The Information Diet Read online

  The Information Diet

  Clay A. Johnson

  The Information Diet

  Clay A. Johnson

  Dedication

  To my dad, Ray Johnson. When he and my mom dropped me off for college, he told me that there were three lessons he’d learned from many decades of practicing psychiatry:

  Don’t jump in anybody else’s drama

  Always believe in yourself

  Don’t believe everything you think

  Talk about a healthy information diet.

  Preface

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  Acknowledgments

  I’d first like to thank my incredible wife, Rosalyn Lemieux. She’s been a valuable sounding board for this book, helped me clarify some of my own ideas, and probably read more drafts than anybody. And she was a good sport in allowing me to expose Zombie Roz and Email Roz.

  Both my parents, Joy and Ray Johnson, are remarkable, and their input into this book, over more than three decades, should not go unnoticed either.

  My editors, Julie Steele and Meghan Blanchette, are also magnificent. They’ve made this book not a weird rambling of strange ideas, but a cogent story. When I first started the journey of writing this book, I thought about self-publishing, but the value of strong, smart editors still justifies the existence of publishers.

  Rebecca Bell was also instrumental in the writing of this book by allowing me to use her wonderful home off the coast of Georgia to escape the distractions of high bandwidth and focus entirely on writing. I could not have done it without that amazing gift.

  My network of colleagues, friends, and family has been indispensable throughout the creation of this book: Jen Pahlka, Carl Malamud, Howard Rheingold, Anil Dash, Andy Baio, Noreen Neilsen, Karl Frisch, Eric Burns, Jake Brewer, Mary Katharine Ham, Michael Bassik, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Pete Skomoroch, Jane McGonigal, Jim Gilliam, Josh Hendler, Cammie Croft, Steve Geer, Tom Steinberg, Mario Flores, Cindy Mottershead, Maggie McEnerny, Todd Kamin, and Cheryl Contee—thank you so much for sitting and listening to me describe my book and pushing me when I needed it. Without you all, this book would not have happened.

  The countless people I interviewed on and off the record—thank you. You know who you are. Linda Stone, you are a national treasure. Anybody who has read anything in this book and gotten anything out of it ought to listen to what she has to say.

  The people who helped me edit this book were saviors. Eric Newton took the time to send me amazing feedback and provide me more historical context than I could ever ask for. Quinn Norton’s brutal honesty helped sharpen my focus and my argument, and without Clay Shirky and Gina Trapani’s encouragement, this book probably would have never seen the light of day.

  Finally, a tip of the hat ought to go to Tim O’Reilly for giving me a platform to share this with you. He’s a mentor and a friend who does not get enough credit for injecting his community with the right kinds of values. Thank you, Tim.

  Part I. Introduction

  “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

  —Steve Jobs[1]

  Chapter 1. Lessons from Obesity

  “What we know about diets hasn’t changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.”

  —Marion Nestle, Food Activist[2]

  A Modern Epidemic

  Banting was right about all the public attention—the commercial success of his pamphlet helped create an industry of diet books, coaches, and consultants. His documents are preserved online by the Atkins Foundation, the organization dedicated to Robert Atkins, who would come along more than a century later and encourage people to go on a very similar low-carbohydrate program.

  But neither Banting nor Atkins, nor any of the thousands of others, solved the problem of obesity. In recent years, it has run rampant through America.

  The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta provides annual data on a state-by-state basis regarding our obesity epidemic. Figure 1-1 shows what obesity looked like in 1990.

  Figure 1-1. A map showing annual obesity rates for each state in 1990.

  While the CDC does not have data for five states in 1990, none of the states for which data was collected had obesity percentages higher than 14%. Figure 1-2 shows what that same map looks like with data from 2010.

  Figure 1-2. A map showing annual obesity rates for each state in 2010.

  In 20 years, we went from an obesity rate no higher than 14% in any state to an obesity rate no lower than 20% in any state, and an obesity rate higher than 25% in most states. Twelve states—Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia—now have obesity rates greater than 30%. Moreover, our obesity rate is accelerating; we’re getting fatter faster than we were 20 years ago.

  What has happened?

  The same things that have always happened. Food is cheaper. We can afford more of it. And we increased the number of steps between our food’s source and our bellies so much so that our food doesn’t even look like food anymore.

