Latest news on gut health

The topic is to find an uninteresting news article that can be connected in some way to our lives and write about it. This topic couldn’t have come at a better time. I don’t mean to confuse the readers, so let me explain it further.

Nowadays, all articles in our newsfeed are fine-tuned to suit our interests. Most of the time, it is based on our search topics, the kind of articles we show interest in, our age, demographics, etc. If you are young and interested in film or music, your newsfeed will be dominated by the latest film gossip, new movie releases, Netflix top ten listings, K-pop articles, etc.

Being an Indian, my newsfeed is monopolized mainly by cricket news, Ind-Pak news, and Bollywood news. However, recently, a new topic slipped into my newsfeed that initially confused me. I started receiving articles about liver health, kidney health, reasons for bloating, best foods to improve digestion, etc. In my suggestions, many scientific news articles about gut health started to become a regular feature.

I found out that there is a serious study underway about the link between gut health and mental health issues like Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and more. I became interested and read the article, but I was also confused why my newsfeed suggested all this news to me. Regular scientific news about the liver, digestion, and probiotics was still understandable, but its link to mental health ailments scared me silly.

After ruminating on this topic and why Google started suggesting these types of news to me, I discovered the chain of events that led to this situation. A while back, I had met up with a few friends to visit another sick friend, where we discussed gut health and shared a few articles on this topic. After returning home, I used Google to look for a good diagnostic center close to home and book a few tests for myself. It was around the same time that I wrote a blog post about losing a few close relatives and finding it difficult to process the grief.

If I am not mistaken, Google put together all these events about my health tests, health scares, and general mental health posts in my blog and decided to suggest these news articles for me. Google, in its infinite wisdom, chose to pacify and comfort me about ways to improve gut health and its connection to depression and any other serious ailments. Since I spend most of my time online or writing articles, Google has a good handle on my state of mind. It must have concluded that I was likely to be depressed based on my topics of interest and decided to help.

After realizing this, I was not sure if I should be encouraged by Google’s help or scared by the intrusive overreach of the Google algorithm. As we spend more time online, the AI algorithms have all the information they need to understand and evaluate our state of mind. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only time will tell. But the sci-fi movies like Ex-Machina, I Robot, Terminator, Matrix, etc., don’t seem as fictional as before.