If you want to convince people on the street that corporations are to blame, you should probably start with things that are simple to understand, such as “supermarkets lace 80% of their product with sugar” and “up to 90% of the food displayed at a child’s eye level in checkout lines is unhealthy”.
To help average people improve their situation, I think it would help to make a cookbook of extremely simple healthy recipes, and to make a YouTube channel demonstrating them. At least, I remember that I procrastinated with starting to cook because everything seemed so complicated. Now that I cook semi-regularly, I understand that maybe 3-5 ingredients in the recipe are essential, and 10 more are just “nice to have, maybe”. Some recipes are sensitive to how much of an ingredient you put there (also some ingredients are sensitive, e.g. salt), but sometimes using 50% or 200% of the recommended thing is still okay. Time is sometimes sensitive and you can easily burn things, and sometimes again anything between 50% and 200% is okay-ish. So as good cook, you need to temporarily suppress the impulse to show off, and provide an easy recipe with few and not too sensitive ingredients (and then maybe make an separate optional “full” version thereof). For example, to cook a potato soup, you only need water, potato, and little salt, those are literally all the necessary ingredients for the basic version; but try googling for the recipe, and you get dozens of ingredients; and yes, they make the result taste better, but they also discourage the beginner from trying.
Nutri-Score is a simple system to rate food. Fiber and protein good; salt, sugar, and fat bad; the result is on a scale from A to E. I expect the food industry to oppose it just as forcefully as the online advertising industry opposes GDPR.
For exercise, I found Convict Conditioning useful. Ignore the motivating story; it is a set of exercises you can do at home, with progressively easier and more difficult versions of each. (There is some criticism online, most of it is of type “perfect is the enemy of good”.) For poor people, or people with kids, exercising at home is more realistic than going to the gym.
I wonder if online shopping could make it easier to resist the temptation in food shops, especially if you could make browser bookmarks for the healthy and useful stuff, so your shopping procedure would just be like “click this bookmark, add to cart, click that bookmark, add to cart, proceed to checkout”.
I can imagine going much further and making an independent front end for food shopping, where you could just select “no sweets” as a filter. This could be developed as open source. But would require too much work. I am not sure how actively the supermarkets would fight against it—on one hand, it’s obviously not what they want, on the other hand, sabotaging the system unilaterally means sending the users to the competitors.
I think it would also be good to create a simple brochure with food advice, updated for recent developments, because the food companies adapt to exploit your simple heuristics. (For example, some people had a heuristic “brown sugar is better than white sugar”, and companies reacted by making brown sugar by simply adding brown color to white sugar. Similarly for “dark bread is better than white bread”; if you don’t check the ingredients, often the dark bread sold at your shop is just white bread with added color.)
Important thing is to keep it simple. Yes, people will object against this in the name of greater precision. But a simple guide that an average person can use is preferable to a complex guide they don’t have time to study.
(One thing I find discouraging as a rationalist is that for some reason “health advice” often attracts people interested in various crazy things, so if you tried to rely on volunteers to provide good advice, soon the advice would consist of cleaning your chakras and watching crystals, plus homeopathy etc.)
If you want to convince people on the street that corporations are to blame, you should probably start with things that are simple to understand, such as “supermarkets lace 80% of their product with sugar” and “up to 90% of the food displayed at a child’s eye level in checkout lines is unhealthy”.
To help average people improve their situation, I think it would help to make a cookbook of extremely simple healthy recipes, and to make a YouTube channel demonstrating them. At least, I remember that I procrastinated with starting to cook because everything seemed so complicated. Now that I cook semi-regularly, I understand that maybe 3-5 ingredients in the recipe are essential, and 10 more are just “nice to have, maybe”. Some recipes are sensitive to how much of an ingredient you put there (also some ingredients are sensitive, e.g. salt), but sometimes using 50% or 200% of the recommended thing is still okay. Time is sometimes sensitive and you can easily burn things, and sometimes again anything between 50% and 200% is okay-ish. So as good cook, you need to temporarily suppress the impulse to show off, and provide an easy recipe with few and not too sensitive ingredients (and then maybe make an separate optional “full” version thereof). For example, to cook a potato soup, you only need water, potato, and little salt, those are literally all the necessary ingredients for the basic version; but try googling for the recipe, and you get dozens of ingredients; and yes, they make the result taste better, but they also discourage the beginner from trying.
Nutri-Score is a simple system to rate food. Fiber and protein good; salt, sugar, and fat bad; the result is on a scale from A to E. I expect the food industry to oppose it just as forcefully as the online advertising industry opposes GDPR.
For exercise, I found Convict Conditioning useful. Ignore the motivating story; it is a set of exercises you can do at home, with progressively easier and more difficult versions of each. (There is some criticism online, most of it is of type “perfect is the enemy of good”.) For poor people, or people with kids, exercising at home is more realistic than going to the gym.
I wonder if online shopping could make it easier to resist the temptation in food shops, especially if you could make browser bookmarks for the healthy and useful stuff, so your shopping procedure would just be like “click this bookmark, add to cart, click that bookmark, add to cart, proceed to checkout”.
I can imagine going much further and making an independent front end for food shopping, where you could just select “no sweets” as a filter. This could be developed as open source. But would require too much work. I am not sure how actively the supermarkets would fight against it—on one hand, it’s obviously not what they want, on the other hand, sabotaging the system unilaterally means sending the users to the competitors.
I think it would also be good to create a simple brochure with food advice, updated for recent developments, because the food companies adapt to exploit your simple heuristics. (For example, some people had a heuristic “brown sugar is better than white sugar”, and companies reacted by making brown sugar by simply adding brown color to white sugar. Similarly for “dark bread is better than white bread”; if you don’t check the ingredients, often the dark bread sold at your shop is just white bread with added color.)
Important thing is to keep it simple. Yes, people will object against this in the name of greater precision. But a simple guide that an average person can use is preferable to a complex guide they don’t have time to study.
(One thing I find discouraging as a rationalist is that for some reason “health advice” often attracts people interested in various crazy things, so if you tried to rely on volunteers to provide good advice, soon the advice would consist of cleaning your chakras and watching crystals, plus homeopathy etc.)