The Information Diet is a work in progress since 2002 when the below sections were written. They are being revised by myself and a top Australian editor and will be available as a complete revised book later in 2006 or early 2007.
Please quote the author if using any of this material: that is, please respect my intellectual copyright
(Dr) Tim Metcalf
The Information Diet
by
Dr. Tim Metcalf
Preface
125 words
Towards the end of the twentieth century an information explosion occurred. In my field, medicine, there were suddenly six thousand journals filled with news and research results. This proved impossible to keep up with. Many people whose work relied upon a thorough knowledge of their discipline became greatly stressed by this trend. Their hard-working nature exposed them to a flood of information, too great for them to adsorb. Feelings of guilt and of being left behind, combined with new fears for safety, health and financial security, all compounded by the sudden introduction of information technologies made sensitive people prone to ill health. As I have both professional and personal experience of this new epidemic, I have written this book in the hope of limiting its spread.
Tim Metcalf
Brogo 2002
Contents
Introduction
Part One: Who Needs The Information Diet?
Part Two: Five Ways The Information Diet Can Help You.
Information and Food
Information and Fitness
Information and Finance
Information and Family and Friends
Information and Fear
Part Three: The Information Diet
Part Four: Feeling Better on The Information Diet
Further Reading
Introduction
Life in today’s Information Age is so intense that many of us are now suffering the effects of over-exposure to information and its newest technologies.
This book will help you identify the symptoms and sources of information excess in yourself and others, and will provide you with ways to combat them. The Information Diet will help improve your mental and physical health. Its effects will be substantially increased by combining it with sensible nutrition and exercise.
By following The Information Diet the reader will first learn to identify excessive information and the harm it is causing. Only then will it be possible to build a logical and individual diet that can be comfortably followed. That there will be long-term health benefits from adhering to The Information Diet is assured, but that this will be easy is not. Some readers will find they have already made some changes in their day, others that they don’t need to. Most will find the diet requires effort, especially early on. We are more deeply embroiled in the Information Age than we might like to think.
The Information Diet is not about getting rid of information and information technology from your life. It is about learning to find a balance between its demands and the demands of the remainder of the existence you are entitled to.
The Information Diet is divided into four easily absorbed parts, and has been written with its own tenets in mind. The reader will find few statistics, and the text divided into easily readable sections. A bibliography at the end of the book lists my choice of the most useful of the many resources available for further reading.
Dr Tim Metcalf
Brogo 2004
Part One
Who Needs The Information Diet?
Contents
Introduction
Why The Information Diet?
Do I really need The Information Diet?
What symptoms tell me I need The Information Diet?
What is information?
IT the mind tool
The problem of time
The problem of technological advance
Information and people
The Information Diet is flexible
The Information Diet may reveal hidden problems
Life in a cave?
Who Needs The Information Diet?
Introduction
No matter who you are, too much information can make you sick.
Part One of this book will show you how The Information Diet can improve your wellbeing, even if you believe your health to be good. It will teach you to identify potentially harmful information and the symptoms it causes. The happy effects of the diet, especially in the reduction of stress and depression, will be explained. The paradox of being better informed with less information will be solved, and the possibility of a more focussed and satisfying life in this Information Age will be realised.
Why the Information Diet?
A vast increase in information itself, as well as its social power, has lead to rapid change in people’s working lives and to the structure of the economy. There are two reasons why we should be concerned. Firstly, the rate of change is making it increasingly difficult for people to keep up the pace required of them. Secondly, this change is being effected with tools that are much more precise and orderly than the humans they are working for. The end products of these changes are more often than not of no special human or social value. That they often detract from our wellbeing, we shall soon see.
Unfortunately we have never had control over ourselves, or our tools. For every person who proclaims the gains of the new technology, there is another whom insists that the psychological losses are too great to justify its existence. In a society already far removed from nature we are intruding even further upon ordinary human interactions. We are constructing an ever more sophisticated ‘interface’, behind which people are becoming ever more isolated.
In the Information Age many people, from those at the top of the information society workforce to those living traditional lives in remote villages, have been rapidly affected by new applications of information and modern information technologies. As this has happened within a few decades, the change has occurred well within our average lifetime. Neither individuals, nor generations, have had time to adapt.
If we never stop to think about life we are likely to become unresponsive. We may lose our sense of responsibility to our own minds and bodies, as well as to those of others. We will continue to act without adequate consideration of the consequences to ourselves or to our social and natural environments. We will lose the time for those activities that waste time. Talking with friends, being in love, communing with nature and playing with children are all vital to our complete wellbeing. The Information Diet is designed to restore the time necessary for a satisfying and meaningful social existence.
