Fast information can be worse than fast food

One of the best ways to lose weight is to stop eating highly processed foods.

Food processing solved a problem for the world – it created more food availability and fed a lot of hungry people. 

It also created a huge problem for the world – we can now eat delicious food whenever we want relatively inexpensively.  Unfortunately, now we eat way too much of it.

There is nothing inherently bad or deleterious about processed food.  A lot of it may have similar caloric and macronutrient content to its unprocessed counterparts.

The biggest difference with ultra-processed vs unprocessed food is this: time

We eat processed food faster.  We digest processed food faster which in turn makes us hungrier. 

Processed food is more mobile and less perishable so it can be eaten on the go.

The speed in which we can eat processed food makes it possible to get even more cracks at the taste so we in turn eat more.

Unprocessed food takes longer to eat.  It digests and is broken down slower, so it gives us more of a satiating feeling.  Consequently, we just eat less.

People inherently make this connection and realize eating an apple is healthier than eating apple sauce and the former is probably part of a better long-term eating strategy.

But what if we started to think this way about information?

What if we really started to look at the amount of information we take in on a daily basis and think how much of it is the equivalent of an apple and how much is apple sauce?

I would argue there is one main difference between getting information from a published book and getting it from a source online or from social media: time.

It takes a long time to get a book published.  It takes a long time just to research the topic of the book, create an outline, interview subjects, create a bibliography, go through edits and rewrites.

It takes 5 minutes to write a blog or IG post. 

Like the unprocessed vs processed food, a lot of the information (caloric content) could be the same.  But it’s the time that makes the difference.

When you read a book, it takes time to get through it all, sometimes weeks or months. 

And in that time, you are constantly ruminating on the subject (ahh hem, digesting it) .

You don’t just stop reading after 20 pages and it pick up another book on the same subject to get another crack at the taste.

When you read something online it’s gone from your purview in minutes, and you may never think about it again.  But for those few minutes you may consider yourself an “expert”.

Much like food processing, the internet and social media solved a huge problem for the world.

It connected people and gave them access to all the knowledge the world has ever known.

But like processed food, we’ve become accustomed to getting things so quickly that we’ve lost the sense of time it takes to appreciate an unprocessed food or a well written book.

Think about slowing down with what foods you choose and the type of information you take in.