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In recent decades, public health advice has become increasingly numerical.

Numbers have entered everyday behaviours via tracking (descriptive) and goals/limits (prescriptive).

The scientific underpinning of the advice is often inherently questionable and/or questionably translated.

None of the guidelines takes individual variation meaningfully into account.

At 44, I’m old enough to remember a time before numbers were everywhere. I remember when no one knew how many calories there were in anything they ate, or what their resting heart rate was, or how many paces they’d done today, or how long they spent in REM sleep last night. The everyday human activities—eating, walking, sleeping, shopping—have remained, but they’ve been superimposed by a layer of arithmetic. It’s happened gradually, this insertion into our lives of numbers that we’re meant to live by: kilocalories, grams of macros, heart-rate zones, heart-rate variability, steps, elevation gains, litres, hours of direct sun exposure…

The progressive numerical infiltration has taken two forms: normalizing tracking and supplementing the tracking with targets and limits. Not very long ago, mainstream health advice amounted to innocuous platitudes such as, “don’t eat too much”, “get plenty of fresh air”, “stay active”. Now, what counts as enough or too much has been converted into numbers: 10,000 steps a day, 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, 2 litres of water a day…

I remember when getting a glass of water was something you did at meals or when very thirsty; now it’s not unusual to aim to get through a certain number of water bottle refills per day and to treat detectable thirst as a signal that kicks in only once things have gone awfully wrong. The same sort of thing has happened with screen time, sun exposure, protein consumption, BMI, sleep scores: In all these cases, numerical norms are now available, and they’re having complex downstream effects.

If one is so inclined, one can turn the numerical norms into personal goals. The numbers thus create behavioural expectations: If you haven’t “got your steps in” or hit your movement minutes quota today and it’s 10 pm, you might conclude that you should go for a walk. A shift is thus underway in what functions as the primary driver of human behaviour: from experience (do I feel hungry, thirsty, tired, restless?) to numerical health........

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