Do I really need The Information Diet?
No information for a week. Easy? Can you unplug the TV and radio, read no newspapers or magazines, stay off the Internet and away from screens and printed material altogether for a second week?
No worries? No change? Perhaps you are right, and have no use for the Information Diet.
Feel better? You can benefit from following The Information Diet.
Find it hard? Can’t do it? Won’t consider it? The Information Diet can help you too.
If you would find it difficult to switch off from the Information Age for a week, but could do it if you had to, then The Information Diet will help improve your general wellbeing. If you know you are already feeling overwhelmed, or stressed, depressed, chronically tired or unwell, keep reading. The Information Diet will guide you gradually towards a comfortable balance between you and information and its technologies. It will help you regain control over your mind and body, and the space they need in which to flourish. It will do this gently, without trying to wrench you from the society in which you live.
What symptoms tell me I need The Information Diet?
The most common indicator that you are suffering overexposure to the Information Age is feeling under pressure for part or all of each day. Often this pressure carries over, across the weekends, and is ready and waiting the next day at home, school, or work. Victims may be continually anxious about being late to seemingly endless appointments, or be overwhelmed by the amount of paper and screen work piling up on their desk. Inevitably some of us respond with irritability, moodiness, angry words and actions, and unreliable performance. At home we fight with loved ones or withdraw to the passive security of a screen showing TV, DVD, games, the internet, electronic relationships, and other technology-based methods of obliterating time until the next day at work.
Physical discomforts caused by the new information technologies are as common as psychological ones. Their inappropriate use can lean our bodies toward postural pain or obesity. Eyes and joints may be strained and fitness fall. Headache is a very common symptom that often has complex causes and should be investigated thoroughly by registered health professionals if it will not go away. Typically it might involve tension in the muscles at the back of the neck and shoulders; arthritis in the neck; a need for eyeglasses when working at computer screens; difficulties with relationships at home, work, or both; major stress; clinical depression; chronic physical illness; or diseases of the brain.
Chronic stress is one of the most common, varied, difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat conditions that health care workers face. In addition there is a grey area between chronic stress and depression that sometimes makes them difficult to distinguish. When full blown it is easy to recognise that there is a problem in need of attention. I have seen it turn up as heart attacks, drug overdoses, epileptic fits, car accidents, premature babies and psychiatric illness.
According to repeated studies, a very large percentage of people in information societies, at least a third and probably more than half, will have at least a few of the symptoms of stress or depression for at least some of the time. Too many of these have progressed already to identifiable mental illness requiring treatment. Health care professionals are becoming overwhelmed by people who either have depression or are at risk of succumbing to it.
The relationship between stress and depression confirms not only the science but the feelings of health care workers from all fields. It is a very important relationship because early in 2000, the World Health Organisation announced that its projection of illness trends indicates that by 2020 approximately one fifth of the world’s population will suffer depression during their life. Its report concludes that the world economy will be severely affected.
The dire prediction of the WHO accords well with the day-to-day experience of many of those concerned with human welfare. More worrying still, these figures concern only depression. The legions of the acutely and chronically stressed, those with psychosomatic illness, victims and dependants of the depressed, and the plainly and simply unhappy are not included. Our response to this problem in the information age has seen some rather unhealthy ways to relieve stress: ways that may ultimately increase it.
Symptoms typical of excessive exposure to information and its technologies are listed below.
Mental symptoms of over-exposure.
- Losing interest, couldn’t be bothered, can’t hold all the facts together, too much guesswork, apathetic, bored.
- Absenteeism, lack of empathy or tolerance for other’s failings, angry at other people much of the time, feeling unfulfilled.
- Anxious, tense, nervous, overwrought, pressured, at your limit all the time, never get enough rest, cannot cope
- Life is meaningless, drug and alcohol overuse, relationship troubles, low libido, insomnia, , feelings of helplessness and inadequacy, have bad feelings and opinions about yourself.
- Feeling dull or flat, feel depressed most of the time, tearful about nothing, the world seems bleak and pointless, don’t care if you die, want to kill yourself.
Physical symptoms of over-exposure.
- Tired, run down, unfit, lethargic, not sleeping well, waking up tired.
- Headache and neck-ache, muscular tension and cramping, postural discomfort.
- Eye strain.
