Health Literacy is an important concept in the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Health Literacy is defined as “the knowledge and competencies that individuals possess to help them comprehend and apply the health information that they encounter in today’s complex world” (Gruman, et al., 2016). In a world where new information is distributed rapidly, everyone has their own platform, and agendas can easily be guised as “science,” there is a lot of noise reducing our ability to improve our Health Literacy.
One of my favorite Instagram Influencers is Liver King. I don’t love eating organ meats. In fact, I avoid eating meat except for small doses to up my protein or fat intake when I’m training hard. Liver King, however, eats liver and bone marrow with every meal. He eats thousands of calories a day in the form of organ and muscle meats. He also exercises for hours daily, calls his followers “primals” and gives life advice.
Liver King is promoting Health Literacy according to his agenda, and on a free platform. He is not, however, promoting Health Literacy in a way that manages to resist the application of Critical Health Literacy. Critical Health Literacy requires applying knowledge and thinking skills to test health knowledge and assess its’ application to one’s own life (Gruman, et al., 2016). Liver King had a bodybuilder physique and a social media brand built on eating lots of liver.
Liver King does not threaten the health of a person who thinks critically about their health. I am in my 30s, have chronic pain from injuries incurred during military service, and have a busy schedule. I exercise, but not for four hours a day. I eat, but only in proportion to my activity level. I’m not going to participate in high impact exercises that threaten my joints- I spend more time doing yoga and low impact cardio. I have to think critically about my health, or risk doing more harm than good.
The health advice that is best for one is not necessarily best for all. We all need to build our own level of Health Literacy to engage in a healthy lifestyle. Health Literacy is how we can all avoid bad information that promotes agendas over science.
Or, you could start eating a lot of liver, breakfast lunch and dinner, because Liver is King.
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd Edition). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781506353951
https://www.instagram.com/liverking/?hl=en
This was very entertaining to read, and I think it’s an important read in today’s culture of constant social media watching. I can scroll on something like Instagram or TikTok and pretty quickly get to a post by a “health influencer.” To me, I always think those influencers are, to put it bluntly, stupid. They say what they want to get views and I don’t think their purpose is truly to be educational or beneficial. Health Literacy is something that more people need so that they can understand which posts are truthful and which ones may be meant to go viral. My question for you is: what do you recommend? Do you think these health influencers, such as Liver King, are wrong in what they do? Or do you feel it’s up to everyone else to decide? In the book, we learn the importance of credibility, and I think influencers should need to include things in their posts like sources, data, and disclaimers so that people don’t just accept their information for the full truth.
Lafreniere, K., & Cramer, K. (2017). Applying social psychology to health. In J. GrumanF. Schneider, & L. Coutts (Eds.), Applied social psychology (pp. 189-220). SAGE Publications, Inc, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781071800591.n8
This was an interesting thing to read, I didn’t know who Liver King was, or even the fact that there is a diet style of focusing on eating liver and bone marrow. I knew liver meat existed and have seen it sold on certain places, but I have never tried buying it to cook and eat it for my own sake.
Certainly, health literacy is hard, and I don’t think that there is an universal answer to what makes a person healthy. For example, medical treatment is not all rounded for all people, like how the textbook cites the flaws of the biomedical model. As it states that “even when people do get sick, there are large differences among individuals in terms of the severity of symptoms they experience and how they respond to treatment”, every individual is different in health status, regardless in response to a virus to how they respond to medication (Gruman et al. 193). I see the same thing in diet as well. Food like eggs and soybeans are said to be good for the health, but many people are allergic to it, which will harm their health instead. I think there are people that are allergic to liver, or even meat itself. This is what makes health literacy hard, for something that is good for one person may be the reverse for another.
Professionals and influencers can help, but at the end of the day, it is up to the individual to evaluate what is best for them.
Source:
Gruman, Jamie A., et al. Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE, 2017.