2 weeks Ago By HALELUYA HADERO, Associated Press
In the corners of social media dominated by wellness content, influencers recommend an assortment of treatments and products to support weight loss, fight exhaustion or promote other desired health outcomes. Some of the endorsed approaches may be helpful. Many play into fads with scant evidence to back up enthusiasts’ claims, medical experts say.
Some influencers encourage their followers to avoid specific food items, such as seed oils, while others advocate going all in on certain foods, such as the meat-heavy carnivore diet. There are video pitches for berberine, a chemical compound that’s been touted online as “nature’s Ozempic,” and for non-medical IV vitamin therapy, which businesses popularly known as drip bars market as cures for hangovers or fatigue. To be sure, alternative health practices and cures that lacked the medical establishment’s backing were a part of popular culture long before the internet age.
But the plethora of advice shared online has both prompted calls for safeguards and found a measure of mainstream acceptance. The new U.S.
health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had his Instagram account suspended in 2021 for posting misinformation about vaccine safety and COVID-19, but many of the ideas he champions have a widespread following.
Critics of Dr. Mehmet Oz accused him of sometimes making misleading assertions on the talk show he used to host; Oz now is President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. A Netflix series released last month explored the story of Belle Gibson, a popular Australian wellness influencer who amassed a following talking about curing her terminal brain cancer with a healthy lifestyle and alternative medicine.
In 2015, Gibson admitted to lying about having a cancer diagnosis. Australia’s federal court later fined her for failing to donate money she said would go to charity through sales of her cookbook and app. Most influencers have or want business relationships with companies that allow them to earn income by promoting products.
The arrangements mean content creators have a vested interest in publicizing products that may or may not work. Creators can get paid for pictures or videos that hype up a product and can earn commissions on sales through features such as affiliate links. Experts say it’s better to proceed with caution when someone inspires you to hit the “buy” button for any wellness products that show up in your social media feed.
Research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that a sizable number of Instagram and TikTok posts that discussed five popular medical tests mostly came from account holders with “some form of financial interest” in promoting the screenings. After analyzing roughly 980 posts on the two platforms, researchers said most of the posts they found were misleading and failed to “mention important harms, including overdiagnosis” resulting from health people having full-body MRIs or tests to detect early signs of cancer, evaluate microorganisms in the gut or measure hormone levels. Promoting dietary supplements has been a particularly lucrative exercise for many influencers, said Timothy Caulfield, a health policy and law professor at the University of Alberta.
He views the supplements industry as “the backbone” of health misinformation aimed at consumers and designed to fuel billions of dollars in revenue. “It’s gotten to the point where if someone is selling a supplement, it’s a red flag,” he said. “I don’t think it was always like that, but it certainly is now.
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