I am insatiably curious, so for the last 15 years, I have read the nutrition facts on almost every package of food I’ve eaten. It’s just shy of a compulsion. I am not a proactively healthy eater, but I do like to know the numbers behind what I am eating so I can avoid the worst of the junk food.

When the FDA mandated in 1994 that nutritional information be printed on all packaged foods, it did very little to improve American health. That’s because they just printed the facts. We were still free to believe whatever we wanted about those facts. For instance, I thought for many years that a person could only gain weight by eating fat. If I ate a candy bar with 12 grams of fat, I would gain 12 grams unless I worked it off by running a few extra laps in P.E. class. Since gummy worms and soda were “fat free”, I could have as much of that as I wanted. It might cause cavities, but it wouldn’t make me fat.

Then I got fat.

It wasn’t until high school that I learned that calories are actually the cause of weight gain. Fat is bad, yes, but only because it contains over twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein. It’s the total calorie count that matters. I realized that sugary food was just as bad as fatty food, and ended up losing 45 pounds between my sophomore and senior year of high school.

I had convinced myself that something was true of nutrition, and even though it wasn’t, it still had a very real impact on my life. Because of a belief, I felt physically unhealthy when I ate greasy food, but not when I drank two cans of Coke. And because my belief changed, I now have a hard time even finishing one non-diet can of soda.

Have you ever avoided looking at the nutrition facts on a label because you didn’t want to know how unhealthy the food was? We spend most of our lives inside the comfort of our understanding, not wanting to know the truth so we can continue believing as we always have. To search for truth is to risk finding it, and to find truth is to risk it destroying the comfortable lives we have built. Life then becomes more about brain management than truth: if we are happy when we die, we have managed our brains successfully.

But the food is still bad for you whether you read the label or not.