Facebook has Nothing & Everything to do with Health

Check out this Businessweek article: How Facebook Sells You.

No worries, this is not one of those paranoid Facebook articles that's preaching abstinence from the world's largest social networks. So you can still keep your virtual friends, just.. beware of them.

FB is a tool, still very much in development and changing, and one that can be used in many great ways. Take, for example, me & you, together at last. [giggle]. Likewise, however, it can also be abused— or used in ways NOT intended— in equally as many ways, if not more.

The point is to UNDERSTAND how and why FB is used [not just quit it altogether].

The article is great for illustrating how hungry businesses are to wet your appetite and swallow your cash, and, with that in mind, how much media can affect our psyche, behaviors and, ultimately.. ugh, I know, but health.

When it comes to nutrition and health education, businesses really do reign supreme. Is it really any surprise, considering the amount of money that goes into advertising and healthcare?


Some food for thought and some highlighted snippets, in case you don't care to read the whole thing:

Question: How many times have you done something because someone you care about did it?

"The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you have context about what your friends are doing," says Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who started accepting ads on Facebook as a Harvard sophomore in 2004 in an attempt to cover server costs. "That's true for ads as well. An advertiser can produce the best creative ad in the world, but knowing your friends really love drinking Coke is the best endorsement for Coke you can possibly get."

Question: Are there really that many people engaged in advertising and branding?

"A year ago, Facebook was an afterthought," says Carol Kruse, vice-president, global interactive marketing, at Coca-Cola (KO), which has more than 12 million Facebook fans. "As we go into 2011, it's fully integrated into our marketing plans, with a reliance and a focus on it."

Question: How are businesses using social media?

Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

That social endorsement is a tiny mnemonic designed to make the ad catchier, and it works. Nielsen, which started measuring the efficacy of Facebook ads a year ago, says that if users see their friend "likes" an ad or has commented on it, they are up to 30 percent more apt to recall the ad's message.

If enough of your friends like or comment on the ad, the ad can escape its right-side quarantine and jump into your main news feed, along with the names of your friends and all the conversation around the ad. The advertiser pays nothing for this migration. In the industry, it's called "earned media." (Think of a teenager wearing a Nike T-shirt or Ellen DeGeneres enthusiastically talking about a product.)

Question: What are the consequences?

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

Think about it. Amongst the advertising fiends is Big Food trying to get you to eat as much of their manufactured crap as often as possible. Diet [& activity for that matter] is about ongoing lifestyle. So essentially, it's their job to take yours over, and, with 2/3 of our population suffering from overweight/obesity, it looks like they're doing a hell of a job. Literally.

What do you think? Do you buy it? ..oops. Not buy buy, but you know.. agree with, or Like, the argument? [grin].

Happy Healthy Juicy Powers of Social Media! For Better or For Worse.
Educators, Pay Attention!

Is Snooki Fighting Too Hard for Fame?

I don't know what The Situation is or what everyone thinks is so Woww, as I have yet to witness respectable-enough media coverage of the Jersey Shore cast for me to actually check out their MTV reality hit.

Case and point: Snooki on the cover of OK! mag, plastered with the words: 'My Battle with Anorexia'.

I commend the editors over there for doing their job, as the cover lured me into picking up a copy to check out the story with such a powerful title. That's not to say, though, I condone them for turning a serious issue into what seems to be fodder.

So what does the beehived tanning queen have to share about her experiences?

'In high school, my weight was a very big deal, but when I went to college, it wasn't as big of a deal to me, and I got over it pretty quick, which is pretty surprising to me...

You know, how in college you're eating all kinds of crappy food? That's when I started eating bagels again. I was like, '"Eh, screw it, I'll just eat." I wasn't, like, downing cheeseburgers. I just started eating like a regular person again. And I started to gain the weight back. I really didn't have any problems in college because I was too busy worrying about my studies.'

Worrying about her studies, I'm sure..


We throw around the term 'depressed' when we're bummed out about something. But depression, in the actual clinical sense, is more than being just bummed out— it's long[er] term, affects daily life, and is seriously debilitating. The same goes for anorexia. Usage of the word is sometimes [or often] thrown around as if it's nothing and without understanding of what it actually means or is.

