Almost Sunny

Tag: nutrition

  • The Internet Was Supposed to Make Us Smarter

    There is a particular kind of clarity that comes with being a child in a classroom before the internet existed.

    Every day brought something genuinely new. Geography that made the world feel enormous and navigable at the same time. History that explained how the present came to be. Science that felt like being handed a key to understanding how everything worked. The teachers knew things you did not. The books contained things no one around you had told you yet. You sat down, you listened, you learned, and you left knowing more than when you arrived.

    Nobody questioned whether the textbook was lying. Nobody asked the geography teacher to prove that the Earth was round. The knowledge was there, built by people who had spent their lives building it, and the reasonable thing to do was to absorb it.

    That world still exists, somewhere underneath everything. But something has happened to it.

    What the Internet Was Supposed to Be

    The promise of the internet was genuinely extraordinary. Information that had previously been locked in university libraries, specialist journals, and the heads of experts — suddenly available to anyone with a connection. The democratisation of knowledge. The great equaliser. A child in a remote village with internet access would have more information at their fingertips than a scholar in a great library a generation earlier.

    That promise was real. In many ways it was delivered. Diseases have been diagnosed earlier. Movements have been organised. Information that governments and corporations tried to suppress has found its way into public view. The internet, at its best, has been genuinely transformative.

    But it arrived with a side effect that nobody adequately prepared for. And that side effect is quietly doing enormous damage.

    The Side Effect Nobody Warned Us About

    The same infrastructure that distributes knowledge also distributes its opposite with identical efficiency. A peer-reviewed study and a completely fabricated one look the same on a screen. A scientist with forty years of research looks the same as an influencer with forty thousand followers. The format is identical. The authority is not — but the format is what most people see first.

    Social media made this dramatically worse by building systems that reward engagement over accuracy. Content that provokes an emotional reaction — outrage, fear, the specific satisfaction of believing you know something that the mainstream is hiding from you — spreads faster than content that is simply true. The algorithm does not know the difference and does not particularly care.

    And so we arrived, somehow, at a moment in history where the following things are genuinely debated online despite being settled science.

    Ten Things the Internet Is Currently Arguing With Reality About

    The Earth is round. This has been known for over two thousand years. Confirmed by satellite imagery, space exploration, physics, and basic navigation. A Texas Tech University study found the majority of Flat Earth believers credited YouTube as their entry point — some went to debunk the theory and the algorithm pulled them in.

    Vaccines do not cause autism. The original 1998 study that claimed this link was retracted. The author’s medical licence was revoked for fraud. Dozens of studies involving millions of children have found no connection. The World Health Organisation listed vaccine hesitancy driven by online misinformation as one of the top ten threats to global health.

    Climate change is real and caused by humans. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree on this. Five independent high-quality studies confirmed that figure. The online denial movement was funded deliberately to sow doubt rather than disprove the science — the strategy was not to win the argument but to make people feel the argument was still open.

    Evolution is how species develop. The fossil record, genetics, and direct observation all confirm it. It is one of the most well-supported theories in all of science. Online communities pushing creationism are well-organised and particularly active in campaigns targeting school curricula.

    mRNA vaccines cannot alter your DNA. mRNA never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored. This is basic cell biology — not complex, not contested. A single TikTok video claiming otherwise was viewed 2.5 million times in January 2025.

    5G does not spread disease. Radio waves cannot carry viruses. Viruses are biological organisms. They require physical transmission. This is fundamental physics. During 2020, the 5G conspiracy theory spread so rapidly that telecom engineers were physically attacked in the UK and New Zealand.

    The moon landing was real. Confirmed by independent tracking stations worldwide — including in the Soviet Union, which had every reason to expose a hoax if one existed. Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo programme. Recent surveys show a significant and growing percentage of younger people expressing doubt about this.

    The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Confirmed through multiple independent dating methods that all converge on the same figure. Young Earth Creationism — the belief it is around 6,000 years old — is actively and widely promoted online.

    GMOs are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences reviewed over 900 studies and found no substantiated evidence of harm. Every major scientific body worldwide concurs. Anti-GMO campaigns have successfully created widespread fear that has influenced food policy despite having no scientific foundation.