- Feeling ill all the time, frequent minor illnesses or accidents, frequent minor complaints but with nothing serious to find.
- Weight change, appetite change.
- Changes in bowel habit or menstruation.
- The side-effects of excessive drug and alcohol consumption.
- Feeling the need for many supplements to feel well or keep up with work.
- Premature death from any number of accident or illness related causes.
I recommend that the assessment of constant physical or mental symptoms includes a visit to an experienced and open-minded General Practitioner.
What is Information?
There is not a simple answer to this question. What ‘information’ is remains open to debate in academic circles. For the purpose of The Information Diet it includes anything we take into our minds, consciously or unconsciously, from any form of Information Technology. This includes television, radio, books, magazine, newspapers, the internet, screen games, computers and mobile phones*.
*( Footnote) Information is certainly more than this. There is suggested further reading for those who wish to explore the subject further in the bibliography.
The terms data, information, and knowledge are rather blurred, and are therefore interchangeable in everyday usage. Data, such as the price, date of cooking, and barcode on a loaf of bread, is checked by a shopper who wants information about the bread. This information will be added to other forms of information, such as what a fresh loaf feels like, what it smells like, what sort of mood our shopper is in, and their memories of who is baking or serving today. All this comes together as the knowledge our shopper uses to make the decision to shop somewhere else.
There is a rough hierarchy. Data is usually a number or a set of numbers, letters, or symbols. A computer bit, etched microscopically onto a silicon chip, is a tiny on-off switch. Millions of them store basic binary data: either as a 0 or as a 1. The raw data of all information technologies is based upon this 0 or 1 binary code. Data is often the word used for a higher level of the system, for example, words and numbers on the computer screen that describe the state of its operating system; or the names and addresses on a mailing list. However, the operations of tens of thousands of bits of data are required to build this screen picture, so that this higher level of data is also called information.
Information may describe anything from a list of oven temperatures to an entire book of recipes. But the recipes, and the ones you end up being good at, require much background human knowledge to create: your own, and that of many generations of cooks before you. A book is not enough to teach cooking: there must be shared knowledge and hands on work from other people.
Purists will argue, and rightly so, that the use and abuse of language, information, and information technologies are ancient properties of mankind; closely linked essential elements of what it is to be human. What is new is the tool we are using. It is so recently arrived, and so complex, that the vast majority of people have not had time to adapt to it. This is an Information Age not because there is information, but because of what is being done with that information.
IT the mind tool
IT (information technology) is the first of the human race’s tools that openly claims to affect our minds. It promises, and threatens, to affect the very way in which we think. Ultimately, we are told, it will change the course of evolution, and what it is to be human. There can be no resisting the enormous impact IT and the information age will have on our economy, philosophy, or history.
Information tells us that information is great. Information tells us that we want to be in the information age. IT is used to push the message hard. We are a consumer society; therefore we should consume. If we don’t, our economy will fall apart. Look how poor and disadvantaged is that 90% of the world’s population that doesn’t have information technology.
Change has always been part of our lives: change is history. In the information age however, our lives, and thus our notions of history are being altered subtly and too quickly for many people to adapt to. Information Technology is central to the accelerating rate of change. Mental distress is the too-widespread result.
Exciting though some of the potential applications of IT are, it is vital that we appreciate its relative novelty, its rapidity of assimilation into mainstream society, and its speedy acquisition of great economic power. This process has had insidious and wide-reaching consequences for human wellbeing.
As humans there are always times in our lives when one or more of our needs cannot be met. This too is natural, and we are psychologically and physically adapted to cope with it. In this information age two paradoxical things seem to be happening. On the one hand our basic physical needs can be met continuously, and on the other hand we are chronically deprived of many basic psychological needs. This situation is largely created and perpetuated by the commercial control of information. Commercial information tries to tell us what our needs actually are.
The precision of IT comes into conflict with several aspects of our natural minds. It is normal for us to have moods, thoughts, and feelings that may not seem rational, even to ourselves. We feel best when we have a feeling of control over our lives, however illusory that control may be. Autonomy and privacy are necessary for optimum psychological health. The opportunity to chat about anything to anyone is equally important: there are no rules for making friends. Information technology cannot ‘understand’ these properties of people, and so programmers must disregard them when using them to effect in the human world.
People often feel intruded upon by information. They may also feel that it compromises them socially. Much information we give or are given is not in our essential interest. It may lead us, directly or ultimately, to harmful choices. Talking face to face with other people is still the best way to find out about them and what they are trying to sell us.
