Abundance, Cravings, Energy imbalance and Hope
A sweeping look at our changing health profile from the lens of systems thinking
Today, I want to talk about a subtle but monumental shift that has come to define our lives in the past few years that influences almost all of our choices and decisions. We’ll also discuss why and how it is taking hold now and how it is hidden in the most fundamental necessity of our lives which is food. Finally, we’ll see what this shift means for our collective health profile and a new shift in its early stages of evolution that can act as a necessary counter.
When it comes to health, we often think pretty much linearly about what and how we eat affects our overall health. But if you really think about it, our bodies are one of the most complex systems that exist on this earth. Additionally, it exists within other complex systems like nature, cities, culture, lifestyles, etc. So, wouldn’t it be better if we think about our health through the lens of systems thinking? That’s exactly what we are going to do here.
First, let’s see what are the major systems that are in perpetual clockwork when it comes to our health -
The food ecosystem - The system that converts energy found in nature into the food that enters our homes.
Our lifestyles - the way we prepare and consume food.
Our bodies - the system that processes food and provides us with energy.
As far as I know, when it comes to our health, we are conditioned to think by the laws of cause-and-effect. We never try to question why something happens to our health whenever it happens.
Roughly, we think like this:
What food I’m habituated to? → Is it available in the market? → Can I make it today/get delivered today?
How hungry am I today? → Do I have time to prepare food? → What do I already know to cook well?
We get sick or become aware of a symptom → We look what is the medical terminology → Then we head to search for the respective doctor for the diagnosis and cure?
Nevertheless, the third system is the most neglected one when it comes to reasoning about how our daily eating habits affect our bodies over time and how the effects compound. We hardly ever stop to realize that our bodies have their own efficient economy that never stops working. And like any economy, individual actions compound over time.
To understand the shift that I mentioned at the start, we need to understand the essential thing that flows through all these systems. It’s energy. From the crops to the food in our fridge and finally, down our belly, energy is produced and consumed – day in and day out –in a perpetual forward loop.
At the end of the day, the question remains - how much energy do you save and how much energy do you spend? It is one of the most crucial concerns that influence most of our decisions now. As a result, anything is of high value if it can help make daily trivial decisions automatic – so that we can focus our other things of value.
The shift lies exactly at the core of this problem i.e., how we make decisions to manage energy in the abundance economy. It’s a question of -
Is this exactly what I want right now? If yes, great. If not, anything will do.
We like to think that in the abundance economy, our choices are fairly distributed across the variety of things available but that’s not what actually happens in reality. Turns out, the variety of choices puts us under the pressure of missing a lot of other choices if we decide to choose one. As a result, we only decide on something only when we are absolutely sure otherwise most of the time, we tend towards a default choice.
If I have 10 minutes, I will go to a specific website if I’m absolutely clear about the task otherwise I’ll just hang on Twitter.
If I need to buy a new phone, I’ll buy the iPhone if I have the budget otherwise any phone under 15k will do.
There is a phenomenon that explains this behavioral shift in the abundance economy. It’s called Zipf’s law.
The 20th-century linguist George Zipf gave the world a very handy anecdote to explain what’s going on here. His question was: out of the tens of thousands of words in the English language, and even the ones of thousands of words familiar to those with basic fluency, how come the majority of our speaking and writing consists nearly exclusively of only the top several hundred words or so? The reason is that the more we use a word, the less effort it takes to retrieve that word and use it a second time. There’s no incentive or disincentive to use any word over another. It’s just what we naturally do.
In essence, the abundance economy gives us the allusion of control over the various choices that we can exercise but in reality, we end up deciding on a default choice most of the time. It’s an emergent behavior born out of frictionless access to cheap, fast, and reliable services that once used to be things that we had to own. I want you to see this effect on our evolving eating habits.
Let’s see with an example: Remember when you are in the mood to treat yourself to something delicious. However, before you realize it, you are already caught up in the work. You barely have time to explore all the options that you thought of before. In a moment of dilemma, you head to the order tab and end up ordering the same food that is your go-to food in these situations. If you order food frequently, take a look at your orders over time. There’s a high chance that you’ll see this pattern.
At first, this new emergent behavior looks normal but looking through the lens of systems, the picture gets clear about its effects on our health profile.
Before we connect all the dots, let’s briefly take a detour and look at some definitions at the core of systems thinking that will help us to see how the three systems interact with each other to drive this shift forwards.
Steady State and Non-equilibrium
Steady-state is when a system reaches stability after a brief phase of evolution. It’s always flowing. What’s getting produced is getting consumed in an orderly fashion. A Steady-state vanishes when either production or consumption stops. The system stops flowing and settles into equilibrium. A functioning vegetable market is a familiar example of a system in a steady state.
Positive and Negative Feedback
Positive feedback is when the outcome of a process re-inforces itself in a forward cycle. The future looks predictable.
