead of 100% it was two months ago, would you still keep eating that? Ok, yes, maybe, but how about constantly every day? Donât you check your iPhoneâs battery health in the settings menu?! Think your body parts like that.
We know this intuitively â well, kind of â but a bad night of sleep or a certain food can ruin your whole day, and being able to monitor your body in real-time can give you invaluable data on how youâre running your body. Then you can make informed decisions on what affects your body â and your health.
Information Diet & Your Bubble
Now, letâs apply the same thinking to your information diet. Youâre not just what you eat, but youâre what you consume: all the data, information, wisdom, and experiences you have shapes your understanding of the world as well as the effects they have on your health â both physical and mental.
Hereâs an example: if you lived in a country where it did not allow international travel, had no open internet, one tv channel, and one newspaper, and all you were allowed to do was either being a farmer or working in a mine, not only you wouldnât know about SpaceX or Bitcoin, you wouldnât know if thereâs life outside the walls of your country.
What if the government decided that it didnât like long hair and told you all your life from every possible channel (the TV, the newsletter, the family and friends) that long hair caused a disease that caused death. What if all you knew and saw was people with shaved heads? Having long hair would not be an option anymore. It wouldnât even be a possibility. Thereâs a good chance that you wouldnât even be aware of the fact that your hair can grow longer than 3mm.
See, the information diet in your bubble determines a lot more than you think. Itâs the power of media. Thatâs why authoritarianism thrives on propaganda and control of the media.
We are who we are because weâre able to have a variety of inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. For example, we can decide whether to consume CNN, BBC or Breitbart â or Twitter or Facebook content. And now, they shape our world; by controlling our information input.
Having this in mind while thinking about how each of these outlets has its own agenda makes you think twice before consuming any content on any platform, but if you add real-time monitoring of the effects of what you consume on your body and mind, as well as its accuracy⌠itâs a game-changer.
Letâs break it down a little:
platforms have agenda: more eyeballs (attention), more active users, more ads, more expensive ads, more accurate ads
to get more eyeballs (and attention), more polarising/dividing/extreme content does better
therefore, the platforms win when thereâs more controversy
so they optimise for controversy to win while the users lose in terms of time, attention, mental and physical health.
Thatâs not new; not an isolated event either. Go to 2:20 and listen to Kanye & Jay-ZâŚ
âNo one knows what it means, but itâs provocative; it gets the people goingâŚâ
That pretty much sums it up.
Thinking Long-term
But now think this: we all know [and probably experienced] the effects of anxiety or stress caused by a situation in a moment in time; maybe a bad piece of news or confronted for something we did not expect⌠We all know the feeling of our hearts pounding in our chest or sweating like crazy as a result of that. We also know that constant or high stress is pretty much a risk factor in any health condition. To be exact, we know [many of] the long-term effects, can we hardly attribute them to a specific thing in the long run. What do I mean by that?
If youâre an Apple Watch owner (or any wearable that shows your real-time heart rate), you can see it goes up and down in different situations. But what about the smaller situations when you donât notice that little change or the patterns when scrolling through Twitter or Instagram? Now, try to expand this to more than just heart rate. What if you could measure other things like your attention or dopamine or serotonin levels and understand them your body [or yourself really] better while scrolling Facebook.
Imagine understanding this as the fact [with data] that scrolling Instagram for more than 15 minutes makes you 28% more sad or 10 minutes of Twitter makes you 36% angrier⌠And if thereâs enough longitudinal data, we can figure out the long-term effects of platforms and the effects of different content creators on different platforms. These pieces of data can profoundly impact our information diet. Moreover, it will [probably] make us more selective of what we decide to pay attention to.
And Iâm not even gonna get into having these data sets verifiable on the blockchain; thatâs a whole other article in itself.
All that being said, even though right now we donât have the equipment and the analytics of knowing all these data points, we do have some of them and understanding the big picture and the direction of the future weâre heading into, itâs a good practice trying to manage or optimise our current inputs based on our current understandings and the stuff we actually knowâŚ
Conclusion
This post was not about how you should curate your information diet or what to read or listen to. Thatâs probably for another intersection.
In this post, my main goal was to bring this whole concept of information diet to your attention. Maybe put this on the back of your mind that the same way our body is constantly being reconstructed from what we eat, our mind and our understanding of our world heavily depends on the information weâre exposed to.
Just being aware of that isnât enough, but itâs a good first step in a healthier information diet â maybe until we can better measure the real-time and long-term effects of information on our health.
* This post was inspired by Balaji Srinivasanâs interview on Invest Like the Best podcast.
Bonus
Read this on David Perellâs newsletter, and itâs stuck with me for over a week.
âThe Wisdom of Imitation
I once met a painting coach who tells students to copy their favourite artists.
At first, students resist.
In response, the coach tells them to listen for friction. âDo you hear that resistance? Itâs the whisper of your unique style.â
Through imitation, we discover our voice.
I did relate to this⌠very much so.