How I escaped the wild west of #cleaneating Instagram and TikTok

Weeks after giving birth to my son in early 2022, I found a lump in my breast. After an ultrasound, it was deemed suspicious and required a biopsy. The two-week wait for results was terrifying, not least because I have a family history of breast cancer. The chronic eczema I have always suffered from flared up, thanks to stress, sleep deprivation and the upheaval of early parenthood.

The lump turned out to be benign, but the experience brought my mortality into sharp relief and my anxiety levels to new highs. After treating my skin with round after round of prescription medication, to little avail, I became committed to “naturally” curing the eczema, staving off disease and perfecting my already cautious diet.

After years of yoga and meditation practice, my online feed teemed with content by fitness and wellness instructors, which social media algorithms had helped curate and pushed my way during the pandemic. Engaging with a few posts on how to relieve skin inflammation led to a further onslaught of wellness and nutrition content, and various rabbit holes opened up before me.

My job is to research public health and political dis- and misinformation – though I prefer the term harmful online influence, since the simple delineation between truth and lies has all but evaporated in recent years. But by the time of my health scare, I wanted to believe that “food is medicine”, as the mantra of wellness Instagram goes.

For close to two years, I tried to be “well”. I quit alcohol and ultra-processed foods (UPFs), which studies have linked to a host of diseases when eaten in significant quantities. But what started as fairly harmless or arguably sensible experimentation, like cutting back on sugar to see if I felt better, snowballed into a preoccupation with food that actively harmed my life.

Related: I went a week without ultra-processed foods. Here’s what I learned

I gave up on a growing list of foods that the wellness industry maligned, including dairy, gluten, eggs and nightshades like eggplant and tomatoes. I rotated among restrictive diets touted by influencers for their inflammation-reducing properties: low-histamine, vegan, paleo and different versions of intermittent fasting. I made excuses to get out of social events and restaurant outings because it would mean relinquishing control over the ingredients I was consuming.

Like many people with an eating disorder, I denied that I had one. This was familiar behaviour. As a teenager, I was hospitalised with, then recovered from, anorexia. Having been there before, I was able to recognize the path and take steps to disengage, primarily with the help of therapy. My clean-eating obsession lasted longer than it should have, but I did slowly fall out of love with the illusory safety that came with eating the correct food.

Why we get drawn in by misinformation about health and nutrition

With my body feeling out of control, I was desperate to regain what little agency I could. I told myself there was no harm in a bit of nutritional experimentation and gleaning some advice online. I just thought I would be savvy enough to take useful tips while discarding the nonsense.

According to one survey by the nutrition tracking app MyFitnessPal, 87% of millennial and gen Z TikTok users take at least some of their health and dietary advice from social media, despite the fact that only around 2% of nutritional content on social media matches public health guidelines.

While the science of what constitutes a healthy diet is broadly clear, it doesn’t make up for creaking health services and a host of still poorly understood, often chronic, conditions. Instead, many people now self-manage their health, adopting restrictive diets, stocking up on supposed miracle ingredients and taking advice from a host of voices – mostly online – in the hope of finding a magic bullet.

A nutritious diet is critical to good health. However, on social media the claims go further: there is no condition that can’t be cured with nutrition, no illness that can’t be prevented with a strict diet plan and no complaint that can’t be simultaneously blamed on dysfunctional food systems and the individual’s failure to carefully dodge toxins.

Mythical beliefs about food are not new and go back millennia, but decades of neoliberalism have placed the onus of health on individuals. Nutrition has become central to a narrative of personal responsibility, as evidenced by another simplistic wellness mantra – “we are what we eat” – though wellness influencers have little to say about the factors, including access and social inequities, that determine what we can eat.

