Al-Amn Magazine

GREENAPPLE D Dangerous t rend has to s top Soci a l med i a ‘ super - spreaders ’ pu t t i ng l i ves at ri sk ozens of ‘super-spreaders’ are fuelling people’s social media feeds with dangerous health misinformation for their own financial benefit, a new report by Rooted Research Collective and the Freedom Food Alliance has found. Proponents of carnivore and ketogenic diets and foods such as unpasteurised milk, as well as influencers who attack plant-based food and seed oils as “scams”, are putting their tens of millions of followers at risk with harmful and misleading nutrition advice. While the analysis does not name these ‘super- spreaders’, it reveals that a majority of them (87%) are not qualified as medical doctors. In fact, 59% have no health qualification at all. In spite of that, one in five present themselves as credentialled experts. “Nutrition is complex, but it doesn’t have to be confusing. Superspreaders exploit that confusion by offering dangerously simple answers dressed up as hacks, often driven by profit, not science,” said Alice Millbank, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Rooted Research. The researchers noted how 57% of millennials and Gen Zers are influenced by nutrition trends on TikTok, with two-thirds adopting them multiple times a week. This is alarming, considering that only 2% of the nutrition content on the platform aligns with established public health guidelines. Meanwhile, one in five Americans trusts health influencers more than local medical practitioners. In the analysis of these 53 super-spreaders, the most popular theme of misinformation is the carnivore diet, which accounted for 29% of the analysed posts. This was followed by general health and nutritional information (25%) and content about low-carb and ketogenic diets (24%). “What became immediately clear is that nutrition misinformation rarely exists in isolation,” the report says. Over 90% of these super-spreaders shared content spanning multiple misinformation themes, with carnivore diet advocacy frequently overlapping with keto diets or anti-seed-oil rhetoric. Moreover, there has been an increase in the promotion of raw milk, with 15% of profiles endorsing it as a health food – this narrative often appears within posts that use ‘carnivore’ and other related hashtags. These super-spreading influencers fall into three categories identified by the report. The Docs are individuals with “Dr” on their profiles, regardless of whether they’re medical doctors. They gain high levels of credibility because of their ‘expert’ status, and use fear-mongering and alarmist language to promote government distrust, Big Pharma conspiracies, anti- seed-oil claims, and carnivore diets. The Rebels, meanwhile, are self-styled disruptors who reject science around health and medicine, using anti-