Psychological information is frequently used to influence us without our explicit knowledge. It is used to bombard people with facts about themselves in carefully crafted advertisements, and with treatments for the stress that often results. ‘Human Resources’ departments suggest we are just that: quantifiable and controllable resources for the corporate world
People may react illogically to information, such as being angered by ‘junk mail’, or destroying warning signs. It is because of our long psychological evolution that we are not happy with the domination of information.
An essential part of human learning, making mistakes, is also in conflict with the information age. We learn by our mistakes. IT is supposed to eliminate them. Life is not a precise affair. It does not always work according to logic. IT, however, is extremely precise, and becoming even more so. This is wonderful for many technological applications, but where there is a direct interaction with humans this distinction creates problems. To complicate matters, the mistakes of IT cannot be identified by IT itself.
Work is an important natural attribute of humans. Human beings are naturally curious and inventive. They are sociable, and will work together for common benefit. In the information age it has been forgotten that computers have radically altered the way work is done. We do not need them to organise our work. Nor do we really need them to make so much work for us, only to benefit the consumer economy. This is poor justification for causing psychological distress on such a large scale.
The problem of time
The typical working day in the information society is filled with information about time.
You wake to an alarm clock, checking what it says a few times in drowsy disbelief. You get up, stumble into the kitchen, check the wall and microwave clock and put on the kettle. You dress, put on your watch, checking it is right, and have breakfast. The TV and radio constantly update you on the time. You hop in the car, checking the time on its clock, and keep one eye on the speedometer whilst listening to more radio. You park at the railway station, and wait for the train, checking your watch and the platform clock repeatedly to see if it is on time. When you get to work you check the wall clock, turn on your computer and log in. Your computer makes a record of your log in time. You breathe a sigh of relief, lean back in your chair, and check the clock on the screen to see how far away morning tea is.
Yet humans do not behave as if time is absolute. At work and school we normally insist on a quite strict timetable, and make sure it is filled to the minute; but we respond gratefully to advertisements for holidays on the beach where ‘time is suspended’, ‘dissolved’, or ‘ceases to matter’. If a friend is late to an important rendezvous one might get angrier with each wasted minute, but this perception of the time will soon change to a much different one if it turns out they were late because they had an accident and are now seriously ill in hospital.
In the information age, time has acquired new shades of meaning. We have remodelled our notion of time. The equation of ‘time equals money’ is being recalculated over and over, at an alarming rate. Advertisers love to manipulate our natural fear of dying young. We are driven to consume now in case our time runs out, yet we live much longer than any other humans in history before us. Here are some examples of the commercial world at work:
“Erase time. Alter perception. Create a new reality” ( a perfume company)
“Don’t let another minute go by without spending an hour with us” (a bank)
“Pay by the second” ( a mobile phone company)
“Write that novel today” ( a publisher)
“If you can get an investment strategy in around an hour-what’s stopping you?” (a bank)
“Diamonds are forever” ( a diamond company)
“An historic football match will be played next Saturday” (a newspaper)
“The code for building the most muscle mass in the shortest time humanly possible has been cracked!” ( a bodybuilding company)
“Everlasting freshness” ( a body shampoo)
Whatever this ‘time’ is that people are feeling short of, it is certainly taking its toll. The expression ‘time famine’ is popular in the cities of the information society. Everyone is trying to save it, but the harder they try the faster things slip away. A shorter and shorter-term concept of time, and therefore of cause and effect, inevitably has developed as a reaction to this perception.
This has all sorts of effects upon us. Not only, for example, does it appear to lower our sense of wellbeing, but if we do become sick we expect to be cured faster than may be natural. ‘Time heals’ it may be true, but when ‘time is money’ it becomes an expensive commodity indeed. It does not follow that ‘money heals’.
A higher speed, globalised, and commercialised concept of time, linked to IT and the promotional media, is a powerful tool of the information wealthy. Information technologies have adapted nicely to our dominant economically-based model of time, and are now influencing it enormously. There has been a sudden and vast acceleration of our data handling ability, so that in theory, huge amounts of time can be saved, and at the same time we can all use our time more efficiently. Therefore we can, say the bosses, fit even more into our time. Instead of sitting down with a pencil and paper to work something out we can use IT to work it out faster than the human eye can blink. Indeed, the ‘clock speed’ of a computer is often its main selling point. Time itself has become something that can be bundled up and shuffled around.