According to the DSM-IV— the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the US— anorexia nervosa is classified using the following criteria:

1. Refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height (e.g., weight loss leading to maintenance of body weight less than 85% of that expected; or failure to make expected weight gain during period of growth, leading to body weight less than 85% of that expected).
   
   
2. Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight.
   
   
3. Disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight.
   
   
4. In postmenarcheal females, amenorrhea, i.e., the absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles.

Snooki claims to have gotten down to 80 pounds in high school, which does sound low, but, note, today, she's only 4' 9''. Moreover, eating disorders, whether it be anorexia, bulimia, or EDNOS [eating disorder not otherwise specified], typically [typically] is NOT something you just get over by saying 'screw it' and then eating bagels. If it were only that simple..

If reality is what you're after, chew on this:

• Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
  
  
• The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate associated with all causes of death for females 15-24 years old.
  
  
• 20% of people suffering from anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder, including suicide and heart problems.
  
  
• Five to ten percent of anorexics die within ten years of onset, 18-20 percent die within twenty years of onset, and only 50 percent report ever being cured.

Stats taken from The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness

Ergo, the point isn't did she/didn't she [have an eating disorder] or was she/wasn't she [anorexic], though it is two-fold:

1. Whether she was sick or not, if she's going to take the responsibility of addressing the issue—which she did by agreeing to give a highly publicized exclusive interview and don the cover of a popular magazine— then she better own up to it and do it with extra care— it comes with the territory of fame, where one is no longer responsible just for oneself.
   
2. Ditto for the magazine/publisher. Though what they're publishing is 'trash', still, it's national, and social responsibility is in order. It's not like they're talking about a trivial thing such as her hair. For some, this really is a reality and really is a matter of life or death [..to be as dramatic as the bold yellow cap-sized font..]

Happy Healthy Juicy Being Responsible, and Knowing What's Appropriate & What's Snot!

Urban Outfitters Should Be 'Rated R' for Violence Against Health - Girls' & Women's Especially

The 'Cigarette' Jeans. That's why.

In fact, there's a whole line dedicated to 'Cigarette' Jeans. So how do they compare to other styles/fits, say, for example, 'Skinny' Jeans [which, yes, they do in fact carry as a separate line]?

The descriptions for each are as follows:
Skinny - Regular Rise, Slim Fit, Skinny
Cigarette - Regular Rise, Super Slim Fit, Super Narrow Leg

Skinny, apparently, wasn't skinny enough.

According to their website, Urban Outfitters' brand profile reads:

'Urban Outfitters operates more than 130 stores in the United States, Canada and Europe, all offering an eclectic mix of merchandise. We stock our stores with what we love, calling on our — and our customer's — interest in contemporary art, music and fashion. From men's & women's apparel and accessories to items for the apartment, we offer a lifestyle-specific shopping experience for the educated, urban-minded individual in the 18 to 30 year-old range — both online and in our stores as well as through our catalog.'

Legal jargon, that last part [in bold] appears to be, because adults [age 18 and over] are certainly not their only consumers [of their clothes or messages]. T(w)eens make up a huge portion of their consumer base, if not the majority. Likewise, 'educated' is a far cry from true.

How educated, for example, would you assess this 'Smoking Smarties' middle schooler?

Lloyd Johnston, a researcher at the University of Michigan for Monitoring the Future, an NIH-funded study, reported the end of last year:

'While great strides have been made in reducing youth smoking in this country, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Among high school seniors in the Class of 2009, 20 percent have smoked in the most recent month and one in nine (11 percent) is a current daily smoker. Further, our follow-up studies have shown that a number of the lighter smokers in high school will convert to heavy smoking after leaving high school.

Given what we know about the consequences of smoking, this is still an unacceptable level of involvement.'

Urban Outfitters' Company Profile reads:

'Our established ability to understand our customers and connect with them on an emotional level is the reason for our success.. The emphasis is on creativity. Our goal is to offer a product assortment and an environment so compelling and distinctive that the customer feels an empathetic connection to the brand and is persuaded to buy.'

..And they forgot, perhaps, use.

