Why Your Brain Chooses Misleading Health Advice

We've become desperate gamblers with our own mortality—betting our futures on binary choices.

"Cardio or strength?" someone messaged me at 11pm. A white flag disguised as a question.

Variations on that question echo everywhere—drained of nuance, stripped to binary bones:

“Seed oils or olive oil?”

“High fat or low fat?”

“Carnivore or plant-based?”

“Zone 2 or HIIT?”

On the surface, they seem like simple questions. But they hit like flares: distress signals fired into the fog of modern health dogma, each one carrying the same message: tell me I’m not lost.

You’re four podcasts deep. Thirteenth YouTube video. Twentieth Instagram reel.

Your CrossFit colleague warns against breakfast while your doctor prescribes it. Your friend swears by keto while your sister sends plant-based TikToks.

One video calls seed oils poison. The next shows a 103-year-old who cooks with them daily. Your head pounds with each contradiction; each new certainty canceling the last.

Your thumb scrolls mechanically while your mind screams for relief. Until finally, in that liminal space between midnight and surrender, you close your phone and whisper what feels like defeat:

“Screw this. Just tell me what to do.”

And without realizing it, you begin surrendering your judgment. Inch by inch.

Because health doesn’t come in threads. It comes in knots. And somewhere between your fifth scroll and third supplement ad, you stop trying to untangle it.

Where Questions Go To Die

The more overwhelmed we become, the more we amputate our questions to fit into tidy binary boxes.

When you ask a binary question like “Cardio or strength?”, you're accepting a low-resolution answer to a high-definition problem.

This invites a particular type of trouble.

Binary questions slice reality into false choices, turning spectrums into switches and transforming wisdom into warfare—with nuance as the first casualty. The frame itself corrupts every response before it arrives.

They also summon the zealots—not the curious or qualified, but the loudest. The ones who've mistaken their salvation story for the universe's operating manual.

They don’t sell the truth. They sell simplicity. Conviction. Heroes and villains. The reassurance that someone has decoded the universe while everyone else remains lost.

Watch as "What approach works best for my specific situation?" collapses into "Just tell me which one is right."

That's not just laziness. It's the quiet exhaustion of a mind that's been promised clarity by a thousand prophets, each speaking a different truth in the same absolute terms.

When uncertainty feels like standing barefoot at the edge of an abyss in the dark… it starts looking for saviours. Any hand will do. Even one that might push instead of pull.

And the longevity world has no shortage of volunteers.

The Tribal Appeal

This is when the tribes descend, each one carrying their doctrine like a flame.

Pick your battlefield: nutrition, training, oils, supplements. Each corner of the internet hosts its own holy war:

• The carnivore who treats plants like biological weapons.

• The plant-based evangelist who sees animal protein as slow-motion poison.

• The low-fat zealot still fighting the 1990’s food pyramid wars.

Each one armed with a neatly packaged worldview and the unshakable certainty of a cult leader.

Every tribe sells clarity. Every guru sells escape. Their certainty beckons like a lighthouse when you're drowning in maybes.

But here’s the thing: they’re not deliberately lying.

The problem? Their map isn't your territory.

You don't know how their physiology overlaps with yours (or doesn’t), what trauma or insecurity shaped their beliefs, or what damage their dogma is doing to their body (silently for now).

And they don’t know either.

What you're witnessing is emotional armour disguised as truth; conviction crafted from whatever saved them once.

The boldest voices are the ones who stopped questioning. Not because they've found final truth, but because they've found something more intoxicating.

A tribe. A doctrine. A following.

Their unwavering certainty is nothing but a sales pitch, with your doubt as the down payment.

No illumination of complexity here; just a membership card to their dogmatic cult, warm from the printer and waiting for your signature. And in this transaction, your sovereignty becomes the final fee.

Trading Sovereignty for Belonging

You wanted clarity but received an invitation to surrender your critical thinking. A transaction far more expensive than it appears.

It's tempting. Because clarity promises relief—the exhale our overwhelmed brains desperately seek.

Meanwhile, nuance offers only discomfort: contradictions when the mind craves resolution, the dizzying drift of “maybe” in a world addicted to “absolutely.” It speaks in caveats, while certainty shouts in absolutes.

It forces you to carry the weight yourself.

Yet, drowning in overwhelm, you are tempted to grab the absolutist's unwavering prescription like a life raft.

You slap a label on your lifestyle—keto, carnivore, intermittent fasting—dropping them into conversations like passwords to belonging. The dopamine hits: finally, an identity that comes with instructions.

At some point, it stops being exploration and starts feeling automatic. We fall into rituals, following advice like fast-food drive-through orders: pick your poison, follow the protocol, pray you chose right, and collect your vitality at the next window.

The more desperately you crave certainty, the more eagerly you'll swallow someone else's conviction as gospel.

And that transaction leaves you owning nothing, not even your beliefs.

When Certainty Breaks

Then the reckoning arrives.

The silver bullet that promised salvation jams in the chamber. Your body rebels. Bloodwork comes back wrong. Weight returns. Inflammation resurges. The fog doesn't lift.

You were buying clarity on credit. And now the bill’s due.

This is when the real work begins. Because yes, at some point you do need to outsource knowledge. You do need to lean on experts.

But doctors aren’t oracles. They’re human. Trained in narrow systems. Pressed for time. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes wearing tribal colours beneath their white coats.

Good medicine was never about perfect answers. It's about earned judgment. Restraint. The wisdom to say "I don't know."

You don't need to become an expert. You need something rarer: the ability to recognize good judgment when it whispers. To see the fingerprints of earned wisdom: intellectual honesty, appropriate caution, the courage of uncertainty.

These voices haven't found salvation. But they’ve earned the right to their doubts. Because there's no perfect authority, and no credential that guarantees wisdom.

And still, the burden of final integration—of weaving all the pieces into coherence in your life—has always been yours.

Surrender that responsibility, and you'll spend your life ping-ponging between extremes: new diets, new dogmas, new distractions.

Returning The Borrowed Compass

So what frees you from binary questions?

Not perfect answers, but better questions that create space instead of collapsing it:

1. Hunt for trade-offs, not the answer. Ask "What am I gaining and losing?" There's always a cost, always a context, always a "compared to what?" Every choice carries a shadow price. The wisdom lies in seeing the full ledger.

2. Fear perfect answers. When a solution arrives too neatly wrapped, look for what's been swept under the packaging. The most dangerous answers are the ones that resolve your tension too perfectly. True understanding rarely brings relief; it usually brings more elegant questions.

3. Ask "what else could explain this?" The most dangerous certainty is the one that ignores alternative explanations. That energy boost from your new supplement? Could be the placebo effect, your improved sleep, or the seasonal change.

4. Trust explorers over prophets. Value those brave enough to change their minds when evidence shifts over those with unwavering certainty. The ones who revise views with new evidence, and resists tribal thinking deserves more weight than the one with the biggest following or most impressive credentials.

Binary questions are the intellectual fast food of curiosity. Satisfying. Addictive. Empty.

They masquerade as destinations, when they’re barely starting points.

Modern health advice tells you what to do. I help you see. Not to feed you answers, but to sharpen the lens that helps you ask better questions. To rebuild the ability to navigate complexity, without numbing yourself with the morphine of false certainty.

Because the most powerful health intervention isn't a pill or protocol. It's refusing to surrender your judgment to a marketplace that profits from your confusion, and sells certainty by the slice.

Your questions carve the path to every answer you'll find.

And some questions…are too important to amputate.