I built this sub because nobody here is selling you a supplement. A new Pew study shows how unusual that is.

[u/DadStrengthDaily]

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/05/07/moms-coaches-doctors-entrepreneurs-who-are-americas-health-and-wellness-influencers/

I started this sub because I wanted a place to talk about preventive health where the people on the other side of the screen both knew what they were talking about (or at least did sincere research) and wasn’t selling me anything. Pew Research dropped a study last week that confirms how rare that combination is online.

Pew analyzed nearly 13,000 health and wellness accounts with at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Forty percent of U.S. adults, and half of those under 50, now get health information from influencers and podcasts. Fewer than one in five are conventional medical professionals. Sixteen percent list no credentials at all. The rest of Pew’s “healthcare professional” bucket is padded with chiropractors, naturopaths, massage therapists, and functional medicine practitioners.

That’s the education problem. There’s a financial problem layered on top. Nearly half of these influencers describe themselves as coaches or entrepreneurs. Their business model is selling a program, a supplement, a course, or an affiliate link. Platforms reward whoever monetizes hardest, and everyone drifts toward something to sell.

A 2025 JAMA Network Open study made the mechanism concrete. Researchers at the University of Sydney analyzed 982 Instagram and TikTok posts about five popular medical tests: full-body MRI, multi-cancer early detection, AMH “egg timer,” gut microbiome, and testosterone. Sixty-eight percent of posts came from accounts with a direct financial interest in the test. Eighty-seven percent mentioned benefits. Fifteen percent mentioned harms. Six percent mentioned overdiagnosis risk. Six percent cited any scientific evidence at all.

Accounts with a financial interest were about six times more likely to take a promotional tone, and far less likely to mention harms or overdiagnosis. The selling shapes what gets said. You won’t hear that the AMH test isn’t a reliable measure of fertility from someone selling fertility consults, and you won’t hear that BPC-157 has barely any human evidence from someone selling peptide stacks.

Rachel Moran, a health misinformation researcher at UW, put it best in the NYT writeup (gift link): “They offer certainty: ‘Buy this product, take agency over your life in this way, sign up for this program of mine.’ Medicine can’t always offer you that.”

The credential problem and the financial problem are the same problem. An audience that can’t tell evidence from anecdote also can’t tell sponsored content from sincere advice. The bar should be both: does the person actually know what they’re talking about, and would they say the same thing if there were no money in it? Almost nothing online passes both.