Health And Reading Comprehension
Why a basic skill lost on many might be steering the conversation the wrong way on health and fitness
Good Afternoon!
I hope everybody had an amazing Thanksgiving.
Reading comprehension is (generally) defined as “the ability to extract meaning from a written text, prior knowledge, and analysis to understand and integrate it into what’s already known.”
Too many readers today lack this skill or have thrown it to the wind to satisfy their already-gorged dopamine receptors.
This is a problem with many facets, but a particularly scary one for health and fitness information.
Here’s why that matters:
Newsletter Summary:
Exploring the shift away from direct news consumption and toward the second-order-influencer pathway
The pitfalls of misreading and misjudging health news (and examples of it)
One quote to start December strong
Second Order Influencer News and Reading Comprehension
By today’s standards, “Web1” and “Web2” were boring.
By that, I mean that the novelty of Google searching any bit of information in the world you wanted to know (Web1) and talking about that information with random strangers on message boards, social media, or blogs (Web2) has worn off.
And it’s worn off hard.
Now, in Web3 — the age of influencers, affiliate marketers, AI, and meme evolution — people don’t consume information via Google Search, clicking, and sitting and reading for 5-10 minutes.
(If you know anyone who STILL does this, they’d probably be my ideal subscriber, so please share this with them!)
Most would rather ask a Chatbot — many of which aggregate their information from message boards and faulty sourcing — what the latest research on Topic X is.
Or they’ll turn to a podcast episode from their favorite guru.
Or worst of all — they’ll see a clip of something deemed notable by a predatory algorithm recycled onto their social media timeline and think from sheer views, clicks, and reposts that it’s indisputably true.
This is what I call Second Order Influencer News (SOIN).
Media companies and social platforms have gamified “influencing” — the practice of accumulating views and followers to monetize your social media page with sponsored products, personal branding and offerings, and affiliate partnerships — to capitalize on more users spending more time on their platforms.
Ultimately, the social media companies are the big winners of Web2 and are still seeing their gains realized in Web3, thanks to podcasters, clickbaiters, and get-rich-quickers all capturing their audience’s attention span.
Now, the news doesn’t originate (or at least it doesn’t feel like it does) from the scientific papers, stories on the ground, or word-of-mouth like it used to.
It comes from the viral post, the much-shared podcast episode or clip, or the guru’s caption on his video.
Influencers on health and fitness usually hold some sort of doctorate or credential, if they haven’t scaled a company and made a major exit. During the pandemic, when everyone was on their phones, it seems that was all that was needed for people to believe just about anything they said.
Andrew Huberman, Paul Saladino, and Bryan Johnson are a few names that come to mind.
This isn’t to say that everything they say is objectively wrong. It just needs context a lot of the time.
Much of the criticism they receive — rightfully so — is for cherry-picking scientific studies, reporting health news and factoids that support their confirmation bias, and previous claims.
I think we, as consumers of news, can be better at discerning what’s important and not take every tweet or post from them as the Health Bible.
That is, if any of us have the attention span or capacity to fact-check.
Missing the Mark with Context
Context matters.
A headline-summation of a study that says “Stevia could hold untapped potential to fight cancer” leaves out important facts:
The cancer cells from the study were ex vivo (or not existing in a living organism)
The Stevia was fermented with isolated bacteria from banana leaves
Trials on this fringe type of therapy haven’t even begun in mice yet
However, due to the lack of patience most readers have these days, a headline like that might prompt someone to switch their sugar in their coffee to Stevia altogether.
Things like this happen far too often because a struggling media machine needs clicks, and readers don’t care to skim through the finer details.
Take a wildly circulated misquote from the president earlier this year.
In the back-and-forth debate about tariffs on imported goods, a viral tweet was circulated by anonymous X accounts with millions of followers, claiming that tariffs would be postponed for five days, which caused the markets to rally.
Someone with the presence of mind to confirm whether or not the information was real quickly got to the bottom of it, but not before the tweet was deleted and a blame game about who spread the misinformation started.
Misreading and misreporting this news had real consequences. In just hours, the stock market had a $5 trillion swing. $2.4 trillion gained after the headline, $2.5 trillion lost after it was debunked.
Now imagine if this happened with some health news.
If someone spread a fake headline about poison in one of our most commonly consumed foods, and it spread like wildfire, imagine the downstream chaos that would come from that.
It seems most health information consumers are a bit more responsible about fact-checking, but it’s still jarring how many people believe Bluetooth headphones are “microwaving your brain.”
One Quote To Start December Strong
“The year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us”
The long and short of this afternoon’s newsletter is that you need to hold on to your ability to read and exercise skepticism at every turn.
Everyone is trying to sell you something.
A product, a belief system, a newsletter (wink wink), or some sort of warped idea about reality, they think they can profit from.
You don’t have to listen to me, either.
But you’d probably be an all-around better person if you read and researched more.
Have an amazing weekend.