"Every Bite You Take" Article
If you were asked to remember everything you ate yesterday, could you recall each item with pin-point accuracy? For 30 seconds, see how much you can remember, and also try to recollect how you obtained the food, or whether you cooked it or not.
From my own experience as a college student, academics is practically a full-time job. Having made studying and homework my top priority, all the minute details of what I ate, or how much I exercised this week seem trivial at the end of the day. However, ever since this Global Health class, I have learned one key point: that these sort of details, and my failure to recognize them as critical to my everyday habits, are what make up one of the most essential and fundamental underlying problems of public health. Our diets have an increasingly significant impact on our overall total health and the sorts of risk factors that we are exposed to.
In this article (which I HIGHLY encourage everyone to read), a study was performed years ago to test the dietary memory of individuals. What were deemed as results were personally shocking. A psychologist at Baylor College of Medicine, who had dedicated his life to studying children's diets, could not even successfully recall the dinner he had made the night before. This observation is a truth that exposes organic human nature and its toll on public health findings. For epidemiologists, studies that require a questionnaire or rely on people reporting their own activities will inevitably incur overwhelming errors in calculations. Human memory is imperfect; this flaw is what keeps our epidemiological studies from achieving true factuality.
"These mistakes are more than a reminder of the human memory's fallibility: they threaten to undermine the foundations of modern medical epidemiology. In this field, researchers make associations between past events and experiences, and later ones such as the emergence of cancer or other diseases. But if the initial records are inaccurate, these associations can be weak, misleading, or plain wrong," says author Brendan Borrell.
Dietary recollection is just one problem of many. Human inaccuracy also affects studies of smoking, stress, exercise, or pollution (anything that relies on people reporting their own exposures).
Recently, a contraption was developed by researchers Baranowski and Vineis. This walkman-sized environmental sensor fits int he pockets of people's clothing or backpacks and acts to measure the air quality of the places that people in San Diego, CA, are exposed to on a daily basis. "When participants in the study leave the vicinity of a 'home' beacon, the device switches between two filters, making it possible for Chillrud to distinguish between exposures at home and elsewhere" (Borrell). A GPS helps detect the global positioning of the individual at times when the device measure low air quality. After several days of use, the filters are chemically analyzed to identify harmful toxins in the air. From this information, researchers can deduce how the layout of a city, "with its parks, hills, and smog traps, influences physical activity and ultimately, public health" (Borrell). This device also cleverly monitors heart rate to determine where individuals are exercising the most. This forefront in medical technology could open up a new door for more accurate studies.
The US National Cancer Institute has also started an investigation called ASA24 (Automated Self-Administered 24-hour Dietary Recall). This experiment will test children on how well they can recall their portion sizes. Photo-prompts of various portion sizes are given to the children, who choose which size they believe accurately represents their diet from days before. The goal is to "build a web-based tool that other researchers can use in place of food diaries, for instance, link up dietary habits, genetic signatures, and risk of disease" (Borrell).
As far as the diet test at the beginning of this post, how did it go? In a short time limit, were you able to easily recall everything you ate? My guess is, no. I could not myself. This is a vital consideration of public health that I believe, if investigated more thoroughly, could change the behaviors of many people, thus (hopefully) prompting a more positive outlook on risk factors and how we can manipulate them for our own good. I hope that you read this article and find it as interesting as I did, because it really exposes a lot of ideas that we can all relate to, but may not realize it.
I find this article very interesting! It took me minutes to remember even a single thing I ate yesterday. Not only does this sort of human memory problem affect eating-related recollection, but it could affect public health data collection of all kinds. This article seems to cast a shadow of doubt on public health data, but I think the excerpt from the book Wisdom of Whores which we read for class gives some hope. The author dealt with the same sort of memory problems in the population she was studying as were discussed in this article. She was able to learn, though, that asking the right questions about the right time frame could minimize the uncertainty in the data. Perhaps diet questions (as discussed in the article) could be properly phrased in a way that maximize people's recollections. Trying to reach the same data through different types of questions might also help bring out inconsistencies and result in more accurate data.
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