    Antibiotics do not work on viruses. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different biological entities. Using antibiotics on viral infections is not only ineffective but accelerates antibiotic resistance — one of the WHO’s top global health threats, expected to kill ten million people annually by 2050. Online forums recommending antibiotics for colds and flu are actively contributing to this.

    The Expert Has Left the Building

    What ties all of these together is not stupidity. The people who believe these things are not, in general, less intelligent than those who do not. What has changed is something more structural — the collapse of the social agreement that expertise means something.

    A doctor who spent a decade in medical school and twenty years treating patients occupies the same rectangle on a screen as someone who watched a documentary and decided they now understand medicine. A climate scientist with forty years of research data has the same number of characters available as a political operative paid to cast doubt. The format erases the distinction between them and the algorithm rewards whoever gets the stronger reaction.

    There used to be a reasonable social contract around expertise. Doctors knew medicine. Scientists knew science. Astronauts knew space. You did not have to agree with everything they said, but there was a baseline acknowledgement that years of dedicated study and practice meant something. That contract has eroded significantly — replaced by the idea that everyone who does a search is now equally informed, that credentials are a kind of conspiracy, and that the person with the most followers probably knows more than the person with the most qualifications.

    Worse, political parties and governments have learned to exploit this. Misinformation is not always accidental. Some of it is manufactured — deliberately introduced into information ecosystems to confuse, divide, and make populations easier to control. When people cannot agree on what is real, they become easier to lead toward conclusions that serve those doing the leading.

    The Danger Is Not in the Present

    The people who currently believe the Earth is flat are, in a sense, a manageable problem. What is harder to sit with is the next generation — children growing up with the internet as their primary source of information, with no memory of a time before it, and with algorithms specifically designed to find their particular psychological vulnerabilities and exploit them.

    When someone has arrived at a belief not through evidence but through identity — when believing that vaccines cause autism has become part of who they are, part of their community, part of how they understand the world — they are no longer reachable by logic. The evidence does not help because the belief was never built on evidence. This is what makes the current situation genuinely dangerous rather than merely frustrating.

    There used to be a reasonable expectation that as technology advanced, understanding would advance with it. That each generation would know more than the last, would be better equipped to navigate the world, would inherit the accumulated knowledge of everyone who came before.

    It is not obvious that is still happening.

    The Question Worth Sitting With

    The internet put the sum of human knowledge into the pockets of eight billion people. It also put the sum of human misinformation there, with better distribution, more emotional resonance, and a more sophisticated delivery mechanism.

    The doctors, scientists, astronauts, and researchers who have dedicated their entire lives to understanding one specific corner of reality — they are still there. They are still publishing, still discovering, still building the body of knowledge that has given us vaccines, space exploration, medicine, and everything else that has made the last century the most extraordinary in human history.

    But they are increasingly drowned out by people who did a search and decided that was enough.

    Whether the internet has expanded human knowledge or whether it has simply made us more confident in our ignorance — that might be the defining question of this generation. And the answer, right now, is not as obvious as it should be.

    These are personal observations and opinions. Almost Sunny is a personal blog.

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  • I Quit Added Sugar for Two Months. Here Is What Actually Happened.

    There is no shortage of opinions about sugar on the internet. Every second article is either telling you it is slowly killing you or reassuring you that everything in moderation is fine. Nutrition discourse online has become its own kind of exhausting — everyone has a framework, a study, a strong feeling, and an unwavering confidence that theirs is the correct one.

    This is not that. This is just what happened when one persistent headache pushed things far enough to actually do something about it.

    The Part That Finally Made Me Pay Attention

    For a while, the headaches were just background noise. Every two to three days, reliably, there one would be. Not debilitating — just present. Paracetamol would take the edge off and life would continue. Then at some point the paracetamol started being less useful than it used to be, which is the kind of thing that gets your attention.

    Alongside the headaches: constant tiredness, the kind that sleep does not seem to fix. A low-grade moodiness. Difficulty focusing. The general sense of operating at about seventy percent for no particular reason.

    None of these symptoms are dramatic. They are also, if you spend any time looking into it — and Reddit threads on the subject are genuinely illuminating — a fairly textbook description of what happens when your blood sugar is regularly spiking and crashing throughout the day. The headaches in particular kept coming up, mentioned again and again by people describing the same pattern.