A good example is a profitable business. The business constantly refines its business model according to the changing market by hiring/retaining great talent and innovating constantly. The habit of constantly evolving with the market moves the company forward making its growth predictable in long term.
Negative feedback is when the outcome of a process pushes back on the current strategy. The future looks unpredictable.
A good example is when the demand for a product naturally dips due to changing market forces. The decreased demand requires the company to change strategy or pivot to a different product. Negative feedback warns the process of continuing the same action plan.
Order and Chaos
Order is an emergent property of steady states. Steady states are not monotonous. They are always looping. Something is achieved at the end of the loop. And the system keeps moving forward in time.
For example, a vegetable market is set up and torn down every day. It’s not monotonous because it consistently comes back up the next day. It has a persistent order because we need to eat and the vegetable seller needs to earn. At the end of each day, vegetables are sold. As long as we need to eat, this goes on forever.
Chaos is looking at order from a different perspective. For the vegetable seller, the business is always chaotic because it depends on changes in seasons, weather, market fluctuations, etc. – which are looping steady states in themselves. When looking from the perspective of the buyer, they see the vegetable sellers having a strong purpose of showing up every day and selling whatever vegetables they have got. For the buyers, it’s almost predictable.
In essence, order is chaos looking inside out and chaos is order looking outside in. They both have purpose from different perspectives.
Purpose and Disorder
Purpose is the meat of order in a steady-state system. Without purpose, the system stops looping. The system reaches an equilibrium state and only disorder prevails.
We go to the vegetable market not only because we need to prepare food. We go there to have fresh veggies. So, there’s a strong purpose beyond the basic need. If we can get fresh veggies at our doorstep in a consistent manner, we’ll stop going to the market. And after some time, the market vanishes.
Let’s jump back in: Over the past few years, mass-level access to cheap internet urged some massive innovations in a number of technologies. We’ll now see what changes these innovations brought in the three systems and how they are affecting each other – through the lens of systems thinking.
The Food ecosystem
The digital economy was already on the rise but when Jio made access to the Internet possible for almost everyone, things started to turn. To meet the demands of this new cohort of internet users, innovation switched gears in everything from logistics, software engineering, last mile delivery, tracking, etc. This created a lot of new jobs ready to fulfill the needs of the dynamic urban lifestyle.
Innovation, economy, and ambitions took a leap. Meanwhile, a lot of new trends sped up in motion. The Creator economy emerged as one of the most dominant ones. With reach to practically everyone, for the first time, people could not only dream but think about an escape hatch from the traditional job market. This meant working more than the usual 9-5 shifts.
Furthermore, all these new opportunities came with increased stress in our work and home lifestyles – as time is still the scarcest resource – but no one can solve for time. But you have to carve time from somewhere.
The food delivery system works because it relieves people from the stress of food preparation. The idea is great because food preparation not only food is an extensive task but it has to be done at specific times. When an idea is successful after several replications, it becomes standardized and gets integrated into our lives, finding its own steady state. Since the idea of food delivery proved promising from the start, it spread quickly across different cities.
Our Lifestyles
For the first time, the democratization of the internet allowed people to have bigger ambitions than their jobs. However, a day still ends in 24 hours. And what takes most of our time other than work? You guessed it right. It’s food preparation – and everything that goes into it.
So, the market responded quickly and food delivery landed with a bang. Due to the rapid rise in the reach and quality of the delivery infra, the rise in the quality of software engineering talent, and new workers migrating to work these completely new jobs, food got automated. Food went into the cloud. It got reduced from what can I prepare today to what I want to eat right now.
Finally, with this new behavior emerged another pattern explained by Zipf’s law (discussed above) that most of the time, we eat the same food when we can’t afford the time to think about everything that goes into deciding what we really want at a certain point.
The food market and our lifestyle were in existing steady states. The rapid increase in cheap internet access for millions of new urban populations (a steady state with evolution) created fresh chaos in the incumbent food market. After some trials and tribulations (food delivery wars), the market responded with a faster and more reliable delivery system. And with the sweeping rise of the creator economy, it attained a steady state.
Our Bodies
Steady states with positive feedback create chaos in neighboring steady states. And we also know that our body is one of the most complex and highly sensitive systems. The positive feedback of getting the food the moment we want drives the loop of consumption itself forward since it saves so much time. Though, not all changes end up in new steady states. Sometimes, chaos persists and has long-term effects.
I have already discussed that we are very easily prone to food addiction when we settle in this positive feedback. Since when can get exactly the food we want, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of making food an object of comfort under anxiety and stress. And since, according to Zipf’s law, we are more likely to order the same food most of the time, it can easily end up in food addiction to sugar-rich foods.