Influencers offered certainty about the “root cause” of my ills, which they attributed to non-scientifically recognised conditions including leaky gut, mould toxicity and mineral depletion. Their recommendations were the same: eliminate “toxic” foods, such as gluten (which more than 20% of Americans reportedly avoid, though only 1% of the population has celiac disease); kale, which supposedly causes “oxalate poisoning”; and seed oils, often likened to “engine lubricant”. The solution? Supplements – which they also happened to be selling.

Derek Beres, co-author of Conspirituality, which examines the intersection of wellness culture and conspiracy theory, used to have orthorexia, an eating disorder characterised by an obsession about eating only healthy food. He sees Covid as a turning point for the unchecked circulation of nutritional misinformation. The pandemic allowed the wellness industry, based on an ethos of self-realisation and bodily sovereignty, to spread concerns about purity and contamination.

“The pandemic made nutritional fearmongering more prevalent because of all the binaries it has set up,” Beres says. Covid hurt the health and nutrition industries in other ways. “Many people who now trade in nutritional misinformation lost their ability to make a living with people physically, [then] turned to being on ‘downlines’ for food companies and supplement companies.”

Distrust of medical institutions grew during Covid, and many sought alternatives: according to one 2022 poll, close to one-fifth of gen Zers trust TikTok more than their healthcare provider. Many wellness influencers parrot the language of patient empowerment and political literacy (as the “do your own research” QAnon slogan showed), exploiting a collective desire for knowledge and control in a world fraught with murky corporate interests.

Related: ‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness

Wellness influencers often exploit real inequities and pain: they appeal to women suffering from painful hormonal conditions for which research funding remains inadequate. They spark fears among new mothers who feel socially isolated and want to protect their children. Increasingly, they speak to men with health complaints and those who feel adrift in the world, offering them politicised promises that the perfect diet will lead them back to a golden age of dominant masculinity. They also legitimately point out our broken food systems and the influence of corporate interests when it comes to, say, the proliferation of UPFs. Making these broad claims allows them to spread many others unchecked.

In the wild west of #cleaneating Instagram and TikTok, influencers’ credentials vary, as does their potential to harm. Some are qualified health experts who take a few scientific shortcuts when presenting information. Others offer nutritional advice with close to no credentials and demonize kale while promoting the carnivore diet. At the extreme end of the spectrum, they spread conspiracy theories about the “great reset” and claim elites want to poison others with specific diets.

“Being an expert in one domain, especially when it comes to health, doesn’t make you an expert in everything,” Beres says. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has faced criticism for exaggeration and oversimplification on his popular scientific podcast Huberman Lab, which features expert guests and has covered topics including cannabis, microplastics and skin health.

It’s not necessary for influencers to lie outright to their audiences to serve their own interests, though many do. Instead, they commonly oversimplify, share half-truths and extrapolate from complex research findings. In health and nutrition, scientific evidence always comes with nuance and can be difficult to funnel into definite conclusions. Attention-grabbing media headlines further contribute to the confusion, to the extent that we can never feel sure whether eggs are a superfood or a silent killer.

There are fascinating frontiers of research exploring the relationship between food and health. The gut microbiome is a case in point: emerging research is finding new links between the gut and a host of diseases (including skin conditions). Influencers take this emerging evidence and loudly proclaim that any condition is a sure sign of a dysfunctional gut, hawking at-home microbiome tests and probiotic supplements, which research suggests achieve little.

All of this leads to a chaotic online environment where facts and fiction sit side by side, and algorithms favour one-minute clips geared for virality. With many Americans priced out of healthcare and NHS waiting lists in the UK becoming ever longer, health influencers who project authenticity are stepping into these gaps to monetise unproven tests and remedies.

The immediate harms are plain to see. Individuals are forsaking treatment for potentially life-threatening diseases; taking supplements, which can contain unapproved, dangerous or banned ingredients; and developing disordered eating. There is a pernicious long-term effect: rampant misinformation normalises our distrust of institutions, and we become used to not receiving reliable information.

How to resist the onslaught of misinformation

I recognised social media was having a bad influence on me, and that a history of eating disorders made me ill-equipped to handle the nutritional misinformation served by algorithms; my critical thinking faltered in the face of emotional vulnerabilities.

