A friend cautioned me that 2,000 words about The Virus of the Mind was too long and hard to follow. In my defense, it is difficult to distill a textbook into a short blog – even for a short 250-page book. However, point taken. Today, I’ll cover just one aspect of memetics and one example in less than 700 words (I tried 500 and couldn’t do it…).
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Early in The Virus of the Mind Richard Brodie writes that the “most interesting thing about memes is not whether they are true or false, it’s that they are the building blocks of your mind.” These building blocks determine how we behave based upon how these memes shape our beliefs.
Consider the different memes regarding diet soda.
According to Statista, Coca-Cola spent between $1.2 million and $59 million a year from 1999 to 2016 to convince Americans of the merits of drinking Diet Coke and Coke Zero over regular soda. Did it work on you? Do you reach for ‘diet’ soda because it is the ‘healthy’ alternative to full-sugared soda?
This is an example of a meme (diet-soda-is-healthier) pushed by a beneficiary (Coke) of the meme. Yet, if the meme worked on you, you are not alone. In 2018, USA Today covered the resurgence of diet soda after a push on fruit-flavored Diet Coke in slimmer cans. Note how the shape of the slim can is also a meme that suggests that the soda will help a drinker lose weight! Coke really knows their memes. While sales of soda steadily declined since 2010 due to widespread health concerns, Coke’s diet soda push in 2018 led to their first quarters of growth in decades.
However, there is a competing meme: diet-soda-is-unhealthy.
In April of 2019, the Cleveland Clinic published a study showing that for 81,714 women between the ages of 50 and 70, those that drank two or more diet drinks a day suffered a 23% increase in stroke risks over those that rarely drank diet drinks.
Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times highlighted the findings of a study published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal that tracked 450,000 Europeans over 16 years and found those who drank two or more glasses of sugar-sweetened beverages were 8% more likely to die young compared to those who drank less than one glass a month. Even worse, artificially sweetened drink enthusiasts were 26% more likely to die prematurely!
How do artificial sweeteners contribute to health risks?
Artificial sweetener chemicals carry part of the blame. They change gut bacteria, condition our taste buds to seek ever-sweeter foods, and, as covered in Science Daily, they change how the body processes fat and obtains energy. These changes to the body’s processing of fat are also linked with diabetes and obesity, although the mechanism for how this happens is not clear.
Scientists also theorize that people who drink diet soda make unhealthy choices. When they order a diet soda, some people feel they are saving calories so they then have a license to indulge in less healthy foods- such as a double-bacon cheese burger.
The medical diet-soda-is-unhealthy meme battles with Coke and Pepsi’s diet-soda-is-healthier memes in each person’s brain. The beverage industry’s advertising spend helps their meme to be more wide spread. The doctor’s meme’s might be more credible, but for people already convinced by Coca-Cola’s meme, they might consider the medical opinion to be overblown. Their desire for sweetness overwhelms their ability to absorb the meme that might deny them that sweetness.
Memes may be true or false, but either way, they make up the way we think. I am spreading the diet-drinks-are-unhealthy meme which naturally aligns with my personal memes that ‘carbonation-usually-tastes-bad,’ ‘why-pay-to-make-me-fatter,’ and ‘soda-is-as-refreshing-as-chugging-maple-syrup.’ I am an extremist who drinks less than 20 sodas a year. Does this ruin my credibility for soda enthusiasts? For those who like soda, can they rationally consider the unhealthy memes associated with diet drinks? We’ll have to see. I hope you are reading with an open mind and thinking about your choices.