  To start with, calorie-dense foods are now less expensive and more readily available than ever. According to the USDA, we’re now producing 3,800 calories per person per day. That number is an increase of several hundred calories since 1970. And accordingly, 62% of adult Americans are now overweight, according to the National Center for Health statistics—in 1980, that number was 46%.[3]

  The Birth of Industrial Agriculture

  In the twentieth century, agriculture went through profound changes, both in the Unit
ed States and globally. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the rural farmer was the largest demographic in the United States. Nearly a century ago, more than 50% of the United States population lived in rural areas, and farming represented 41% of the American workforce.[4]

  Then, industrialization happened. The development of the Ford Model-T, the tractor, pesticides, and other agricultural technologies brought a new drive for efficiency into America’s heartland.

  It took a century to double food production from 1820 levels to those in 1920. It took just 30 years to double it again, between 1920 and 1950. It took 15 years from 1950 to 1965, and 10 between 1965 and 1975. Food production has continued to grow exponentially as science and the demand for food has caused our agricultural industry to industrialize.[5]

  In the words of food activist Michael Pollan:

  “In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle.”[6]

  This drive and industrialization is necessary, actually. By 2050, the UN estimates, we’ll need to double our food production again to maintain projected population growth.[7]

  The miracle of abundance comes with a remarkable set of consequences. Today, America’s heartland is empty; only 17% of Americans live in rural communities. Efficiency also means fewer jobs: if a single farmer can feed 150 neighbors, it means you need fewer farmers. Today, less than 2% of the United States population is directly employed in agriculture.

  Another significant consequence of industrialization is a rise in occupational health hazards. Agriculture is now one of the most dangerous professions in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control,[8] agriculture is dominated by giant factory farms with livestock packed at huge scale. It’s what allows just four companies to produce 81% of the cows, 73% of the sheep, 57% of the pigs, and 50% of the chickens in America.[9] But with a relatively homogenized and industrialized production system, toxins travel faster in our food supply and affect more people. Packing animals in makes them more susceptible to disease, which means that more antibiotics and other drugs go into our livestock, decreasing their effectiveness for treating human diseases. And locating these farms near places where produce is grown means an increased risk of food contamination.

  While calories have become more affordable, the nutrients in our food have slowly disappeared before our eyes, only to be replaced with corn-based sugar, soy-based fat and protein, and a whole lot of salt. Sugar, corn, and soy are the three crops of America, and they are the crops that make it into our animals and onto our dinner tables. Our grocery stores are full of manufactured foods, made mostly from corn and soy, that aren’t particularly good for us and as Michael Pollan says, not something that your grandmother would recognize as food.

  We don’t grow our food anymore; we manufacture it. And in the 1970s, we eliminated requirements for calling artificial food “artificial.” So right on the front of the packages, in really big emotion-grabbing type, companies could create exciting new forms of false food without ever saying so. Add to that the fact that this cheaper, more highly processed food alters our taste sensation so that the organic stuff seems bland, and it’s easy to see why we’ve gotten obese. Figures 2-1 and 2-2 speak for themselves.

  A New Set of Consequences

  As probability would have it, I am one of the 62% of Americans considered overweight. In fact, according to my Body Mass Index (BMI), I’m one of the 27% of us considered obese. It’s a terrible feeling, compounded by my constant attempts at exercise. I’ve run a marathon and several half marathons; gone through the constant physical, mental, and intellectual abuse of Tony Horton’s P90x; and endured the torture of vinyasa yoga. My house is littered with high-tech gadgetry—from the Wii Fit to the Withings Internet-powered scale (it posts your weight on Twitter) to the FitBit (a little gadget you wear on your belt to tell you how many calories you’ve burned by walking around). I do all of this for two reasons: so that I don’t need to grease the doorframes to get out of the house, and so that I can eat.

  If you want to know why Americans are getting fat, ask a fat person. It’s because for most of us, food—especially food that’s bad for us—is delicious.

  Let’s be clear: a chocolate-chip cookie, for most people, is superior in every way to a head of lettuce, and if one could make a chocolate-chip cookie as good for you as a pile of spinach, the salad industry would be in danger of being obliterated by Mrs. Fields. It’s a cruel joke that the stuff that tastes the best is often the stuff that’s worst for us. But the reason behind it makes a lot of sense.