These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by social media platforms’ curation systems: research has found that platforms’ algorithms funnel users towards more and more extreme diet content.

Resisting the misinformation onslaught takes ever greater efforts, and we have become improvised factcheckers, a tricky task as influencers become increasingly skilled at muddying the waters about their credentials.

While seeking advice from a healthcare provider should be the first port of call for anyone concerned about their health and diet, for those still looking online, Beres recommends following degree-qualified nutritionists or dietitians with clinical experience (called “registered” or “accredited” depending on the country) on social media.

Danielle Shine is an Australian registered dietitian and PhD candidate who researches nutrition misinformation. She uses her Instagram account for public education, debunking food-related concerns fuelled by wellness influencers. Shine is among a number of public communicators who are sharing the most up-to-date scientific evidence on nutrition with the public, and providing nuance in an online landscape that doesn’t leave much room for it.

She cautions against commentators who use wellness buzzwords such as “clean”, “good”, “bad”, “toxic”, “junk” and “poison” to describe food, and who speak in absolutes about nutrition and its effects on the body, by stating, for instance, that “sugar is toxic’” or “seed oils are inflammatory”. “Influencers who make these kinds of oversimplified and misleading statements demonstrate a significant and dangerous lack of food and nutrition knowledge,” she says.

Reliable health communicators, she adds, will include a wealth of robust references on their posts to allow readers to check their claims, particularly reputable human studies indicated by DOI or PMID numbers. “If influencers share weak forms of evidence, such as animal-based research or blog posts, they’re not worth following,” she says.

She also recommends being alert to influencers’ financial interests, and to what they are selling. “Influencers who spread nutrition misinformation often promote and sell non-evidence-based products, including direct-to-consumer food-intolerance and microbiome tests, books endorsing restrictive diets, expensive food products marketed as being superior to more affordable alternatives and non-accredited online courses,” she says.

Like Beres, she says she is wary of influencers who stray outside their domain of expertise when speaking about health. “If nutrition professionals venture outside their scope – for example, to discuss hormone health – it’s crucial they collaborate with or consult qualified subject-matter experts such as an endocrinologist to ensure the information they provide is accurate,” she adds.

Related: I want to ignore beauty culture. But I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t look a certain way

While each person’s path to recovery is different, a few things have helped me make my peace with food. I cleaned up my social media feed, unfollowing many wellness influencers, biohackers and “holistic health” advocates, though I still follow a handful of clinically trained nutritionists who share recipes. I tweaked my social media settings by muting nutrition-related keywords, hiding health-related ads and liking posts unrelated to nutrition.

I cut back on food rules, keeping only broad ones that feel manageable. While this felt disappointing at first – I wanted to believe in an easy “hack” – it became liberating. Today, I mostly cook from scratch with whole foods, but no longer shun specific food groups. I have learned to accept a level of uncertainty. Eggs might be good or bad, depending on whom you ask, but given my love of shakshuka, I have become comfortable with not really knowing.

I have also started practising “lateral reading”, a method put forward by the misinformation researcher Mike Caulfield, author of the digital literacy guide Verified (2023), to help individuals limit their exposure to pervasive bad science and resist constant assaults on their attention. The method involves evaluating the source of online content, identifying unreliable speakers and quickly moving on. “Rather than asking, ‘Is this true?’, the more useful question is: ‘Do I know what I’m looking at here?’” as Caulfield put it in one interview.

Perhaps more importantly, I slowly rediscovered the joy and meaning of food as I stopped thinking about diet as a cure-all. This has made eating nutritious food more enjoyable. When I cook sauerkraut-based dishes, I no longer wonder if they account for my “superfood” intake for the week. Instead, I think about how my Polish grandmother cooked them for me as a child, and how she served them with potato dumplings on her favourite white-and-blue pottery. In other words, I think of home.