Nutrition Myths Online: Who Sets the Record Straight When No One Is Paying?

Host Rasmus Cloes speaks with Prof. Dr. Martin Smollich from the Pharmaconutrition Research Group at the Institute for Nutritional Medicine at the UKSH in Lübeck about nutrition myths online and the efforts to combat them. He explains why successful disinformation almost always contains a grain of truth, why a well-founded rebuttal takes about ten times as much effort as the claim itself, and how commercial accounts operate with entire editorial teams. The conclusion is clear: independent science communication needs funding.

[Translate to Englisch:] Zwei mittelalte Männer im Profil.

Because patients have started asking him in nearly every therapy session what they should eat or avoid, he has been engaged in science communication for about ten years: first through a nutritional medicine blog featuring translations of studies, and for the past few years primarily on Instagram. His reasoning is simple: You have to go where the misinformation is; otherwise, it will prevail on its own.

According to Martin, effective myths rely on a small kernel of truth, often dressed up with technical jargon—as in the classic claim that cutting out sugar “starves cancer,” even though the body produces sugar on its own and tumor cells can easily switch to using fat and protein. For guidance, he recommends relying on guidelines and professional societies rather than individual opinions, specifically citing the Cancer Information Service and the consumer advocacy groups’ portal on dietary supplements. The structural problem remains the asymmetry: Making a claim requires no effort, while a substantiated refutation takes hours of research. Added to this are commercial interests, coaching services, and supplement shops operating in the background, filter bubbles without comment functions, and, increasingly, AI bots that tie up individuals’ time.

To put it bluntly, Martin does not view nutrition myths online as individual misfortune, but as a societal risk: When gurus and professional societies appear to be on equal footing, it delegitimizes the scientific system as a whole—just as with climate change, the shared factual foundation is lost, and without it, a democracy cannot even begin to debate the consequences. His call to policymakers and foundations: provide financial support for independent, non-commercial educational accounts so that science communication is no longer just volunteer work done in the evenings after a twelve-hour day

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The Digital Public Health Podcast is a production of the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology (BIPS) and Health Sciences Bremen.