How To Tell When Nutrition Advice On Social Media Is Rotten

We asked nutrition science experts what they believe are the most annoying (and dangerous) myths being perpetuated about nutrition.

Nutrition influencers run the gamut, from conspiracy theorists convinced that grocery shopping is the delicate act of dodging disease to the licensed nutritionist who shares debunking posts. Accounts and opinions proliferate by the hour, all equally earnest and legitimate-seeming. It’s harder and harder to differentiate between the tedious combativeness of science deniers and ethical fact-first takedowns.

The trends that unchecked nutrition influencers set can quickly go viral and correspond to nearly every broad category of nutrition pseudoscience infesting the present-day internet. Arranged on a credibility spectrum that goes from science-adjacent to totally unscientific, these are:

“Scienceploitation.” Canadian health law and policy expert Timothy Caulfield coined this term to explain the enthusiastic adoption and breakneck mainstreaming of legitimate but emergent research for profit. It is most commonly done by companies and wellness investors eager for a first-movers advantage, and often seen with supplement-shillers who exploit the fact that supplements do not go through an approval process by the Food and Drug Administration.

Biohacking. This is championed mostly by Silicon Valley types like tech billionaire Bryan Johnson, who is determined to de-age himself with the aid of obsessive vitals-monitoring, extreme diet modification geared to lower body fat percentage, and beta-stage technology aimed at outperforming regular exercise to deliver peak physique.

CAM (complementary and alternative medicine). Positing that the real and perceived inadequacies of conventional medicine need other forms of healing to step in, complementary and alternative medicine (or complementary and integrative medicine) is a controversial field that pushes combined treatment protocols. Acupuncture and yoga are two examples of the alternative half of this complementary approach. Despite World Health Organization recognition and functioning departments in accredited hospitals, critics say that CAM is still not optimally regulated, tends to deepen patients’ resistance to more evidence-based treatments, and is packaged as being more effective than it actually is, especially by buzzy celebrity doctors.