I have a facebook account. Nothing too unusual there, there are more people on Facebook than live in France.

However, last week, I received a post from somebody and I replied to it. The funny thing was that every single person on my list of Friends received the message, resulting in a lot of messages back to me from people asking what the heck I was talking about. See they didn’t see the first post.

Facebook have the default set to ‘all’. This is probably the thing about Facebook that bugs me most. I know this is their business model in order to keep content changing on everybody’s account so you check back more often in order to see what people are doing.

However, this set me to thinking about the default setting and how it is used.

I have a coffee in Starbucks probably once a month. Now, Starbucks have taken a decision recently in the Us that all milk-containing drinks are by default set to half-fat milk, not full fat. This means that several million coffee drinks per day are going out to Americans and the fat in the milk is lower than it might be if people thought about it and put in their usual full fat or cream.

So, in some way, by setting the default to ‘healthy’ Starbucks can have an effect on public health. Maybe not much, on their own, but given that we eat in cafe’s and restaurants so much, these painless moves could actually have as much of an effect on public health as increased funding for the HSE.

I work at NUI Maynooth and if I eat in the university canteen, my lunch is very likely to be almost entirely brown in colour, due to the fact that most of it is deep-fat fried. There are very few healthy alternatives and I usually don’t have the time to go elsewhere for food. There is no option to have half-fat or skim milk in my coffee (I usually use skim milk).

I am at a conference in Colorado right now and the best talk, in my opinion, this week was one on Type-2 Diabetes (sometimes called insulin-resistant diabetes). This is the form of diabetes that the body ‘learns’ over your lifetime and it is very strongly linked to obesity. Your body can successfully produce insulin but the tissues no longer respond to it. If you make a research advance in diabetes research, it is, in money terms, the equivalent of finding an oil well. That is how big a problem is.

However, this form of diabetes is strongly associated with eating cheap, brown, high fat food.

I feel that us scientists need to make this kind of fact available more generally. I don’t know what effect might be achieved by having some kind of pressure put on the large chains to swap trans-fat foods for healthier alternatives. It would make people healthier over a period of time, it would raise awareness and it might be a good business model and might win brownie points (pardon the weak pun) with the customer.

Damn you Facebook for cluttering my head with thoughts of default options.

Comments are welcome.

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