    Taking Stock of What Was Actually Going In

    There is a version of this story where someone dramatically reckons with their diet. This is not quite that. But when the headaches became frequent enough to actually pay attention to, it was worth being honest about the sugar situation.

    Tea with two sugars, multiple times a day. Chocolate — the good kind, the kind that is easy to justify. Sodas occasionally. And then the less obvious stuff: the added sugar hiding in sauces, in flavoured yoghurt, in things that do not taste particularly sweet but have it in the ingredients list anyway. It adds up faster than it seems like it should.

    Working in tech means spending a lot of time in front of screens, which means a lot of small reaches for something easy. Sugar is, neurologically speaking, very good at being the thing you reach for. The dopamine hit is real, the energy spike is real, and the crash that follows is also real — it just tends to arrive quietly and get mistaken for something else.

    The Decision, and the Rules

    The plan was not ambitious. One week. Just to see. Not a full dietary overhaul, not a wellness challenge with a name — just removing added sugar for seven days and observing what happened.

    The distinction that mattered most: natural sugar was fine. Fruit stayed. Nothing was being taken away that nature put there. The target was added sugar specifically — the stuff that appears in ingredients lists as sugar, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, maltose, dextrose, and approximately forty other aliases. If it was in a whole food, it was allowed. If it was added to something to make it more palatable, it was out.

    The First Week, Honestly

    Day one felt like nothing much. Perhaps mildly self-satisfied.

    Day two was a different matter. A headache arrived — worse than the usual ones, if anything — alongside a fatigue that felt almost flu-like. This is apparently extremely common. The body, accustomed to regular sugar intake for quick energy, objects when the supply is suddenly reduced. Dopamine levels drop. The brain, which had been relying on those regular sugar hits to feel normal, registers their absence as a problem.

    The logic that got through day two was simple: the headaches were already happening anyway. Whatever was coming could not be meaningfully worse than the baseline.

    Days three through six were difficult in a duller way. Less acute pain, more general sluggishness. The body adapting to finding energy through other means. Cravings appeared at specific times — after meals, mid-afternoon — and were more habitual than physical. The hand reaching toward the biscuit tin on autopilot before the brain had even made a decision.

    Then, somewhere around day seven or eight, something shifted. It is hard to describe precisely. Just a lifting. Less weight behind the eyes. Thoughts that moved more cleanly from one to the next. Energy that did not arrive in a spike and then abandon you two hours later. The brain fog that had become so familiar it had stopped being noticed was, quietly, gone.

    What Two Months Actually Looks Like

    The headaches became infrequent. Not gone entirely — two in the span of two months — but both on days where meals had been skipped due to a busy stretch at work. Which is its own kind of data point.

    The mood stabilised. This one was unexpected. Not a dramatic personality shift, just less of that background irritability. Less of the inexplicable 3pm slump where everything feels slightly harder than it needs to be. More even, generally. The mood swings that had been unremarkable because they were so regular became noticeable only in their absence.

    Weight dropped without doing anything else differently. Three kilograms over two months, without tracking food or changing exercise habits. The body, no longer managing constant blood sugar fluctuations, apparently found a more comfortable equilibrium on its own.

    And the cravings — which felt significant in the first week — largely disappeared. Chocolate that used to feel necessary now just feels like a choice, which is a different thing entirely. The wanting is quieter. Sometimes absent.

    The Bit Worth Being Honest About

    This is not a recommendation. Bodies are different, situations are different, and the internet already has plenty of people telling everyone what they should be doing with their diets.

    What it is, is a genuine account of what happened when one specific thing changed. The headaches were the original problem. Addressing the added sugar addressed the headaches. Everything else — the energy, the mood, the weight — came along as a consequence rather than a goal.

    The two months also confirmed something that feels more broadly true: a lot of the things consumed regularly are consumed not because of any particular want but because the habit of reaching for them is so ingrained it bypasses the question of wanting entirely. Removing the option made that visible in a way that was, initially, slightly uncomfortable and then, gradually, quite freeing.

    Two months in and still going. No firm endpoint in mind. Just curious, at this point, to see what the next two months look like.

    Note: This is personal experience, not medical advice. If you’re dealing with persistent symptoms, a doctor is a much better resource than a blog post.

    If something here was worth your time, you can buy me a coffee — it genuinely helps keep this going. And if you’d like new posts straight to your inbox, no spam, no schedule pressure, subscribe here.