> anything that gets people thinking more about their activity and diet seems like a good thing. This makes intuitive sense; however, in practice, the truth is

> anything that gets people thinking more about their activity and diet seems like a good thing. This makes intuitive sense; however, in practice, the truth is a bit more complicated. We don't really know how to get people to change their behaviour and exercise more, eat less, etc.[0] - this is the holy grail of "lifestyle" diseases such as diabetes or heart attacks. (Disclaimer: my startup is a health-tech company aimed at improving medical outcomes through a number of factors, including getting patients to adapt their behaviour). However, there's a lot that we know doesn't work. It turns out that simply making people more aware of what they're eating not only doesn't work, but in fact oftentimes causes people to eat more. There are a few hypotheses explaining this, both of which are supported by evidence (so it's likely to be a combination of factors). First, people falsely equate awareness with action, psychologically[1], so making them over-aware of that they are doing makes them likely to think that they are taking more action than they actually are[2]. The second is that people don't have a good sense of how to process this data, so by (e.g.) placing caloric counts[3] next to food items, if they don't also know how many calories they should be consuming in a typical meal[4], they can end up overeating ('This dessert is "only" 800 calories!). [0] by this, I mean a systematic process that is cost-effective on the population at large, not something that is (a) effective only for a small subset of people, or (b) effective but cost-prohibitive. There are a lot of strategies that are very effective for people who are already low-risk, and a few strategies that are effective but insanely expensive for people who are high-risk. [1] This is analogous to what happens in politics with "slactivism". [2] This is probably the origin of the advice that you shouldn't tell your friends about new resolutions before you have constructed a plan to enact them - telling others about it gives you a sense of satisfaction even before you've done anything. [3] Not that calories are really the best way to measure diet, but let's set that aside [4] Most often, people are familiar with the number '2,000 daily', but that doesn't help you determine how that should be allocated throughout the day (dividing up into three equally-sized meals is not ideal), and many people require significantly less than or more than 2,000 calories.