This is not the first time, however, the retailer sparked controversy. On Wikipedia, there's an entire list, referencing at least eight separate incidences. The last reads:

'In May 2010, Urban Outfitters released a shirt that read "Eat less." The shirt was widely criticized for promoting anorexia, especially since the model that adorned the shirt on the website was considered to be extremely thin. The company soon pulled the shirt from the website altogether.'

Extremely thin.. yet over 18?..




So the shirt was 'pulled from the website altogether'. Hurrah! Right?


But check this out:
Type in the Search Box of the Urban Outfitters' retail site: 'EAT LESS'.

You'll find it does NOT return 'NO ITEMS FOUND', as typically would be the case for gibberish, but instead directs you to the 'Tops -> Basics' category, displaying nearly 48 images of ultra-skinny women [perhaps girls, too].

Shutter.

Education, including health, occurs everywhere - *Everywhere* - Not just the classroom.

Is this the kind of education you want to buy, wear, endorse, breathe, consume, become? Food for thought.

Happy Healthy Juicy Fashion Shouldn't Hurt or Harm!

Public Health/Edu, meet Today, Social Technology..

Food+Tech: that's the name of a meetup group I joined recently. Upon signup, they require you to introduce yourself. I didn't fawn over it and kept it succinct: 'electrical engineer turned nutrition educator. i blog about health.'

I didn't really know what the group was about so I attended their latest meetup about a week ago to find out. They call it 'Five On Food', where basically, five presenters have the opportunity to share what projects they're working on, theoretically in the realm of its name, food+tech.

Highlights of the event included these three speakers from..:

1) WindowFarms, which are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.

Goal 1: Empower urban dwellers to grow some of their own food inside year-round.

Goal 2: Create a web platform that allows citizens to collaboratively innovate globally toward more sustainable cities using locally available materials to suit locally specific conditions, a process we call R&D-I-Y.

R&D-I-Y: Mass Collaboration to Solve Environmental Problems:
The ultimate aim of the Windowfarms project is not primarily to create a perfected physical object or product. Rather, the targeted result is for participants to have a rewarding experience with crowdsourced innovation. The team is interested to learn from participants' experience as they design for their own microenvironments, share ideas, rediscover the power of their own capacity to innovate, and witness themselves playing an active role in the green revolution.

The windowfarms project approaches environmental innovation through web 2.0 crowdsourcing and a method called R&D-I-Y (research and develop it yourself). Big Science’s R&D industry is not always free to take the most expedient environmental approach. It must assume that consumers will not make big changes. Its organizational structure tends toward infrastructure-heavy mass solutions. A distributed network of individuals sharing information can implement a wide variety of designs that accommodate specific local needs and implement them locally. Ordinary people can bring about innovative green ideas and popularize them quickly. Web theorists like Clay Shirky claim that this capacity to “organize without hierarchical organization” will be a fundamental shift in our society brought about by the web over the coming decades.

2) Fresh, which is a grassroots efforts for a grassroots movement.. [It's] more than a movie, it’s a gateway to action. Our aim is to help grow FRESH food, ideas, and become active participants in an exciting, vibrant, and fast-growing movement.

Fresh uses social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help spread the word.

3) NOAH [Networked Organisms And Habitats], which is a tool that nature lovers can use to explore and document local wildlife and a common technology platform that research groups can use to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

An example of one of their current missions is called Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners, where users can share info with fellow gardeners to learn what can grow best in their garden.



Today, I went to another meetup event for another group- totally unrelated- on media and publishing. Co-founder of Foursquare and expert in mobile apps, Naveen Selvadurai, discussed key ingredients that go into creating a fun digital experience.

In case you don't know what Foursquare is, it's a mobile app that's focused on fostering social meetups/gatherings/community and learning/exploration/discovery of cities, particularly one's own, using game-based theory. The gaming aspect basically acts as an incentive for users— users 'check-in' to locations and when they meet certain criteria, they can win various badges [action->reward].

One such badge is called the Gym Rat, which you can earn if you check in to venue tagged 'gym' 10 times in 30 days. At one point in his presentation, Selvadurai shares a user's comment, which said his desire for this badge got him to go to the gym and is healthier because of it. Yoga studios, parks, farmers' markets, health food stores, restaurants with healthy fare, are other examples of how this app can and has been influential within communities, by themselves no less.