  From way back during mankind’s foraging days until just a few centuries ago (less than a blink through the eyes of human history), we didn’t have a lot of food to go around. We never knew where our next meal would come from, and thus our bodies became wired for scarcity. Over the millennia, we evolved into energy conservation machines. It’s why we crave that salt-fat-sugar combination—and why, as far as I’m personally concerned, the most dangerous place in America is between me and a chicken wing.

  Our bodies are programmed to acquire as many resources as possible, and to take what we don’t need and store it as fat—fat that will keep us warm and supply us with energy during the harsh winter when there’s a lot less out there to eat.

  For modern society, neither winter nor famine is the same threat they used to be. Not only can you get “fresh” tomatoes at your grocery store in the middle of winter in the coldest regions of America, the season has all but stopped killing us. In 2010, according to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics report, there were only 42 deaths from “winter” in the United States and another 34 from cold. You have about as much chance of dying from the cold as you do from lightning.[10]

  The fresh, warm Krispy Kreme donut on a cool fall morning does more than treat (and trick) the tastebuds. That sort of food production allows the planet to sustain ever-larger populations—we’ve now surpassed seven billion human beings—with cheap calories.

  Once the biggest threats America faced were the Famed Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—war, famine, pestilence, and disease. But we’ve traded them in for a new killer. Today, 13.5 million[11] people die each year of heart disease and stroke, and 4 million from diabetes-related complications[12]—far more than die in automobile accidents. Heart disease is now our number one killer, and it takes more people to the grave in the United States in five years than all our war-related deaths combined. Instead of dying from the cold of winter, we find death in cholesterol.

  The Modern Diet

  Today, nearly a century and a half after Banting’s diet recommendations, Amazon.com lists nearly 20,000 books available for purchase on diets.

  As of this writing, 681 books have been released in the past 30 days, with another 112 coming soon. In the first six months of 2011, more than 2,000 books on weight-loss were released.

  We know beyond any scientific doubt that being fat kills. For more than a century and a half, the medical community has known that sugars and carbohydrates make us fat. But we keep eating, despite all of the information and transparency—from this month’s 681 diet books, to the nutritional labels on every item in the grocery store, to chains of Weight Watchers and Jenny Craigs across the country.

  Food’s scrumptious properties aside, perhaps the diet books have something to do with our obesity problem. It certainly seems as though the number of diet books available to the public correlates to obesity rates. While any economist would predict that the number of books to help people be less fat would grow with the number of fat people in the market, at what point does causation flow the other way around? Maybe all these diet books are making us fat by making it harder to figure out what a healthy diet is. At the very least, the modern obsession with weight over diet brings us a significant health issue. Imagery of being perfectly shaped and skinny trumps being healthy and happy,
and as a result, scores of people suffer— and die—from eating disorders.

  No matter which way you turn, abundant information makes it easy to distort our relationship with food into something unhealthy. If you’re looking to surf through a land of false promises, spend a few minutes in the diet aisle of your local bookstore. You can lose weight by thinking like either a caveman or a French woman, or by eating only food that’s cooked slowly. You can lose it, says the updated 2012 edition of Eat This Not That! (Rodale Books), by simply swapping in a Big Mac® for a Whopper-with-cheese®.

  In the diet aisle, our relationship to food can take on social, political, and environmental significance. A healthy diet mustn’t just include the right number of calories and the right interaction of nutritional elements. It must also produce the least amount of carbon, and be as natural as possible. It’s no longer good enough to eat reasonable portions of lean meat; the meat must come from a cow that could roam free and eat grass.

  If time is of the essence, you can get top-selling weight loss books promising change based on your lifestyle: just spend 8 minutes (Eight Minutes in the Morning, Harper), 4 hours (The Four Hour Body, Crown Archetype), or 17 days (The Seventeen Day Diet, Free Press). If religion or the supernatural is your thing, just look to the 159 diet books available containing the word “miracle.”

  Most of what these books cover and the pseudoscience behind them appeals to the same emotional impulses as do the people peddling calories in the first place. Some of this is unavoidable in a free society: the right answers— healthy information—compete side-by-side with the answers we may want to hear but which may not be true. Only the highly nutritionally literate can easily tell the difference.