Sugar-rich foods are high-carb foods. Continual consumption of high-carb foods puts a load on our body’s insulin response. Insulin’s job is to carry the glucose from foods to our cells. More than required carbs means more than required insulin release. More insulin release causes the suppression of leptin. Leptin signals our brains to stop eating (negative feedback). No leptin means the brain thinks we are still hungry even though we already have more than enough energy and we eat more.
The negative feedback loop which is essential for our ideal energy balance gets broken due to the persistent chaos of eating the same food (most likely carb-rich food). And all the extra energy ends up in fat (specifically visceral fat). This visceral fat is the main cause of metabolic syndrome – a cluster of diseases like type 2 diabetes, increased level of cholesterol, heart attacks, etc.
When we outsource food production to the kitchen cloud, we run into the principal-agent problem. The cloud kitchen wants to maximize its profit. It doesn’t really care about sourcing quality ingredients which you would do if you prepare food yourself. Also, the portion sizes are not fixed. So, most people end up not eating according to their needs.
Our body’s purpose is to evolve. While it can adjust to a wide variety of steady states, some are better than others. Our body has mainly two purposes -
To keep evolving with respect to the changing environment.
To keep us energized for our day-to-day survival.
The first occurs at an emergent layer and the second occurs at the biological level. When the negative feedback mechanism gets broken, a new steady state is achieved – the conversion of extra incoming energy into fat. From our subjective lens, we think it’s abnormal behavior. But from the perspective of nature, at the level of organs, at the level of enzymes, at the level of cells, they are doing their assigned job. There, it looks like chaos from the outside but it’s really a new order from the inside.
Since this is a fairly recent phenomenon, there are negligible data to look at the long-term consequences of this new eating pattern. The worst-case scenario would be tending toward the collective health profile to the likes of the United States where half the population comes under the obese category. Because they have had a high-carb low-fat diet for decades. This is not surprising actually due to the pace at which free market economies disrupt emerging and unregulated markets.
But hold up, not everything is so gloomy. The good news is that we are also reacting to this trickled-down misbalance in our energy system. I think the first wave of innovation has already been proven successful. If we got settled into 30 minutes food delivery apps as the accelerator of economical productivity for the past 5 years, we also didn’t take much time to come up with even faster 10 minutes grocery delivery apps. It seems like we always wanted groceries quickly and reliably but the market misunderstood the problem and took its time to get to the bottom of it. Fortunately, we have the sweet sweet negative feedback mechanism self-correcting the whole system itself.
When it comes to food, nobody really wants it to be handed to us in a black box. Especially in rapidly developing economies like India, where our nutrient intake is already sub-optimal. So, the path towards ideal progress in terms of energy intake is to create systems, products, and solutions that give the customer full control of their health – in faster, better, and more reliable ways. Part of the reason why the 10 min grocery delivery apps became so hit in so less time.
I hope that you now have a clear picture of the various forces that are at play in shifting the health profile of the Internet native generation. Health is a complex system and looking into it from a linear perspective needs to stop since it does more harm than good in the long term. Nevertheless, it’s the most pressing problem to solve until it’s too late – because the growth of an economy will be capped if its workers have to tradeoff their health for overall progress. Fortunately, we are more clever than we give ourselves credit for and we already have earlier indicators of the light at the end of the tunnel.
Here’s the sum up -
The democratization of the Internet has led to rapid innovation in the supply chain, software engineering practices, delivery infrastructure, etc. A new market layer emerged in the form of food delivery services and attained a steady state after a few years of trial and error.
The Creator economy emerged as the most dominant shift due to the new massive reach of the Internet and the falling rates of mobile phones. This raised the ambitions of people engaged in traditional working markets. The new ambitions meant more time working and less time in food preparation.
This new chaos in our existing lifestyles led to Zipf’s effect on our eating patterns. We shifted from what can I prepare today to what can I get right now? However, in reality, chances are that we eat the same few foods most of the time due to our busy lifestyles.
This new eating pattern can lead to food addiction if someone orders food frequently and is also used to consuming sugar-rich foods as objects of comfort for anxiety and stress. Over time, the negative feedback mechanisms of our bodies signal our brains to stop eating when we are full breaks. As a result, we eat more despite already taking in the required energy.
The energy imbalance attains a new steady state granted we continue with the same eating pattern. Excess fat gets created causing metabolic syndrome. From the outside, it looks like chaos in our metabolic system but from the inside, it’s the same old natural order. However, not all steady states are good for us.
Fortunately, the market has already reacted with a counter in the form of high-speed grocery delivery services. It’s a subtle hint of real-time negative feedback to that current system of food intake that we never quite wanted but got settled into it due to market forces that any individual can’t fight alone.
As always, if you enjoyed this issue, let me know your thoughts in the comments or write to me @ letsharden@gmail.com or hit me up on Twitter at @poetofgrindset. See you in the next issue. 👋