Do you find health and wellness articles to be utterly confusing? You read one thing today, then seemingly the opposite tomorrow? If you do, you are not alone. Health and wellness reporting creates a lot of confusion, largely because it is almost always a snapshot. The articles report a certain idea, from certain research, under certain circumstances with certain people. This can produce trains of thought that seem almost comically inconsistent, leaving the reader to wonder just what the heck they are supposed to believe. What’s missing is information synthesis, which is what professionals of any vocation actually do.
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Consider these various headlines from major publications:
- Run A First Marathon And Your Arteries May Look Four Years Younger – The New York Times
- Brisk Walk Healthier Than Running – The Guardian
- Lifting Weights Is Better For Your Heart Than Cardio: Study – The New York Post
From this one example we can see how, over time, the unsuspecting reader might easily come to feel lost. We go from the idea that we should run twenty-six miles, to the idea that we should walk instead of running, to the the thought that we should lift weights instead of doing cardio at all. The next step from there could be pulling our hair out and giving up on the whole thing.
Here’s three more helpful headlines:
- How A Low-Carb Diet Might Help You Maintain A Healthy Weight – The New York Times
- Cutting Carbs Could Lead To Premature Death, If You Replace Them With The Wrong Things – The Washington Post
- Carbohydrates: How Carbs Fit Into A Healthy Diet – Mayo Clinic
A Low carb diet is a good way to lose weight. Low carb might kill you if you do it wrong. Carbs are part of a healthy diet. Totally clear, no?
Synthesize Before Exercise
These two examples are emblematic of the problem we face when consuming fitness information in the media. Each of these articles appeared in a different publication on different days, meaning we read them disjointedly over time and set ourselves up for confusion. We can’t quite be sure if carbs are good or bad, or running is better or worse because, in fact, we’ve been told that every answer is true at some point along the way! In the end, this is a structural issue. Each of these articles is a self-contained bubble that accurately reports on its particular topic, for that day, in its own little contextual universe. It is fragmented. What we need is to make the pieces into a complete picture.
A journal article over at the NIH describes the process one needs to go through in order to achieve this, which is called information synthesis. Information synthesis consists of four parts which are described as: “Defining the topic and relevant information about that topic, the purpose of the synthesis, and the target audience; systematically gathering this relevant information; assessing the validity of such information; and presenting validated information in a way that is useful to the target audience.” In simpler terms this means figuring out what we care about, what reliable info there is on it, and—most importantly—how that info fits into our actual circumstances.
Putting It All Together
Applying information synthesis to the question of whether we should run or walk, for example, looks like this: First, what do we care about? We care about reducing heart disease. Why do we care about heart disease? Because it kills us, and we want to live longer. Already, we are in a whole different universe now. If what we want is to live longer, there are lots of ways to do that. Running and walking are both ways, no matter which is technically ‘better’ than the other. Weight lifting is also a way, even if we didn’t read about it in the Sunday Health section. Changing our diets also happens to be a very effective method for increasing longevity. Ditto for more sleep, less stress, or even just making a friend.1
With so much context brought into the discussion, the articles about walking and running and marathons take on less individual importance. Yes, it’s possible that walking is better than running, technically, but that doesn’t actually mean you should walk and not run, because your choices don’t boil down to binary equations. Maybe you like running because it helps you destress. That would be an excellent reason to run rather than walk because you’d be helping yourself on two fronts. Or maybe running helps you destress and, on top of it, there is a running group in your town that gives you a much desired social aspect. Now you are doing good things for your health on three fronts. Of course, if you have bad joints, that might change the equation yet again. And, it must be said, poor nutrition could render everything moot anyway.
You get the picture. The name of the game is picking what makes the most sense in a broad context. This is something no single article can do.
Sometimes, we need someone to spend a lot of time doing the information synthesizing for us, because we’ve got a lot of other things to do. If you feel that way, this article on picking the right expert might be helpful.