Column #234

Do your health food information sources provide sound, fundamentally researched information or are they simply advertising messengers? There are four basic media types: print, broadcast, outdoor, and Internet. In many cases it’s really easy to pick out their advertisements. But in an appalling number of cases presentations are advertisements pretending to be news, announcements, or heartfelt advice. Often these deceptive advertisements aren’t truthful. Sure, they use motivating keywords and half truths but messages like that can be very misleading.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing/advertising messages bombarding us daily. As an example I’ll briefly mention politics because, just like health food, it’s a contentious topic of interest.

Long before the founding of our country Americans debated political “news” and views. But for centuries, instead of presenting well-thought out policies in the testy political arena often politicians used every deceptive, name-calling, emotional trick in the book. Why? Because many people respond to emotional messages especially if they hear them over and over again.

In that same way there has always been deception in the health food and supplement arena. Just think a minute, how long has the term “snake oil” been around? Yes, for more than 150 years “snake oil salesman” meant deception through and through. Oddly enough though, snake oil made from the Chinese water-snake (Laticauda semifasciata, black-banded sea krait), which the Chinese started importing in the 1840s, was actually an excellent curative product due to its extremely high Omega-3 EPA content. As its popularity grew in America it wasn’t long before snake oil was being counterfeited because water snakes are not native to American waters. Of course the counterfeit snake oil did not work and the term “snake oil” became a euphemism for deceptive marketing.¹

In our modern age we have really turned up the heat in marketing through what is known as influencers. Of course they’ve always been around but, with the Internet, they’re with us more than ever. Social Media Influencers put out newsletters or have blogs with 1,000 to 100,000 subscribers or followers. By using the Tribe Group website a “Brand” can, with a few clicks, connect with thousands of “Creators.” Also, prospective Creators can list their blogs or newsletter specialties with the Tribe Group to gain Brands to promote.^{2 3}

The Brand provides the Creators with salient points about what it is offering or needs publicized and then lets the Creators write their own personalized pieces. Of course the Creators submit their write-ups first and, if approved, earn a fee which is paid after they publish.

Now you can see why some Brands are written up and recommended by what seems to be everyone all at once. This spontaneous, broad-based bombardment of recommendations from possibly thousands of sources can really influence the masses. We all know that if people receive the same suggestion over and over again (especially from numerous sources) they can be convinced to believe almost anything. Also, many people are dependent thinkers without the necessary technical background in a topic to ask the proper questions to get the facts. So they end up following the crowd, or what they perceive to be the crowd and then it becomes the crowd. Yep, they act just like herds of migrating lemmings, the little rodents that are famous for running off of cliffs or into bodies of water. Of course the little lemmings don’t have suicidal wishes.  They’re merely following the leader.⁴

What inspired this topic on health food marketing was an article about Mike Bloomberg beginning a campaign on Tribe. The report I saw stated that, “For a fixed $150 fee, the Bloomberg campaign is pitching micro-influencers—someone who has from 1,000 to 100,000 followers, in industry parlance—to create original content ‘that tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected.’”⁵

I wonder how many other candidates are doing the same thing? If some are, it makes it more difficult for Joe Sixpack to separate the wheat from the chafe when he doesn’t realize which of his inputs are advertisements. The same difficulty occurs in the health food arena. This is the world we live in and we must understand how it works. This means we’re right back at square one in doing our own homework. This doesn’t mean everything we hear or see is a lie. It means we have to ask more questions and seek more answers from both sides of the isle on virtually every topic.

Genuine Chinese snake oil was and still is very effective. In the same way grass-fed and Omega-3 meats are very effective because they are the most nutritious foods we can eat. But in our woke world the plant-based meats are being mass-marketed as healthier substitutes for consumers and the planet. The vegetarian promotions of highly processed imitation meats have been so effective many of their fallacious points are now common knowledge. But I wonder, how long will it take before the masses realize “plant-based meats” are deception through and through?^{6 7}

To your health.

Ted Slanker

Ted Slanker has been reporting on the fundamentals of nutritional research in publications, television and radio appearances, and at conferences since 1999. He condenses complex studies into the basics required for health and well-being. His eBook, The Real Diet of Man, is available online.

Don’t miss these links for additional reading:

1. The History of Snake Oil by: Andrew Haynes from Pharmaceutical Journal

2. What Are Micro-Influencers & Why Are They So Effective?

3. Tribe  – Connecting Brands with Creators

4. Lemming from Wikipedia

5. You like Me! You Really like Me! -- Bloomberg Pays Social Media ‘Micro-Influencers’ $150 to Make Him Sound Cool by Dave Goldiner and Leonard Greene from New York Daily News

6. Is it a Fad? By Ted Slanker

7. You’ve Been Lied to: Methane & Cows by Ted Slanker