Information and IT are not the only sources of this distortion of our sense of time. It has been developing over centuries. The increasing precision of time-keeping tools and a work ethic based upon them, has melded with many other cultural factors to produce today’s rapidly ailing information society. We have developed an information economy, whose complex transactions can be done at close to the speed of light without the need of human intervention or supervision. The combination of more information with the perception of diminishing available time appears to be creating a great deal of stress. People may feel that ‘things are going too fast’ for them to cope, without really being able to say exactly in what way they feel bad, or even what the source of their bad feeling is. Often the end result is a chronic lack of motivation, a sense of uselessness and hopelessness, and stress and depression.
The problem of technological advance
Information affects everybody. Undoubted benefits of enormous magnitude have resulted from the worldwide use of information technology . Public Health, Media, Government and Finance are all better informed than ever before. IT is used at most workplaces, and in the form of television (TV), radio, personal computers (PCs) and mobile phones, is found in nearly every home in information societies. Our interactions with these technologies fill an increasing amount of our day.
Throughout human history technological advance has always caused profound social change. It is in our nature that such changes are disruptive. Some people are always left behind, alienated, injured or even killed by a new technology. This was true of the invention of the stone wall, the bronze blade, and the printing press. In one sense, the mixture of development and exclusion introduced by new technology is our history.
As humans, it seems we are not very good at learning from history. We still kill at war, and we still use our technologies to isolate others or to gain superiority over them. Information technology is no exception, but it differs in both the speed and depth of its penetration into our societies. Information technologies use information to sell themselves, and powerful individuals and market forces have ensured their arrival and assimilation has proceeded more quickly and completely than any previous technology.
This process has accelerated over the past 30 years, and continues to do so in nearly all countries. At the same time the incidence of stress and depression is rising dramatically. Many people are finding it difficult to cope: if you are one of these you are not alone! If your information exposure is high, and especially if there is pressure at work to respond quickly and correctly to that information, The Information Diet is likely to help you.
The Information Diet is flexible
You will find The Information Diet easy to adapt to your personal circumstances. Every time you reduce your information exposure, working towards your personal comfortable limit, you will accumulate benefit. It does not matter if you miss a day, or have a binge. The Information Diet does not discriminate against your age. Nor does it discriminate against your work, whether that be in the office, on the workshop floor, at school or in the home: everyone is exposed.
If The Information Diet is helping you will find it easier and easier to follow, because you will feel better and better. Eventually, at your own pace and along your own chosen path, you will reach a new and happier equilibrium with this Information Age in which you live.
The Information Diet may reveal hidden problems
‘Hidden’ problems are usually those we hide from ourselves. We do not always like to acknowledge our problems and difficulties, especially those that are personal and perhaps have some social stigma attached to them. Mental or psychological conditions are like this. For examples, major depression affects about one in every fifty people, and anxiety that interferes with normal living up to one in every twenty. Unlike stress caused by the pace of life in the information society, these disorders are equally prevalent in cultures around the world. For modern, information rich cultures, stress is the most common problem. Its seriousness for the health of both individual and society is often underestimated.
The Information Diet is capable of curing those sufferers who are simply overloaded with information, but some readers will find their difficulties only partially alleviated. If this applies to you, you will be assisted to recognise that there are other causes that need to be addressed, and will be pointed in the right direction.
Life in a cave?
It has become increasingly popular over the last two centuries to romanticise the life of the pre-civilised person who had none of the complex social and economic problems incurred by living in the contemporary information society. This is often referred to as the myth of the ‘Noble Savage’.
Aside from the fact that primitive societies were neither as simple nor as idyllic as the wise sayings we select on their behalf suggest, it is naïve to imagine we could change our lives so profoundly. I can no more become the jungle tribesman with no knowledge of the rest of the world than he can suddenly take my place in the information society.
The Information Diet does not recommend life in a cave, nor is it opposed to information technology. This book will proceed on the premise that, as its gurus insist, IT is here to stay. They also say we should adapt, and the sooner the better if we want to be rich. I believe they should help us find ways to integrate IT into our lives that optimises our health and well-being. In a way, some of the most frequent and skilled users, who have become Internet addicts, have returned to the cave with their computer: The Information Diet can help them back out again.
