Every scroll today comes with a health influencer ready to fix your body, fix your hormones, and sell you a better lifestyle. These influencers make up an entire sector of the influencer market, influencing the everyday choices of millions of people who follow them.
With such a large user base comes a larger responsibility, one that social media isn’t living up to. From propagating brands solely for financial gain to spreading misinformation about health and fitness, a significant portion of the influencer market is increasingly profiting from the exploitation of their viewers.
Can We Really Trust Health Influencers?
There are a vast number of health influencers online today, creating content on various aspects of health and wellness. While many creators are sharing genuine advice, there are also people with large audiences who often use their vast network solely to create clickbait content that helps them earn.
However, what’s often overlooked is that these audiences include people of every age group, ranging from teenagers to older adults, many of whom are unaware of the difference between genuine content and content created solely for financial gain.
As a result, users often blindly rely on the advice being promoted by influencers, adopt unhealthy eating habits, purchase unnecessary supplements, or spiral into toxic patterns. According to a report by the Pew Research Center, titled Trust in Health and Wellness Influencers, about 1 in every 10 adults agrees to getting health information from social media.
As Courtney Babilya, a certified medical exercise specialist and personal trainer with over 430,000 followers online, explains, most health influencers with a large viewer base do not even list themselves as professionals. She says, “Someone has a baby, and suddenly they’re a pregnancy coach.”
“We have to be careful with people who have an experience in one thing and suddenly become a ‘coach’ on that.”
What The Numbers Reveal
A 2024 survey of Millennials and Gen Z TikTok users, called Concerning New Statistics Highlight Inaccurate Nutrition Trends on TikTok, found that about 87 per cent of the user base relied on these platforms for health and nutrition advice, and almost 57 per cent of them were influenced by social media trends around health and fitness.
Additionally, a whopping 67 per cent admit to trying out these trends more than once every week. However, what makes this a concern is the fact that only about 2.1 per cent of this content was labelled as appropriate to health guidelines given by experts.
As per a report by the Pew Research Center, about half of the adults in the US under the age of 50 years get health-related information from podcasts and other social platforms. However, about 4 in 10 of these individuals label themselves as healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, coaches, or simply individuals sharing personal experiences.
As per a 2024 report titled Medical misinformation on social media—are the platforms equipped to be the judge?, social media is usually the “first port of call for many people with ailments or questions about their health”. As per a report by YouTube, videos about health were viewed more than 3 billion times on the platform in the United Kingdom.
Another alarming study published in JAMA Network Open, which analysed about 100 Instagram and TikTok posts, revealed that most of them promoted controversial health tests. It was found that out of the posts, about 87.1 per cent mentioned the benefits of these tests, while less than 15 per cent mentioned the risks involved, and an even smaller percentage of about 6 per cent mentioned the issues concerning their overdiagnosis or overuse.
The study revealed that most of these posts, about 83.8 per cent, used a promotional tone, and about 50.7 per cent of them encouraged the viewers to get the test, with about 68 per cent of these influencers earning profit out of the posts.
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Where The Actual Problem Lies
The problem, however, is not limited to misinformation alone, but also how extensively fake content is spread across social media platforms to reach audiences who don’t realise the risks involved in adhering to such advice.
What’s dangerous is that misinformation rarely presents itself as misinformation. Some health influencers often create such content with excellent delivery and marketing gimmicks, such that it blurs the line of doubt in the minds of the audience.
While the internet is an important tool in staying aware of various topics, it is important to realise that something as sensitive as health cannot be treated the same way we treat trends that take over social media every other day.
It is important to get information about health and well-being from people who specialise in the field. Because at the end of the day, someone spreading misinformation can log off after posting a viral wellness trend. The audience, however, is the one left dealing with the consequences of following it.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Firstpost, Pew Research Centre, The Guardian
Find the blogger: @shubhangichoudhary_29
This post is tagged under: health influencers, wellness culture, social media influencers, health misinformation, TikTok health trends, Instagram wellness trends, online fitness advice, wellness industry, social media health advice, influencer culture, medical misinformation, health and fitness trends, nutrition misinformation, wellness scams, viral health trends, digital wellness, influencer marketing, healthcare misinformation, Gen Z wellness trends, social media psychology
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