Wellbeing Influencers and The Skewing of Public Health Discourse

Why Capitalism, Not Seed Oil, is the Problem

It’s a familiar format on TikTok and other social media platforms. An earnest young man enters a supermarket. He walks down a deserted aisle (they’re always deserted; you never see another shopper). He plucks a packet off the shelf: maybe a breakfast cereal, a dessert, or something that’s typically marketed as healthy. Sometimes it’s an innocent vegetable such as humble spinach.

Then comes the monologue. Straight to camera. He explains, with grave concern, how something in that product is dangerous to your health. It might be an ingredient commonly flagged as an ultra-processed marker, or something for which there’s no credible evidence at all—seed oils, for instance, always receive disproportionate attention. The claim is always the same: eliminate this product, or this ingredient, otherwise tragedy will follow, and you will succumb to some horrendous chronic illness within a short period of time.

The pervasive influence of wellbeing influencers has significantly skewed public perceptions of health and wellbeing. Their content often consists of a chaotic blend of contradictory nutritional advice, lacking scientific credibility and rooted in anecdotal claims—or worse, serving as thinly veiled marketing for their own branded supplements. The task of debunking such misinformation is best left to experts like Dr Idz, Timothy Caulfield  and Dr Jessica Knurick, whose work rigorously addresses these issues. Beyond this, influencers frequently appropriate and misrepresent global majority and Indigenous health practices, offering partial or orientalist interpretations that strip these traditions of their cultural and contextual integrity.

The significant harm I want to raise is that health and wellbeing influencers can fall into perpetuating neoliberal discourses, shifting blame onto individuals. They often champion individualistic solutions—quick fixes and lifestyle bio-hacks—that are easily commodified into the multi-million-pound wellness industry instead of addressing systemic issues. These solutions ultimately offer little to no meaningful improvement in population-level health outcomes and merely reinforce a cycle of superficial self-optimisation. The messages of Influencers become one of the machines that power neoliberalism.

But how does what appears to be superficially benign and fluffy tie in with neoliberalism?

Influencers represent a digital reincarnation of what sociological literature once termed the “alternative health” movement. This movement traces its origins to the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—a time when established authority was widely challenged across issues of gender, race, and imperialism. Alternative health emerged as a critique of conventional medicine, condemning it as impersonal, inaccessible, and closely aligned with powerful capitalist interests. It sought to reclaim health as a personal and political matter, rooted in holistic care and community responsiveness

It is within anti-establishment discourse that the convergence with neoliberalism lies. The rejection of institutions and the elevation of the individual subject are core tenets of neoliberalism in its current, more radical form that we are witnessing emerging in the USA and elsewhere. While earlier alternative lifestyles may have centred wellness and wellbeing in their critique of mainstream systems, the neoliberal variant does not. It is concerned with the sweeping away of any regulation in the field of health and wellbeing, and in the food supply.

Yes, there is so much wrong the health of populations in many high-income nations such as the USA or Britain. Levels of chronic illness are unacceptably high, and health inequalities by class and ethnicity are widening and worsening. Yes, there is so much wrong with the food system. Big food corporations maximise profits at the expense of the nutritional quality of their products. Yes, the large pharmaceutical companies are highly problematic too. But the lifestyles pushed by health and wellbeing influencers will not address those problems, nor will they address how peoples’ lives are blighted by class, racial and gender inequalities.

The solutions to chronic illness—and the wider issues outlined above—are not individual but collective. They emerge in community settings and hinge on a more equitable distribution of the many resources our societies produce. Central to this is the introduction of free, well-funded healthcare, accessible to all. But deeper still, these solutions require a reimagining of society: one that no longer marginalises people based on skin colour, sexuality, or other markers of difference. Without a sustained focus on these systemic injustices, everything else becomes a distraction. Worse, it risks entrenching the very problems it claims to solve, offering a host of false solutions.

We’re already seeing the outlines of this in the United States, where RFK Jr.’s “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) movement has emerged as the wellness vanguard of MAGA—a form of medical populism shaped by the wellness industry that pits the public against the establishment, simultaneously simplifying complex health issues. It pushes reforms that centre individualistic solutions, not the necessary deeper systemic change. Sure, there’s talk of taxing and challenging Big Pharma or Big Food, but more often than not, that rhetoric simply paves the way for another corporate player: the wellness industry itself. Beneath these shifting fronts, the deeper issue remains untouched. What we must confront—globally, from America to Britain, Europe to Africa and Asia—is capitalism. It remains the single greatest health risk facing populations worldwide.