Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.
Just think about that and then read the last post. It discusses an article from the Wall Street Journal that maintained you could get your kids to eat fruits and vegetables by feeding them cake. Crazy, right? The more cake your kids eat, the more cake your kids want. The article is just wrong. It contributes nothing to health literacy. It is so far out, I can’t explain it other than by linking it to advertising revenue from big food.
This points to a much bigger problem. How can you really increase health literacy in people with chronic illness when there is so much variation in medical advice. We started by discussing diet. That is a great example of health information that could not possibly be more confusing. Take this combination of herbs and natural products. Be the greatest loser through heavy exercise. It’s all about calories. It’s all about fat. It’s all about carbs and sugar. If the people promoting these things cannot point to large numbers of patients who have lost weight and kept it off for ten years, they are not contributing to your health literacy. Health literacy that matters is centered on solutions that are proven to work long term.
What represents health literacy on weight gain? In 1950, most people were slender. The average American woman was 26 pounds lighter. So what happened? Did everyone lose their will power? Did everyone develop some personal flaw that caused them to overeat? Of course not. The sugar lobby promoted fraudulent articles by scientists that blamed fat for illness and said sugar and carbs are ok. At about the same time Americans began to eat fast and processed foods combining fat, salt, sugar, and processed carbs in ways that are irresistible. We will eat them when we are not hungry. The more we eat the more we want. You can lose a pound or two a month by simply eating real food—lean meat, eggs, seafood, dairy, fruits, vegetables, beans, peas, and nuts—and you can keep it off. You can even eat the stuff that makes you fat once a week. That is health literacy built on evaluating root causes and developing solutions that attack the root cause and then proving they provide sustained benefit. All the other stuff is confusing noise.
You can count on this site to improve your health literacy by examining root causes, addressing them with specific interventions, and proving the interventions work. Facts, science, data, and the truth. That is what matters.
I love the concept of Health Literacy. I am very fortunate to have grown up with home grown veggies and fruit from our own trees. Mind you, I didn't think so at the time. I might have gone off the rails for a while as a young adult but the always knew what was right and made my way back to it. Simple real food.
It pays to be in the know - our lives depend on it. Thank you for providing that opportunity - day after day.