The Algorithm That Keeps Us Still
This article is based on my recent opinion piece published in L’Altra Voce – Quotidiano Nazionale. Public debate on obesity and cardiovascular disease continues to focus primarily on food. Taxes, warning labels and the classification of Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) dominate policy discussions, while one of the most profound lifestyle changes of the past two decades remains largely overlooked: the collapse of everyday movement driven by digital environments.
As Europe debates age limits for social media and scrutinizes platform algorithms, it is time to recognize that excessive scrolling is not only a mental health issue. It is also a metabolic and cardiovascular one. Effective prevention should look beyond the plate and begin addressing the screen.
Key Takeaways
- Digital platforms influence not only attention but also movement, sleep and energy expenditure.
- Excessive screen time is increasingly associated with sedentary behaviour and poorer cardiometabolic health.
- Current obesity policies focus predominantly on dietary intake while largely overlooking energy expenditure.
- Restrictive nutrition policies such as taxes, warning labels, and UPF classifications have delivered limited health benefits while imposing high economic and social costs.
- Digital environments should become part of future cardiovascular prevention strategies, not through prohibition, but through responsible design, education and digital literacy.
The Algorithm That Keeps Us Still
Across Europe, policymakers are debating stricter rules for social media, particularly for younger users. Several Member States are considering minimum age requirements. At the same time, the European Commission has intensified its scrutiny of major platforms, questioning whether design features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay and algorithmic recommendations deliberately encourage compulsive use.
This represents an important shift.
For years, concerns about social media have focused almost exclusively on mental health: anxiety, addiction, self-esteem, and attention span. These concerns remain valid. Yet an equally important consequence has received far less attention.
Digital platforms do not simply shape how we think.
They shape how we live.
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Algorithms designed to maximise engagement also reduce spontaneous movement, fragment sleep, encourage distracted eating, and replace active leisure with prolonged sedentary behaviour. In doing so, they influence one of the fundamental determinants of health: energy balance.
The human body is an open thermodynamic system.
Health depends not only on calories consumed, but also on calories expended.
Yet public policy increasingly concentrates on the first half of this equation. Around the world, obesity strategies revolve around food composition, nutrient profiling, warning labels, sugar taxes, and the now familiar category of Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs). Meanwhile, one of the most profound changes in modern lifestyles, the disappearance of everyday movement, remains largely absent from prevention frameworks.
Scientific evidence increasingly links excessive screen exposure with reduced physical activity, sleep disruption, distracted eating and worsening cardiometabolic markers, particularly among children and adolescents.
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This broader perspective inspired the concept of Ultra-Scrolling Social (USS).
USS is not a diagnosis, nor is it a proposal for new taxes, warning labels or restrictions on digital technologies. It is a conceptual framework designed to expose an inconsistency in current public health policy.
If policymakers recognize that food environments influence behaviour, they should also recognize that digital environments do the same.
Unlike many current food policies, however, the solution is not to replicate blunt regulatory instruments. The goal should not be to classify social media as the next public enemy, but to encourage responsible platform design, greater algorithmic transparency, stronger digital education and better tools for self-regulation, especially for younger users.
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Age limits for social media may provide additional protection for minors, but they cannot replace education, parental engagement or the development of healthy digital habits.
Ultimately, the challenge is not choosing between the plate and the screen.
It is recognizing that modern health is shaped by both.
Cardiovascular prevention in the twenty-first century must therefore move beyond a monoculture of nutrition and embrace a broader understanding of lifestyle, one that integrates movement, sleep, digital environments and individual responsibility alongside nutrition.
Only then can prevention become truly evidence-based, balanced and fit for the realities of contemporary life.