Part Two
Five Ways The Information Diet Can Help You
Contents
One: Information and Food
Two: Information and Fitness
Three: Information and Finance
Four: Information and Family and Friends
Five: Information and Fear
One: Information and Food
Contents
Sweet Information
The 97% Fat-Free fiddle
Food Stress
Food Poisoning
Trust and Common Sense
Our eating habits are bad and we know they are bad. For all our information we are not better off: many people are worse off. As the confusion mounts, so does the pile of diet books. And so does the fat on the bodies of those in the information society.
Consumption is the great metaphor of the modern economy. In my practice as a doctor I met countless people who were victims of too much information about food presented in an overwhelming manner. The Information Diet will show you how to focus on building a foundation knowledge that will become the base from which you comfortably slip into the delectable world of food. You will be encouraged to lose your confusion and fears generated by excessive food information. This will enable you to learn just what you need, not what others have decided is best.
Relaxing in the knowledge you are eating well, you will find the other elements of The Information Diet so much easier to adopt.
Sweet Information
The more a product is advertised, the less likely we are to need it. The modern supermarket’s most dazzling area is usually the confectionary aisle, where wrappers crackle enticingly, perhaps inviting us to enter a competition as well as to eat their contents. Kept well away from this are the vegetables, whose only information is their price.
Food information is everywhere. The quantities of information we gorge ourselves upon concerning food, and the periods of time we spend worrying about some aspect of it, have increased enormously. Mostly the information is of good quality, but never a substitute for hands-on learning with a good cook. Common sense, domestic information, mostly transmitted from mothers to daughters, and millennia old, has been replaced with a numbers and chemistry-centred approach. Sometimes even nutritionists become obsessive. They can end up like food accountants who lose sight of the overall picture in a mass of detail.
The simple calorie counter of the mid-20th century has expanded into a vast body of data concerning every aspect of what goes into our mouths. Not just calories and all the variety of sugars, but vitamins, minerals and salts, proteins, amino-acids, co-factors, carbohydrates, dextro-glycans, isoflavones, carotenoids, anti-oxidants, sulphur dioxide and other preservatives, colourings and flavourings, monosodium glutamate, cholesterol and plant sterols…and so the list goes on.
A vast global industry in diet supplementation has evolved beside that in pharmaceuticals to counteract the consequences of poor nutrition. Endless articles by nutritionists keep us up to date with the latest research results into fats and oils, steroids, phyto-oestrogens, sugars and diabetes and cancer. People joke that only pure water is safe and stock their refrigerator-tops with an array of expensive supplements of vitamins, minerals, and a steadily lengthening list of ‘essential’ chemical nutrients.
The role of sugar in modern diets illustrates the confusion that too much information can sow so well. At the same time that we are selling and eating more sugars than ever before, we have been convinced that they are bad for us. This is surely a recipe for psychological distress. On the one hand a great amount of scientific data has been oversimplified to the often-heard and ridiculous assertion that sugar is bad for us; and on the other the information society is promoting sugar-containing foods to the point of creating enormous health problems for itself. Each of these problems comes with its’ own great volume of information. Sugars, like fats and cholesterol, are necessary to life itself.
The 97% Fat-Free fiddle
Advertisers try to appear to be helping the public health authorities, promoting healthy eating. If, however, their product cannot genuinely be said to be good for a person, the food corporations simply find a way around it. Dividing food up into its individual molecular components makes this process a great deal easier, as all food has something in it that is good for us.
In this way advertising and public health information on nutrition soon ran into conflict. As is usual in human affairs, the side with the most money is winning, so that our modern supermarkets are complete sensory experiences: ideal food-consumer’s worlds into which we are drawn, mesmerised by the carefully-lit and colourful shelves. The power of advertising should not be underestimated.
Much food promotion is strongly information-based. A common example is the ‘percentage fat free’. Many dairy products are sold on the basis of being ‘low fat’. A food that is 98% fat free is held to be better than one that is only 97%. Using the bigger numbers to impress the consumer, commercial psychologists have managed to fool customers. 98% fat free sounds good. Few turn it around to ask if a ‘dairy’ food is only 2% fat, what else is in there?
Dietary fats are most closely linked to our obsession with body image that is so well fuelled by the information age. Hundreds of publications deal with it: from women’s magazines boasting papperazzi’s photos of the supposedly body-perfect stars; to macho body-building monthlies for men packed with advertisements for supplemental chemicals to improve one’s physical performance and muscle mass. Weight and body image are amongst the most commonly discussed subjects in general conversation. Much has been written on the connection between anorexia or bulaemia nervosa, and the body stereotypes portrayed by the commercial media. It seems little wonder that body image disorders are increasingly prominent
