I just watched the video "You're Not Addicted to Content, You're Starving for Information" by the vlogbrothers (specifically, Hank Green). It's much longer than the usual vlogbrothers video, so I'll summarize.

1) For almost all of human history, a scarcity of food has been a big problem. 'The first American generation that for the most part did not have to worry about getting enough food is still alive.'

2) But now many of us actually eat too much, though it's still healthier than malnutrition. 'And now we're in a society where companies compete to create the most delightful and engaging and inexpensive food possible. ... If the calories are cheap and they're designed to hack your brain into not realizing you've consumed them, you will eat more food, and it makes sense that companies would optimize for that.' The term companies use for this extra tasty food is 'hyperpalatable.'

3) So this over-eating is not healthy, but informing people about the nutritional problems with their favorite food is not enough to fix the problem. 'It turns out that the solution is mostly avoiding food that has been designed to be extremely tasty.' Ow!! Part of why it's hard is that 'having too much food is a very new problem' and we don't have the cultural structures to deal with it, plus 'we don't have as much agency as we would like to think.'

(He likes 'the elephant metaphor' where 'our bodies are the elephant and our consciousness is the person driving the elephant. We all have many situations where we've realized we would like to go somewhere, but the elephant doesn't want to go that way, and it simply will not. We just can't, in that moment, stop ourselves from saying the mean thing, from making the bad decision, from finishing the burrito even though you are stuffed full of burrito.')

But then he says, 'But luckily, we're cultural, and we build cultural tools when we have to. It just takes a long time.' It's hard to adapt to change. 'The way we get better at things when things change isn't entirely clear, but it does seem to happen with food.' We now might have a cultural 'vibe' that some of these addictive foods are gross or cringe and we turn away from them to prevent them from having that kind of power over us.

4) Similarly we've also long lived in a world with information scarcity, and now there's a similar overabundance. 'And definitely the people who package up information to sell it to you are competing with each other to make that information more hyperpalatable. And in many cases, the process that makes the information hyperpalatable also makes it worse for you. It makes it easy to only consume information that you like. Information that hacks your brain into consuming more of it. Information that doesn't contain the vitamins and the fiber and the protein that your brain needs to have a functional, useful model of the world that helps you thrive in your environment.' Some information is just like empty calories, but some is much worse, like 'the outrage bait, the conspiracy theories that alienate you from your communities. And just like with the nutrition labels,' mere education is not enough.

He says, 'giving away your agency a little bit can be fun and rewarding, but giving it away completely isn't just damaging to you and your ability to flourish, it's kind of cringe. Like nobody brags about the start of their second hour on TikTok.

'What worked with cigarettes and I think what is working some with food is shining a light on the people who want to manipulate us. ... We need to understand that the people and the platforms and the foods ... are very good at hacking your brain and taking away your agency, and the creators and leaders ...alienate you from reality so that they can keep control over you, ... keep you scared of everything, angry at everything, feeling superior to everyone. ... And I do think that eventually we will see that stuff ... as so manipulative and cringe and [its creators as] imagining us as tools to be used.'

He thinks the solution is not teaching people how to do fact checking and have good informational literacy, but telling stories 'of people trying to manipulate us into being their tools despite the fact that it's going to make our lives worse.' His example from smoking was a commercial showing a guy dying in a hospital and a bunch of businessman standing around him mourning that he was their greatest and most loyal customer and talking about how to replace him, 'and then the camera pans to a young person in the hallway of the hospital.'

One great thing about vlogbrothers videos is the commenters.

One commenter summarizes, 'Basically reframing addiction from something you can't stop consuming to having a strong need to consume and the addiction is fake satisfying that hunger.'

Another commenter: 'I think this is a problem in general with junk foods and part of why turning away from the hyper palatable foods is so hard; a lot of people, myself included, turn to that easy to achieve (although hollow) stimulation that junk food offers because it takes too much out of us to find or achieve the things that would be truly fulfilling. The idea of only sticking to boring foods is almost distressing because of this.

'And yeah, the same can be said for social media, phone games, etc. it's easy shots of dopamine at a time when people don't have the time or energy to get the real deal.'

Another commenter: 'I am a bit sad you missed the chance to point out that most of the tobacco CEOs went on to own food companies after cigarettes really lost the war.'

Another commenter brings up another similar situation: "this makes me think of road design, 'info about calories will make people healthier' sounds like 'a lot of traffic signs will make people drive better', but people won't drive better with more traffic signs, they will drive better with infrastructure that guides them into driving well, so what 'food infrastructure' do we need?"

And a comment on that was 'I used to be a big part of laser safety for companies I worked at, and the biggest piece of info of safety was signs don't work, they're a temporary last defense. Having labels on every piece of food doesn't mean they're any safer, nor does it mean the user will ever even take the time to read them. All the true safety valves are upstream before labeling even comes into play. I never made this connection to food labels before as Hank did in the video, nor road signs, for telling people about this problem, kudos.'