While these four ventures are very different from each other in content, they do all have an underlying common principle: that is, social media as a means to influence peoples' [each others'] behaviors. And isn't that what public health/education is all about?

[Rhetorical question.] Yes! Public health and education is about communication and influence. Social media is a [or, currently, the?] major portal & tool for both. We can't deny, overlook, or be ignorant of it anymore. It's time to get with the program, folks, there's a difference [many, actually] to be made.


Happy Healthy Juicy Wake UP! Social Technology [4BetterHealth], umm, rah!

Public Health Educators: Who are they really?

According to Wikipedia: Education, in the largest sense, is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another.

When we think of the word ‘education’, we think: academia, discipline, school, classroom, homework, tests, studying [or cramming]..

When we think ‘physical education’, we think: manly female gym teacher, locker rooms, goofing off, class without tests..

When we think ‘health education’, we think: awkward lessons about and during puberty, birth control and STDs, smoking, drugs, alcohol, peer pressure..

But what about ‘nutrition education’ [NE]? I mean, unlike the above, nutrition education is still a very new and emerging field/area/subject. After all, it’s only since about the ‘80s—that's a mere 30-some years ago—that the nutritional health of Americans has plummeted, weight sky-rocketing.

Typically, though, NE is associated with learning about healthy eating/eating healthy. Sub-consciously, that translates into die with a T, deprivation, restriction, bland, hunger, guilt, preaching, nagging, rules to break. Realistically, it often translates into type A dietician[?]; blowoff course, or a joke, but an easy A; just knowledge like anything else; lame, or worse, boring; inaction; useless; zero improvement and perhaps further decline in health.

Moreover, because of the term education and the implications of learning, NE is generally thought of/envisioned as occurring particularly on the grounds of an educational setting— ie. school, [organized, do-good] programs, etc.

But wait! What is education again? For one, it is not location-specific. School may be in the business of, but it definitely is not the monopoly. Parents, friends, celebrities, media, people around us are all teachers by their power to influence. That said, education isn’t just about facts or knowledge. What we do with that knowledge, or understanding, and how it affects us, is just as relevant, if not more.

Girls, for example, learn that they aren’t naturally beautiful and so, fueling a multi-billion $$ industry, they wear makeup, day.in.&.day.out. Kids, for example, learn what’s cool and then themselves, drink, smoke, use, wear, listen, watch, act whatever it is that they learned. What we learn affects our behavior, for better or for worse.

The premise of nutrition education lies on the same principle: its aim isn’t to look prettier or be cooler, obviously, but [rather the opposite, oops..] to live a more optimal, healthier, happier life/style and is achieved via both knowledge and ‘behavior change’.

Ack, behavior change: I vividly remember my professor preaching this in my intro class to nutrition education. I remember [vocally, oops] only partially agreeing. As an educator, I thought it would be my job to empower others to make better decisions/choices—whether they actually would, though, would be up to them and not within my control.

I mean, it’s not my job to force feed people [here doesn't come the choo choo of broccoli..] but just be convincing enough that they’ll do it themselves, on their own. *Like*, you could be the best parent in the world but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee your kid won’t turn out to be a criminal. Over the years I guess I’ve come to accept it as true, though: my actions/purpose as an educator is geared toward [un-forceful, yes, but nonetheless] behavior change [for the better].

But wait! [sorry, again]. These non-optimal [aka. unhealthful] behaviors, who/what are exacerbating them, fueling the fire? Exactly—the real educators.

In the realm of nutrition, this translates into:

Marketers—think ads/commercials, product placements etc.

Designers—think product packaging, food styling etc.

Writers—think articles, posts, blurbs [newspapers, magazines, websites].

Producers—think tv shows [news, cooking shows, reality tv, morning tv etc.]

Business(wo/)men—think $$$. They do. And look at the results they get..

Entertainers—think anything remotely interesting enough to catch someone’s attention and good enough to have it stick and play into action.


These are the folks who really have a handle on education— nutrition, health, and all. Currently and unfortunately, those with the actual titles do not.


Public health has to change if the goal is for the health of the public to. Period.