Acknowledging that the profit motive warps health information to generate sales can help us lead healthier, more rewarding lives, at lower risk and lower cost.
Businesses large and small routinely seek to emphasise potential health benefits of their products and services while minimising or denying downsides outright.
These one-sided stories are routinely retold uncritically in media coverage, ads, pharmacies, on labels and on the channels of online influencers.
Food, drink and supplement categories support rafts of flimsy studies to justify vague health claims. Alcohol’s was debunked for the umpteenth time this month.
To dismiss these claims is not to dismiss the products. They might bring us joy, relieve pain and make us feel better, just not a positive stepchange in our health or life expectancy.
The benefit of scepticism is it stops us overcommitting to a product based on unrealistic expectations, perhaps with downsides and side effects, not least disappointment.
Rather than becoming a super-consumer to serve a business interest we can consume in ways that make us feel better. Our time and money can be used for other things.
There are around seven things we can do to improve our long term health which a huge range of foods, drinks and activities can help us achieve in enjoyable ways.
Making choices to serve ourselves
Real medicines have third-party verification based on large scale medical trials, and even then some wrong-uns slip through the net.
Beyond this any implication of a product offering big health benefits should be a red flag to us, with any studies cited highly unlikely to withstand serious scrutiny.
Wellness influencers and media platforms are also iffy intermediaries, being largely funded by selling pricey supplements while promoting gurus with wares to sell.
This format is largely there to solve a revenue problem rather than address a health problem. We should not give uncredit to their most strikingly-positive health claims.
So too psychedelics and cannabis, which vested interest promote as health enhancing without robust health studies while, obviously, saying little about their risks.
Even austere practices like meditation have some rarely aired perils. The Dalai Lama himself was nonplussed to be told about them.
Yoga, massage, meditation or practices like cold exposure might help us feel good but will not “supercharge our immune system”, as some of their proponents say they will.
Being wary of the way commercial interests warp the truth is tiresome, but it is also a way to make choices which are less costly, less risky and more rewarding,
Industries’ main goal is revenue, whatever marketing category they might operate in, be it food, drink, health or wellness. Their health claims are not made to serve us.
The most reliable working assumption is to disbelieve health claims from non-medical businesses. ■