With a world of information at your fingertips it can be easy to be fooled by misinformation. How information is shared, marketed, or the confiscation someone has can influence us to believe it’s true… even when it doesn’t make logical sense. This is one of several rants I’ll have about how to appropriately navigate health information in the internet and social media.
Cadre: Have you ever heard something that sounds so absurd, but just because someone says it with good conviction, you believe it? She says that is exactly how social media influencers work. Do you ever fall into that trap?
Hey, Cadre, have you ever heard something that sounds so absurd, but just because someone says it with good conviction, you believe it? Because I feel like that is exactly how social media influencers work. Or people who have really strong opinions and try to make money off of those opinions, promote their ideas and their preferences. So, basically, this morning, I was at the gym and my ear pods weren't working, so I was just listening to everybody around me, and one of the trainers was trying to work with their client, who was following a Weight Watchers program and saw on Instagram that blueberries stunt your metabolism.
She was correlating this with the fact that when you're following a program like Weight Watchers on a diabetic track, they associate points with berries and fruits or things that are seemingly healthful but contain calories, and therefore the program equates it to a number. And I heard this, and I unfortunately, have pretty intense RBF, so my facial expressions are hard to hide. And the trainer wonderfully coached her about appropriate sources for information, you know, making sure that the things that she's watching and listening to are reputable.
And I felt really validated that this trainer was able to catch something seemingly so absurd. I and correct the train of thought for her client, who might have ended up going down a worse rabbit hole of, you know, demonizing healthful foods or creating black and white thoughts around food and whatever her fitness goals were. So I'm just curious if you often fall into that trap, too, because sometimes people say things in a really convincing manner and they have no backing for it, or they come up with some pseudoscience or some non evidence based rationale for, like, why something is so true, and it's usually connected to a personal preference or usually money when it comes to someone's business or their influence on a platform.
So I wanted to plant that seed of thought of, you know, and I'll talk more about this in the future because it's a huge pet peeve of mine of just how information gets disseminated and how people leverage modern day technology and platforms to communicate really inappropriate stuff. But for you, do you ever just fall into that trap? Do you get down the Reddit rabbit hole? Or do you find yourself scrolling through reels on Instagram and the topics just get more and more absurd sounding, but yet so convincing and true that you start to even believe it yourself?
